Hours before the March 20th men’s final at Indian Wells, the biggest and toniest of tennis tournaments outside of the four Grand Slams, 24-year-old Taylor Fritz was seen limping out of a warm up. He was on deck to play Rafael Nadal, the venerated Spaniard and perennial favorite, unbeaten for the year and two months off his historic 21st Grand Slam singles title. In the semis the day before, Fritz had tweaked his ankle during the match against world number 7 Andrey Rublev. What began as discomfort caused him to scream out in pain the morning of the final. No one wanted him to play through it. An hour before he was due on court, he looked his team dead in the face and told them he’d do it anyway. “I know I’m a pain in the ass,” he said, “but I have to play. I just won’t be able to sleep if I don’t go out there.” His coaches, Paul Annacone and Michael Russell, said no. The physio said no. His doctor said no.
Fritz beat Nadal in straight sets.
The moment he won, he became the first American Indian Wells victor of any gender since Andre Agassi, the eight-time Grand Slam champion, triumphed there in 2001. Annacone described Fritz’s hellbent insistence on playing the final as “Taylor in a nutshell.” When I asked Fritz’s father, former ATP player Guy Fritz, about the decision, he blamed genetics. “I think it’s a Fritz trait.”
A big-hitting baseliner, a southern California boy, Taylor Harry Fritz clocks in at a lanky 6'5", with high cheekbones and floppy hair. Dominant serve, powerful strokes, not a lot of net rushing. Between points, he ambles with the swagger of a high school crush.
Fritz himself knew his decision to play the Indian Wells final was a gamble. “I’ve never experienced worse pain in my life before a match,” he tells me over the phone from Houston, where he was competing in the U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championship, a few weeks after the tournament. He was aware of the risks and placed his bet: Two numbing shots of lidocaine, the local anesthetic, to the ankle. Once he was on the court, he “basically didn’t feel any of the pain you’d expect to feel, just pure adrenaline up to the final moment that made it all disappear.”
Now, as he heads into the biggest clay court tournament of them all, the French Open, Fritz is coming off other setbacks: a pulled stomach muscle from April’s Monte-Carlo Masters and a recent bout of the flu. The top-seeded American man in the tournament, and the 13th ranked player in the world, he faces Argentinian qualifier Santiago Fa Rodriguez in the first round, on Monday May 23.
He's hoping to fare better than he did at last year’s French Open, when he was wheeled off the clay after a second round loss to Germany’s Dominik Koepfer. Fritz had felt a pop in his right knee during match point, and once he sat down, was unable to stand again. He underwent surgery, and then spent three and half hours a day, six days a week, doing physical therapy. His meniscus was still intact, the damaged cartilage was snipped out, and Fritz adhered to a high-protein diet to minimize inflammation, purely for the sake of making it to Wimbledon on time. His dad worried. “Everyone told him not to play Wimbledon, including me,” Guy says. “I begged him not to play. I thought the grass was too slippery.” Miraculously, three weeks post-op, Fritz waltzed into the third round of the tournament.
He knows he’s lucky that he hasn’t had to deal with a truly sidelining injury yet, the kind of perpetual frailty that certain players become associated with—think of Andy Murray’s hip or Roger Federer’s knee—and that can derail a good year, or worse, a promising career. “If you’re out for a couple months,” Fritz says, “it’s going to absolutely destroy your ranking.”
Off the court, Fritz splits his time between Miami and his native California, where he grew up in dreamy Rancho Santa Fe, California, 20 miles north of downtown San Diego. Fritz’s dad, now in his second stint as the head men’s tennis coach at the College of the Desert, in the town of Desert Springs, had him out on the family’s private backyard court at the age of 2. Fritz started with a two-handed toddler forehand grip, occasionally hitting balls into the side of the ball machine across the net. “He couldn’t even pronounce ‘ball machine’ yet," says Guy, "so he’d tell me, ‘Daddy, I hit the ‘chine, I hit the ‘chine.”
In Fritz's recollection, as a kid, he didn’t even like tennis that much. He loved to compete, but mostly in other sports—basketball, lacrosse, baseball, football. The slog of tennis practice was hard to get through. Both of his parents had been professional tennis players, though—his mom, Kathy May, was once ranked number 10 in the world, having reached the quarterfinals of three Grand Slams—and Fritz knew he wanted to be a professional athlete, too. So, at age 14, he dropped the sports he loved most for the one he showed the most promise in. Three years later he turned pro.
For anyone considering a career in tennis, playing the 110-degree court heat at the USTA training facilities in Boca Raton is a good litmus test, and at 15, Fritz started making the occasional sojourn to the famed headquarters. When he first arrived, he quickly fell in with two other young American players who were already living in the dorms together—Reilly Opelka, who would become known for his monstrous serve and staggering height, and Tommy Paul, lightning quick and deft on clay. “We were all practicing on clay,” Paul says, “and in California there’s not a lot of clay courts out there, so I remember him showing up and just looking all clumsy.” At one point, Fritz wiped out on a treadmill going 6.5 mph. “We saw him and were like, what a Cali kid. He was just super California.” Apparently Fritz was the only one at that age using hair gel. That, and he brought self tanner spray with him to Florida to maintain his “California glow.”
Fritz headed back west but started training at Boca more regularly. The three of them—Opelka, Paul, Fritz—all turned pro in 2015. (There’s a photo from that year of the trio standing in height order, squinting in the sun as at the Junior Davis Cup tournament.) Theirs is a bond that’s held up, even as they competed with each other for the same titles and buzz over who would break through, who’d emerge as the next American One. Three big-swinging American boys, coming up in juniors at the same time, turning pro at the same time. Paul’s manager, Wajid Syed, describes them as “a kind of triumvirate right now in American men’s tennis.”
“It’s because we live this life together that no one else could understand,” says Fritz. “It’s tough. You have to compete against your friends. And then we travel around the world together 30-40 weeks of the year. We’re all the same age and we're all kind of doing the same thing.”
They’re also all well aware of the cultural thirst for the next American champion—the kind that in hindsight that you can really pine over. “This was happening even before we turned pro,” says Opelka. “We heard it as juniors. We felt the stress from the coaching staff. There was a point when we were young and none of the Americans performed well at the U.S. Open and [Davis Cup captain] Patrick McEnroe was under a lot of stress, a lot of fire for that. It trickled all the way down to the kids training at the USTA, which was me and Taylor Fritz. It’s very toxic.”
American tennis has been waiting for its next male Grand Slam winner ever since former world number one Andy Roddick retired in 2012. But what’s peculiar about the idea that there’s been some kind of drought is the reality that American male players are everywhere. “Just turn on the TV,” says Opelka. “If you’re a tennis fan, it’s hard to find a tournament without at least two or three Americans. And in the slams, you’ll find 12 of them. I think that’s all that matters. You can’t develop a Grand Slam champion. The USTA can provide juniors with the training, enough to potentially crack the top 50, but what happens between top 50 and a Grand Slam is completely on the individual. You can’t breed that.”
Fritz is similarly unfazed. The idea of who would be the next big American player was something he heard his whole life, and it was something, he felt, that the generation before him heard all of theirs. He tries to not focus on it too much. “I’m playing for myself,” he says, “and the pressure I feel is the pressure I put on myself.”
Does he ever think about soliciting the advice of older American players? “Not really,” he says. “I’m sure if I went and asked them, they’d be accessible, but I’ve never really wanted to bother them. What I’ve seen is that all of this is about finding your own process, finding what works for you.”
Last year, Fritz’s goal was to go farther at some of the bigger tournaments this year, which he did right away, beginning with his third round victory in January at the Australian Open. This year, he wanted to crack the top 10, which he nearly has. Eventually, he wants to win a Grand Slam. To get there, he’ll navigate the cycles and restrictions of injury, the weariness of unending travel, the occasionally deadening repetition inherent to the life he’s chosen—train, play, eat, sleep. He’ll do it all, too, under, in spite of, a kind of nagging sense that no matter how far American men’s tennis progresses, we long for a kind of player that no longer exists.
Fritz is the first to admit he’s very hard on himself. At 17, he was competing in a national tournament in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and refused to leave the court when he hurt his knee. His dad couldn’t drag him out of the match, even after he told him there was no way he was going to win. Russell, his coach, notes how laid-back Fritz is when he isn’t playing, but says the fierceness comes through on court—the sort of single-minded compartmentalization required in the upper echelons of professional sport. Fritz doesn’t work with a psychologist. He doesn’t want to overthink it. “I really think it’s one of those things you’re just born with," he says, "like the gene of just being good under pressure. And I feel like I’ve always had that.” He gets nervous, of course, but he trusts himself. “My favorite part about the game is when it’s high stakes, and what I’m able to do right then, how I’m able to play against it in that specific moment. That’s when I can play my best.”
The last time an American man won a Grand Slam was in 2003—it was a 21-year-old Andy Roddick who defeated Spain’s Juan Carlos Ferrero for the men’s U.S. Open title, and it happened just as 14-time Grand Slam champion Pete Sampras officially announced his retirement. It was the stuff of dreams, a perfect, bittersweet changing of the guard, and fans of American men’s tennis have spent the past 19 years scanning the horizon for another moment like it—searching so intently for greatness, perhaps, that we've missed what it looks like when a very good new player arrives on court, focused, stubborn, hopeful. Taylor Fritz is already here.\
