MELBOURNE, Australia — Ben Shelton’s Australian Open equation is simple. Beat the best player in the world to get to the final, then beat either the second-best player in the world by ranking or one of the greatest men’s players ever to play the sport.
He plays Jannik Sinner, the world No. 1 and defending champion, in the semifinals in Melbourne on Friday night. Alexander Zverev and Novak Djokovic contest the other semifinal. But even if he doesn’t win another match, Shelton, the world No. 21, has made one thing exceptionally clear to the tennis world the past two weeks: it’s one thing to beat him in a tour event, but it’s a completely different thing to topple him at a Grand Slam.
The American has now played 10 majors, reaching the semifinals twice and the quarterfinals once. Shelton is 22-9 overall in Grand Slam main-draw matches, and 18-4 on the hard courts of New York and Melbourne.
Shelton has been talking tennis math for a couple of weeks now, telling anyone who wants to listen that he backs himself in the best-of-five format more than any other. Grand Slam calculations form the basis of Shelton’s success in the biggest tournaments in tennis, in which he has a 72 percent win-rate. He’s at 58 percent for all ATP Tour competitions, the majors included.
“For me, it’s really special to be playing at these big tournaments and playing my best tennis at the big tournaments,” he said Wednesday night after beating Lorenzo Sonego of Italy, 6-4, 7-5, 4-6, 7-6(4) in three and a half hours.
To look at Shelton’s game on the surface, his version of big-time tennis is all vibes and thunder: the massive serve, the cranked forehands and backhands that get an extra scream of exertion when he gets his shoulders moving. It’s a force-of-nature approach to the tennis court that pulls his opponent and everybody watching into a cauldron of vibes.
That’s maybe how it was in his breakout runs, especially at the 2023 U.S. Open when he sprinted to the semifinals with his hang-up-the-phone celebration and forehands scudding down the sidelines. Not so much now. The massive serve is being turned into something trickier and more precise. The groundstrokes are earning the right to finish points, rather than exploding them. He’s incorporating more spin on his forehand and working hard on varying his return game.
Shelton produced electrifying performances at the 2023 U.S. Open. (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)
“You get a few more balls back,” his father and coach, Bryan Shelton, said walking through a tunnel under Melbourne Park with his son. “You start making a few smarter decisions. He’s doing things he wasn’t doing a year ago.”
It all goes back to the math. Big games though come with small margins, especially for Shelton the past couple years. A few loose points lost to rocket forehands that just miss, or to an overhit return here and there, can get an opponent halfway to the finish line in a best-of-three match.
A couple more, and the match might well be over. In a best-of-five sets match, especially given how much time he spends in the weight room and the running track, Shelton feels like he’s got all day to make up for a ropey patch, because he kind of does, and so does everyone else, especially now that he has achieved a certain level of Grand Slam success over and over.
“I feel like I belong,” he said as he walked the corridor late Wednesday evening. “I feel like I deserve it.”
So does his father.
“You have kids?” he asked a little while before Shelton spoke. “It’s little things you work on paying tiny dividends here and there. Over time, hopefully they add up.”
He wasn’t really talking about tennis. And then he was.
GO DEEPER
Ben Shelton, serve savant, wants to talk about the return
Shelton knew it was going to have to go this way — because of the math. When he rolled to those Australian Open quarterfinals and U.S. Open semifinals in 2023, he felt that the dreamlike tennis he was living through could vanish at any moment. Back then his serve, his biggest weapon, had to be perfect, along with just about everything else. If he had a bad serving day or wasn’t nailing lines with his groundstrokes, he probably wasn’t going to win. More importantly, he hadn’t yet figured out how to win not just without hitting 100 percent of Hail Marys, but without using 100 percent of his energy, physical and mental.
The past year, and especially the past few months, he and his father have focused on stringing together a safety net, because most of the time he and every other player will be far from a perfect version of themselves on the tennis court.
His biggest task has been trying to figure out how to get into more points on his opponents’ serves. In the corridor late Wednesday he talked about the past. He might start a match returning well by standing deep, but when an opponent made an adjustment and standing deep stopped working, he had nowhere to turn.
“I wasn’t good at making the adjustments or changing up my position, giving guys different looks, and I feel like I can do that now,” he said.
“The best returners in the world, they can do so many different things, and sometimes that’s hitting the ball and roping into the baseline and sometimes that’s a deep, floating chip. Sometimes it’s a chip at the feet. That’s a lot of what I’ve been working on.”
Ben Shelton’s second Grand-Slam semifinal run is built more on fundamentals than flashiness. (Andy Cheung / Getty Images)
Against Sonego, Shelton was desperate not to fritter away a two-set lead after finding himself in a fourth-set tiebreak. Shelton had scrambled Sonego early with a series of looping, spinny forehands that he’d practiced all December in Florida. Then, Sonego surged. His winner total kept growing, from six in the first set and 14 in the second to 17 in the third and then 26 in the fourth. Shelton’s legs were fine, but his mind was fried from watching all those balls sail past him out of reach.
At 4-4, after some tight misses from the back by Shelton and at the net by Sonego, the Italian twisted a kick serve down the middle to Shelton’s forehand. He didn’t try to kill it: he hit a low chip short, drawing Sonego into the net, where he didn’t really want to be in that moment. Sonego looped an approach into Shelton’s backhand and he thundered it straight back. The volley sailed long. Shelton closed it out from there to set up his date with the world No. 1 and defending champion.
He’s a realist. Sinner has been in a class by himself, joined and surpassed intermittently by Carlos Alcaraz, for the past five months. Shelton knows his chances are what they are. But the match remains a huge opportunity to measure himself and his progress against the best there is on the biggest stage.
Shelton has beaten Sinner once, in October 2023 in Shanghai, just as the Italian was rounding into the form that carried him to the top spot in the rankings. He has not won a set against Sinner in four tries since then.
He will try to believe that doesn’t matter, just as he did before he faced Lorenzo Musetti in the third round. Musetti had won both of their previous matches. People were asking him how that was going to go.
“I don’t really care who is on the other side of the court,” he said after he had beaten Musetti, who had never played him in a Grand Slam.
“If I’m healthy and I’m feeling good, I always feel like I can go the distance, five sets. That’s half the battle, trusting in your ability to make it all the way to the end.”
What’s the other half? Sinner, and then maybe Djokovic. It’s the last weekend of a Grand Slam and there are only four players left. It’s just math.
(Top photo: Mark Avellino / Anadolu via Getty Images)
