Ben Shelton arrived at the
Australian Open without
having played any match outside his country and has been one of the surprises at
the tournament.
The World No. 89 is undoubtedly one of the revelations
of the tournament, he reached the fourth round of the first major of the year
without having traveled outside his country before and has had an upward game
as each round passes. For the passage to the quarterfinals, he’ll face the also
American
J.J. Wolf. The 20-year-old had only been in the main draw of a
Grand Slam at the 2022 US Open, when he was eliminated in the first round by
Portugal's Nuno Borges in 5-sets.
After defeating local Alexey Popyrin in 3-sets, he
commented with a smile: “It feels great”.
“Definitely a big smile on my face, I called my
parents and they’re pretty happy so yeah, just a lot of happiness around.”,
said the American.
Bryan Shelton, Ben's father was a professional tennis
player in the 90's and won two ATP titles. Even though Ben wasn’t interested in
playing tennis, he started playing at the age of 12 and was playing college
tennis some years later. Currently, he is already a player who has entered the
professional tour, and if he beats Wolf he will ensure his entry into the
top-50.
The takeoff has been meteoric, in the Cinciniati
Master 1000 he played being ranked 229th at this moment, and
defeated
Lorenzo Sonego in the first round. In the second round he defeated
Casper Ruud, a top-5 and US Open finalist just two weeks later. Although Shelton
had played mostly Challenger tournaments (all in United States), he had already
achieved several wins against top-200 players, and it looked like he would make
the jump soon. When he was asked why he had never played a tournament outside
of the country, Shelton said:
“There were players inside of the U.S. that could challenge me
and beat me every week, and I wasn't winning every single USTA tournament that
I was playing. So my dad's thoughts were, 'I'm improving here, I'm not the best
in the nation, and so there's not really a reason to go to a different country
where I probably would lose and learn a lot of the same things”.
"I'm not sure if there was a moment
where things clicked, or it was just I knew that I was making gradual
improvements in my game. I just started trusting myself more and more going
into the summer.”
Now
he is preparing to play world No. 67 Jeffrey John Wolf, who has only dropped one set in
the tournament, and who has already shown that he can compete at the best level
when he eliminated the 23rd seed
Diego Schwartzman.
"The more that I competed at a higher
level, I had more trust in myself to keep moving forward.", said the
20-year-old youngstar.