Is Ben Shelton for real?

A FEW DAYS before Christmas, and a few days before Ben Shelton boarded a plane for the start of the 2024 tennis season and its first major at the Australian Open, he went over to his parents’ house in Gainesville, Florida, to grab something from his old bedroom.

While he was rummaging through his closet, the 21-year-old found a tennis racket signed by Dominic Thiem, a hard-hitting Austrian who won the 2020 US Open.

Shelton had won the racket a few years ago in a contest at the Miami Open, a tournament he regularly attended as a kid.

Grinning, he brought the racket to his dad. “Remember this?”

Bryan Shelton, his dad, his coach and a former tennis pro himself, smiled. “Yeah, I do.”

Four months earlier in New York, Ben Shelton beat Thiem during his magical run at the 2023 US Open. With mighty serves, delicate volleys, blistering forehands and boisterous celebrations, Shelton thrilled the American audience until he suffered a chippy loss to eventual champion Novak Djokovic in the semifinals. But Shelton, who became the youngest American man to reach the US Open semis since Michael Chang in 1992, rejuvenated hope that an American man could be the last one standing on the sport’s biggest stages.

In the blink of an eye, Shelton had big-footed his way into the role of America’s top contender. He was already 11 when he told his dad he wanted to pursue the sport seriously. After winning the NCAA title at Florida as a 19-year-old sophomore, he turned pro with a world ranking of 547th. Until 2023, he had never ventured outside the United States to play tennis. Today he is ranked 16th in the world, and most pundits are still calling him an “upstart” and talking about the “upside” of the 6-foot-4, 195-pound lefty.

“It’s just surreal, you know?” Bryan says.

Shelton’s next chance to become the first American man to win a Grand Slam since Andy Roddick in 2003 — Shelton hadn’t yet celebrated his first birthday — begins Sunday in Melbourne. It’s worth remembering that in his only other Australian Open appearance, Shelton advanced to the quarterfinals as a 20-year-old rookie before falling to fellow American Tommy Paul.

Seeded for the first time at a major — 16th — he faces a tricky first-round challenge in former top-10 player Roberto Bautista Agut. So the questions remain: Is Ben Shelton for real? Is another deep run too much to ask?

A Grand Slam title is “something [Ben] is shooting for,” Bryan says. “He is not one to say, ‘I’m going to win this year’s Australian Open,’ but those are certainly things we’ve talked about. … We don’t take anything off the table right now, you know?”

Shelton’s astronomical rise from nearly losing his spot in the Florida Gators’ lineup in 2021 to Grand Slam contender in 2024 might not be as “surreal” as his dad would have you believe. Look closely. Listen to those who have known him. There were indications all along that the jolly-grinned giant was poised to emerge from the swamp and take his place among the sport’s elite.

Fast and curious

FOR THE FIRST dozen or so years of his life, Ben Shelton was all about being QB1. His dad and uncle had both been professional tennis players, his mom had been a promising junior, and now his big sister had fallen for the sport, too. Ben dabbled with a racket, but football was more his speed. Tennis? They can have it, he thought. Until he didn’t. When he was in seventh grade — aka age foot-in-the-grave in junior tennis years — Shelton approached his dad and said tennis was his thing after all. Turns out Ben had built-in power off his forehand side. He loved unleashing it so much that he rarely hit a backhand.

Bryan quickly noticed that he could lure Ben in with practically any sort of challenge on the court. Unlike most elite junior players, Ben hadn’t spent his youth drilling hundreds of groundstrokes a day, so everything seemed new and challenging and fun. “If there was a game that we could play … he was all-in,” Bryan says.

Not only that, he was a quick study. And adaptable to boot. “A lot of kids need a ton of reps before they feel comfortable, but he could make the change pretty quickly,” Bryan says. “And hold onto it.”

Shelton progressed so fast that he won a Florida high school state championship in 2019 as a sophomore at Buchholz in Gainesville. Soon after, he bounced an idea off his dad. He wanted to start college a year early. He was ready to play at a higher level, and to him that next step was college tennis. He had been watching Gators tennis for years by then because his dad was the head coach.

“He’s watching them, he started to visualize himself out there playing with them every day,” Bryan says. “And it’s like a puppy dog who’s sitting on the side who wants to join in.”

In the early pandemic days, before Shelton officially joined the team, he played set after set, hour after hour with Duarte Vale, Florida’s No. 3 player. They had nowhere else to go, so they spent time on the tennis court.

It didn’t take long for Shelton to start taking sets off of Vale.

“His game was aggressive, he was a competitor,” Vale says.

In July, Shelton signed with Florida.

Bryan had initially wanted to redshirt Ben his freshman season, but he couldn’t ignore the “exponential improvement” in his son. Ben gained 15 pounds of muscle, his movement improved, his forehand remained ferocious and his serve was world-class. So he put Ben in the lineup.

Months into his first season, Bryan could envision Ben one day becoming a good college player, but he couldn’t “see his path to professional tennis.” Not yet.

But every time Bryan set a new — and lofty — goal for Ben, he not only accomplished it, but did so faster than Bryan could fathom.

“In practice you can improve one step at a time, but in competition you can improve exponentially. You start doing things that maybe you’ve never even done before, and that’s what we would always see with Ben,” Bryan says. “When we moved him up, or we put a bigger challenge in front of him, he would just raise himself up to that level.”

A turning point

ON A COLD April day in 2021, months into his first season as a Gator, Shelton was struggling. Playing No. 5 singles in an SEC showdown against Vanderbilt, Shelton got steamrolled in the first set by Max Freeman. Shelton’s serve was slow, his return even slower. He lost a match in straight sets that Bryan says he was “certainly expected to win.” He lost his doubles match, too. The top-ranked Gators survived 4-3, but Ben was more liability than asset that day. Player and coach knew it.

Something had to change. The Gators’ lineup was deep, and Bryan, who says he was tougher on Ben than on any of his other players, had options. He would not hesitate to bench his son for the good of the team.

The entire trip back home — during the car ride to the airport, then at the gate and then on the airplane — Ben sat next to Bryan and listened. Bryan remembers speaking without pause, first telling his son more broadly that things needed to change, that he needed to step up — both for himself and his team. Then he dissected Ben’s game and his emotions in detail — how he needed to adapt when the conditions didn’t work in his favor, how he needed to compose himself during difficult moments.

Bryan, who had coached for decades before his son joined his team, usually found it difficult to talk to players for a long time. “Everything’s got to be microwaved,” he says. Bryan remembers the sad but determined look on Ben’s face. He made eye contact and listened to every word coming out of his dad’s mouth.

“I don’t want to let these guys down,” Ben said to Bryan. “There’s a responsibility I have to this team.”

Bryan remembers a metaphor Gators assistant coach Scott Perelman shared with him about Ben: “If you hit a donkey, he bucks, but if you hit a racehorse, he takes off,” Perelman said. “Ben is our Secretariat.”

“You don’t have to do much and he’s ready to go,” Bryan says.

“No way, I’m not coming out of this lineup,” Bryan remembers Ben telling him that day.

Less than two months later, Shelton, playing at No. 5 singles, clinched the Gators’ first national team title with a three-set win over Baylor’s Charlie Broom. A season later, in May 2022, Shelton defeated San Diego’s August Holmgren to win the NCAA individual championship. Months later, in the span of three weeks, he won three ATP Challenger titles.

Says his former teammate Vale: “The crazy part is, I think he can get a lot better.”

Weapons for days

THE FIRST TIME Rennae Stubbs watched Ben Shelton in person, she almost got “pegged in the head.”

Stubbs, a former world No. 1 in doubles and a current analyst for ESPN, monitors up-and-coming players. So in 2021, she made her way to Court 5 for the first round of the US Open qualifiers to watch Shelton, who had just finished his freshman season at Florida. She remembers sitting down in one of the corner pockets right behind the court, facing Shelton.

Stubbs looked away for a millisecond, down toward her phone. That’s when a ball came whizzing past her ear, so close she heard a whoosh. She looked up, eyes bulging and her arms involuntarily cupping her head.

“It missed me by about half an inch,” Stubbs says.

Shelton had delivered one of his nasty lefty kick serves with so much power that it had zipped past her after landing in his opponent’s service box. Michael Mmoh hadn’t even moved to return it.

“I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ First of all, what a serve. Second of all, holy s—, that almost hit me,” Stubbs says. “I have been paying attention to him since then.”

Brad Gilbert, who served as Roddick’s coach when he won the 2003 US Open, boarded the Shelton bandwagon a match later. He remembers watching the second round of qualifiers when Shelton played the Netherlands’ Botic van de Zandschulp. “This kid is special,” he thought.

Shelton lost a three-setter that day, but a few things stood out to Gilbert.

Shelton was a lefty, and a tall one at that. His serve came in at an angle much different from that of right-handers, which is what players are used to. And he had a powerful forehand to back it up.

“It’s really uncomfortable to play a 6-foot-4 lefty with a nasty serve to begin with. That has your attention,” Gilbert says. “And he’s got a big lefty forehand.”

Gilbert also noticed that Shelton wasn’t afraid to use a backhand slice and approach the net. Gilbert was convinced.

After that match, he bumped into Bryan Shelton, whom Gilbert had once defeated in a five-set marathon at the 1993 French Open, and dropped a prediction. “Your kid is going to be top-100 in no time.”

Nine months later, Ben won the NCAA title.

The day Ben announced he was turning pro, in August 2022, Gilbert texted Bryan.

“Your kid is going to be Top 5 for sure.”

If there’s a shot that can make Gilbert’s top-five prediction come true, it’s the Shelton serve.

“He has this serve where he could contort his body and get the most action and snap on it, and then the ball would bounce and jump to the side and up,” says Sam Riffice, a former Gator who won the NCAA singles title in 2021, the year before Ben. “He had that from the first time I ever saw him.”

With a deep knee bend, incredible racket speed and that lefty spin, Shelton amassed 505 aces in 2023, averaging about 10 per match.

“The game of tennis is still about holding serve,” says Bryan, who resigned as Florida’s coach so he could accompany Ben on tour. “And Ben can hold serve against the best players in the world, you know?”

At the 2023 US Open, Shelton hit the fastest serve, at 149 mph, and recorded the most aces of anyone, with 81. Holmgren, who also went from NCAA tennis to the pros, thinks Shelton’s serve stacks up against anyone’s.

“He’s got one of the top five best serves in the world,” Holmgren says.

Natural athleticism

FORMER NFL DEFENSIVE BACK and current USTA strength and conditioning coach Reshard Langford chuckles at the memory of the first time he met Shelton. It was in Orlando in 2020, and Shelton and Riffice had traveled to the USTA National Campus to train. Langford’s first impression was that Shelton had more explosiveness than any other tennis player he’d seen before. The second? “Ben couldn’t keep a ball in the court,” Langford says.

Langford, who played in 17 games for the Kansas City Chiefs from 2010 to 2011 after starring at Vanderbilt, says his career with the USTA is built on the belief that tennis is a “movement” sport. He focused on Shelton’s feet.

“I helped with his footwork and him being able to move under control and know when to speed it up and know when to slow down and how to slow down properly,” Langford says.

Holmgren can attest to Langford’s success.

It’s the final of the 2022 NCAA men’s tennis championship, and Holmgren manages to return a heavy kick serve from Shelton. After hitting a forehand to Shelton’s backhand, Holmgren runs to the net believing he’s in good position to win the point.

But Shelton tracks it down. Squatting, he lunges to his right and swipes the ball with his two-handed backhand.

The ball screams past Holmgren, landing well out of his reach.

Holmgren stares at Shelton. Seconds pass. Holmgren doesn’t move. Standing with his hands on his hips, he is still staring.

“What?” Shelton barks from his baseline. “Why are you looking at me?”

Holmgren shakes his head, his mouth parts in a grin.

“You’re too good, mate,” he says. “Just too good.”

Shelton breaks into a grin.

After losing the first set, Shelton stormed back and won the second straight NCAA individual title for Florida — and the wild card into the main draw at the 2022 US Open.

“Something that you might not immediately see is how good of a mover he is, how athletic he is,” Holmgren says. “He’s super quick, and besides, he’s strong. So, it’s tough to get him off balance. When he runs, he’s really good at neutralizing and counterattacking that way. So it was hard to find an opening in his game to exploit.”

It’s a puzzle that some of the top players in the world were unable to crack during Shelton’s 2023 US Open run. The serve was there, sure. But so were the groundstrokes and the touch shots and the passing shots and the volleys. And that’s something Shelton thinks he can still build upon.

“I was pleased with the way I was able to play fairly complete tennis this week,” Shelton said at his news conference after the loss to Djokovic. “I didn’t feel like I was just being a serve-bot and getting free points with my serve. I was backing it up.”

An on-court ‘tude

OLYMPIC SILVER MEDALIST, world champion hurdler and Florida alum Grant Holloway was watching the 2023 US Open quarterfinals between his friend Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe at his home in Gainesville when he saw it. A celebration Holloway knew well.

After hitting a crosscourt forehand winner for the match, Shelton placed his hands on his hips. With sweat dripping from his forehead, he narrowed his eyes. He mimed a phone call with his left hand and placed his hand against his ear. Then he slammed the imaginary phone down.

The gesture made Holloway smile. He had done something similar after winning the 110-meter hurdles at the 2019 NCAA track and field championships. As Holloway crossed the finish line and broke a 40-year-old college record that day, he crossed his arms over his chest, smiled and mimed a phone call indicating to sponsors, “My line is open.”

At his postmatch news conference, Shelton said the celebration was his way of saying he was “dialed in” and that it “connects me to my friends back home.” He also gave Holloway a shout-out for winning his third world championship a month earlier. The celebration became a viral US Open moment, and that made Holloway happy.

Along with his big game, Shelton has brought a big personality to the ATP Tour. He pumps his fist after winners. He screams “Come on” to his box. His high-pitched “yeahs” outnumber even his aces. But what is seen as exuberance by some can be seen as arrogance by others.

A few days later, when Djokovic, who would go on to win his 24th Grand Slam title, ended Shelton’s run, he imitated — mocked? — the phone celebration. People had opinions; some questioned Djokovic’s choice to poke fun at a youngster, while others found it funny. When Shelton was asked about it, he simply said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.”

Shelton has always had a boisterous side to him. Vale remembers Shelton attending Gators matches when he was in high school, cheering and pumping up his future team. Vale says Shelton’s energy was so vibrant that the entire team fed off of it.

“He would cheer for us loudly, get into it with the other team,” Vale says.

The bigger the stage, the bigger the personality.

“He’s such a people person that, if you put him on a stadium court, and you put a lot of people in the seats, it just excites him, you know?” Bryan says. “He’s got this personality that’s always been very magnetic, and he’s always had a big smile on his face, even as a little kid, and I just don’t know that he’ll ever lose that. I hope he doesn’t.”

Bryan Shelton, who peaked at No. 55 in the world and was a self-described introvert, marvels at the differences rather than the similarities between him and his son. Bryan remembers often mumbling to himself when too many eyes were trained on him, “They’re watching me, I don’t want to blow it.” Ben is the opposite, Bryan says. The bigger the stage, the higher his level gets.

“He’s so fun to watch,” Riffice says. “The youthful energy he brings and the true enjoyment to be out there, he had that from the first time I met him.”

Shelton’s ability to embrace pressure, to thrive in the tense moments, to be comfortable when things get tight, is not something that can be taught, says Riffice.

“You either have the ability to show up in the big matches or you tighten up, and Ben always played his best tennis in the biggest matches,” Riffice says.

When Shelton returned to Gainesville after the US Open, he met up with Holloway at a mutual friend’s birthday party. They didn’t talk about the viral moment, because “what’s understood doesn’t need to be said,” Holloway says. It’s a philosophy they had subscribed to years before, when they would meet at a gym and work out together in silence before nodding and going their separate ways. This time, they shared a hug and moved on to celebrate their friend.

“Ben is an animal,” Holloway says. “When you’re young in the sport, your goal is to make the people at the top feel uncomfortable, and when he is on the court, people fear him for his abilities.”

Off-court humility

BEN SHELTON KNOWS everyone in Gainesville. Or at least that’s what it seems like to Riffice.

It’s the 2023 offseason, and Shelton is home training with his dad for a few weeks before leaving for Australia for the first leg of the 2024 season. A lot has changed for Shelton since he enrolled at Florida as a 17-year-old freshman in 2020. For one, he has earned nearly $3 million in prize money. For another, he moved into his own apartment. He also bought a black Mercedes after his 2023 Australian Open quarterfinal run, which he entrusts to Riffice when he travels.

Riffice, who lives in the apartment above Shelton and attends law school at the University of Florida, drives it around town to make sure the car is in good shape.

Then, there is the celebrity. People in Gainesville stop Shelton for photos everywhere he goes. Restaurants. Tailgates. Grocery stores.

But the one thing Riffice notices about Shelton is this: Nothing about his personality has changed since they became teammates in 2020. He still stops to talk to everybody, and he can go for hours without bringing up tennis.

A month or so ago, Riffice took Shelton to a tailgate before a Florida football game. The tailgate was thrown by a law firm Riffice had finished an internship with and is hoping to land a job at when he’s done with law school. Wanting to score some brownie points (the lawyers loved tennis), he brought Shelton along. Shelton became buddies with every single one of them, Riffice says, asking questions about their lives and posing for photos.

“He’s just very genuine and enjoys meeting new people,” Riffice says. “He’ll go out of his way to talk to people. … I don’t think the success has gone to his head at all.”