“You come so close to doing something so special, and to see everything that happened after that,” Tiafoe said Wednesday. “I want more of those moments and better.”
Tiafoe, who plays Karen Khachanov of Russia, on his 25th birthday on Friday, has been, if not here exactly, then somewhere like this before. Three years ago, he made the quarterfinals of this tournament, and his ranking soon shot up to No. 29 in the world. He figured his tennis life would simply continue the upward trajectory that began when he picked up a racket as a small child at the club where his father, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, was a maintenance worker, and began hitting balls against a wall.
He quickly caught the eye of tennis coaches there, and later the United States Tennis Association, which helped fund his development through his teenage years. But that breakthrough at the 2019 Australian Open resulted in complacency rather than hunger. He practiced and trained hard only when he felt like it, or skipped it altogether. He paid little attention to what he ate.
He lost more often than he won and fell out of the top 80.
Wayne Ferreira, a former pro from South Africa who started coaching Tiafoe in 2020, said in September that Tiafoe might have suffered from having it all come so easily.
“I think I helped him because I played and I went through the issues of being relatively talented and being lazy,” Ferreira said in September. “Food intake was terrible at the beginning. The effort on the practices and on the court wasn’t good enough. It’s taken time for us to get gradually to where we are today.”
Tiafoe said he was virtually unrecognizable from the person and the player he was three years ago, the one who suddenly found himself playing challenger tournaments on the sport’s back roads.