Frances Tiafoe, the tennis player who learned with his eyes, the threat to Carlos Alcaraz

• US OPEN 2022 Alcaraz saves a match point, beats Sinner in a great battle and will play the semifinals

Frances Tiafoe

started playing tennis with her eyes.

Her father worked in the maintenance service of a promising academy and he spent hours watching other children train from the fence.

He then she would grab the first racket she saw and repeat against a wall what she had seen.

If any court was free, she practiced serving.

Most of the time, without anyone on the other side of the network.

semifinals this Friday

against

.

In a sport that requires a somewhat greater economic effort from families, her story is unusual.

is the son of two migrants who met in the

fleeing the civil war in

and soon they had twins,

The family settled in Maryland and the father found work building a tennis facility.

His attitude was so popular that when they finished, he was left in charge of maintenance.

That's where he started this journey.

, which was the father's name before he was renamed

Sr.

In honor of her son, she worked overtime to get a little more money.

Enough that he ended up being more comfortable moving into an empty room in the facility.

And since their mother,

, worked as a night shift nurse, the twins lived there with her father five days a week.

"It was a fairly small room with two massage tables. My father slept in one and my brother and I, since we were little, fit in the other,"

explained in a report by '

The workers of the academy remember him sitting on a bench, so small that his legs did not yet reach the ground, absorbing the classes from the outside to repeat them later alone.

Both twins liked tennis, but for

it was like poison.

premature professional

Tiafoe

learned this way from the time he had enough arms to hold a racket, around the age of four, until he was noticed at eight by

a Russian coach the academy had hired.

Frances was not a student - they would never have been able to afford it - but

was struck by his desire and physical condition and began to work with him at times before and after his shift.

When Frances made it to pro, you could still see the traces of that unusual early upbringing in a game that was technically less polished than usual.

ended up assuming the sporting tutelage of the boy, who with a more specific preparation became one of the greatest youth promises in the

, part of that explosion that in the space of eight months also gave birth to his friend

, number 12 in the world;

the gunboat

(n. 28);

or

(n. 34), executioner of

in the

At 16,

was rallying with Rafa Nadal at

and qualifying for the

.

Tennis, which had started as a way to aspire to a university scholarship, and receive the education that his parents were not going to be able to pay for, became a professional opportunity.

He soon began to stand out as a fast and powerful tennis player, sometimes wild, but ambitious.

At the age of 20, he lifted his first (and only) title in

leaving his idol,

, on the way .

And with just turned 21 he stood in the quarterfinals of the

against

Nadal as a measure

"

I had never seen myself there and he will have played a thousand times a quarterfinal in a

confessed

after losing against the Majorcan at the

.

The American recognized that in that tournament there was a moment when a tear escaped him when he thought about what he was achieving.

It looked like the ultimate assault on the elite, but he still had a way to go.

He has recognized that the break due to the pandemic was good for him to reset his career.

That first great success was a flash, the measure of how far his potential reached;

the setbacks that came later showed him the path that still lay ahead of him.

His trainer, the South African

has come to say that

needed to learn to behave like a professional.

Work and concentration inside the track;

rest and meals outside of it.

The temptation is to attribute his outstanding

to those changes , but the truth is that the

that has been seen since 2020, although with higher game peaks, has not left irregularity behind.

He is also the player who has only stepped on the

once in 32 participations, or that he has not lifted an ATP title since

The problem for

is that the

that is being seen these two weeks in

looks more like The one who overwhelmed

in the round of 16 than the one who was afraid of the Mallorcan in

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