This week, La Vanguardia sat down to talk with Billie Jean King.
In her day, Billie Jean King (79) had won all four Grand Slams: her tennis had become so important that the Fed Cup (the women's version of the Davis Cup) had borrowed its name. Today, the tournament is called the Billie Jean King Cup, and its finals are held from November 7 to 12 at La Cartuja in Seville.
Those, those of Billie Jean King and Stan Smith, had been glory times for American tennis. They had been then, in the 60s and 70s, and they continued to be so later, as Evert and Navratilova, Arthur Ashe, Connors, McEnroe, Chang, Seles, Capriati, Courier, Agassi, Sampras, Roddick, the Williams sisters appeared...
That's how it's always been.
Thus, until this 21st century.
Well today it is no longer like that.
Not for now.
When I ask her about the current stagnation of American tennis, Billie Jean King raises an eyebrow and responds, somewhat angrily:
–And what about Coco Gauff, champion of the last US Open, or Jessica Pegula and Sloane Stephens, or Ben Shelton, who is growing in the men's draw? In the United States there is potential, and all of it is going to be talked about.
Billie Jean King is right.
It carries it, in part: American tennis is in perfect health. She sports top names, she has people like Taylor Fritz, Madison Keys, Sofia Kenin, Tommy Paul or Frances Tiafoe.
They are magnificent tennis players, but they are not first swords: none of them seems capable of altering the feeling of emptiness that surrounds American tennis and returning it to the category of legend, where McEnroe, Sampras or Billie Jean King herself had taken it.
“None, except Shelton,” some say.
And you have to listen to these.
This weekend, Shelton (21), left-handed, big as a quarterback (1.93m tall, 88kg), a discipline he had tried as a teenager, defeated Aslan Karatsev (7-5 and 6-1) to take over of the Japan Open, in Tokyo, and thus made a superb leap in the ATP ranking.
It had opened the year as 96th in the world.
It's already the 15th.
And now, the world of tennis, and especially the world of American tennis, blesses Shelton as if he were a new messiah, let's see what all this leads to, since Mardy Fish had experienced something similar between 2005 and 2010 , and almost no one remembers him anymore.
(They tell us this in Uncovered: Breakpoint, the story of Mardy Fish: reader, you can watch it on Netflix).
(...)
At the beginning of the year, Ben Shelton reached the quarterfinals at the Australian Open (he is the youngest American to do so since Michael Chang did so in 1992) and then reached the semifinals of the US Open. And, incredulous, the analysts said to themselves:
–Are we facing a truly groundbreaking tennis player, or a one hit wonder (an eventual winner, about whom we will no longer know anything more)?
–We don't know it yet, but this boy has more resources than any other American tennis player –McEnroe has said these days.
Pay attention to him, then.
