The most consequential result in the last 20 years of American tennis happened in the wee hours of Wednesday morning at the US Open, and most sports fans couldn’t see it because they had been asleep for hours.
Ben Shelton upset Carlos Alcaraz in the US Open quarterfinals in a five-set thriller, winning the final set tiebreak to secure the biggest victory of his career. Unfortunately, the match ended at 3:33 a.m. ET, meaning almost everybody outside the most hardcore tennis fans missed it.
Incredibly, because of the length of matches in the Tuesday night session before Shelton-Alcaraz was scheduled to begin, their contest didn’t start until after 11 p.m. local time. And with the match lasting 4:28, match point was finally won well into the night.
Ben Shelton takes down Carlos Alcaraz in a five-set tiebreak to advance to the US Open semifinals!
It guarantees that an American will play in the US Open men’s final.
Match point was at 3:33 a.m. ET.
Chris Fowler and John McEnroe with the call for ESPN. 🎾🇺🇸🎙️ https://t.co/7Vq8wN9JTu pic.twitter.com/JutJNupcEn
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) September 9, 2026
Sure, it might be fun for the players, announcers, and fans in attendance to brag about being there for the latest night in the annals of US Open history. Some fans will try to get through their Wednesday on little to no sleep, wearing a badge of honor for making it through the night to watch the entire thing. A huge match under the lights in Flushing Meadows is one of the best scenes in sports, especially with an electric crowd behind an American player. And given the importance of the victory for Shelton and American tennis, it will be talked about for years, especially if he can go on to win his first career Grand Slam title.
But don’t let all those good vibes prevent you from understanding that this is totally insane.
Late start times have been a problem for sports for a long time. And it doesn’t take an AI singularity loop to understand why. The later in the evening you go, the more fans you will lose because human beings need sleep. And that’s especially true for a generation of young fans that are already moving away from sports at a troubling pace. It’s unrealistic to expect young people to become sports fans when they can’t witness their biggest moments live.
But it’s one thing for the national championship in college football or college basketball to end too close to midnight. Or for a particularly long World Series or NBA Finals game. It’s a completely different thing altogether to not even start your marquee matchup until after 11 p.m. ET, locking out a huge portion of potential fans from even engaging in the first place.
But that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning. And it’s been happening all throughout the US Open where finishes after midnight, 1 a.m., and 2 a.m. local time have become the norm. If a match can go the distance, as we saw three times on the men’s and women’s side on Wednesday, it can create a snowball effect that grows through the day. The Shelton-Alcaraz classic came after Jessica Pegula beat Emma Navarro in three sets and Frances Tiafoe defeated Alex Michelsen in five.
A conversation is growing that tennis matches are becoming far too long. And that’s only going to increase after what we have seen at this year’s US Open. With increased competition and reliance on long baseline rallies, marathon matches are becoming the norm.
But someone at ESPN and the US Open needs to step in and realize what an unforced error this is.
This was the first time an American male tennis player had defeated either Carlos Alcaraz or Jannik Sinner in a grand slam tournament. This was a truly historic occasion. For the first time in 20 years, American men’s tennis finally has some hope. And that moment was completely lost, costing millions of potential viewers.
After all, the US Open invited so many content creators and influencers to market tennis to a new audience and grow the game. But you can’t grow the game under the cover of darkness.
Can you imagine how many new tennis fans they could have created if they’d had the chance to witness this victory? Instead, it’s something people might see in their social media algorithm and scroll past, musing, “that’s nice,” before forgetting it five minutes later when they encounter the next Elizabeth Holmes-Nathan Fielder meme.
Maybe there is no perfect fix right now. But the US Open needs to take a long, hard look in the mirror, figure out how to change this, and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Because anything would be better for the sport than this.
About Matt Yoder