After playing at home and hearing the roars as he reached his first Grand Slam final at the U.S. Open, Taylor Fritz is back on the road after a trans-Atlantic journey.
The tennis world moves on very quickly.
“I mean it’s one week off and then right after it again,” said Michael Russell, one of Fritz’s coaches. “There’s just not a lot of time off.”
The risk of a letdown is real, but this is a road trip to Berlin that Fritz has been looking forward to. He fell hard for the Laver Cup when he made his debut in 2019, and the team event, dreamed up by Roger Federer and his agent, Tony Godsick, remains one of Fritz’s favorite events, even in an overstuffed Olympic season like 2024.
“Being so mentally locked in for these two weeks, it would be really tough to go play an individual tournament that’s not going to have the same, like, just energy,” Fritz said at the U.S. Open earlier this month. “So it’s amazing I’m going to get to go play a really fun event that I enjoy with all of my friends. Because it’s pretty impossible for me to not be fired up playing a match when I have all these guys on the bench kind of going crazy for me.”
The Laver Cup, running Friday through Sunday, is an annual men’s competition between six-player all-star teams, inspired by golf’s Ryder Cup. In that tournament, it is Europe against the United States. In the Laver Cup, it is Team Europe against Team World. It is not the most natural rivalry. Who instinctively roots for “the world minus Europe?”
But since the event’s beginning in 2017, Team World has been surprisingly cohesive, in part because it has had a strong American accent with the captain John McEnroe and regulars like Fritz, Frances Tiafoe, Tommy Paul (who is not playing this year) and the now-retired John Isner and Jack Sock.
The new American arrival Ben Shelton joined Team World in 2023 and helped defend the title.
Shelton, Fritz and Tiafoe, all ranked in the top 20, are back this year and have evident camaraderie, even if Tiafoe and Fritz just faced off in a high-stakes U.S. Open semifinal that Fritz won in five sets.
“Playing on a team is an entirely different thing, and it brings out a lot of different energy,” Fritz said. “We’re used to competing for ourselves, and when you compete for other people it brings on the nerves much more. But that also makes the energy and the excitement much higher.”
Fritz’s schedule reflects his taste for team events. This will be his third of the season after the United Cup mixed team event in Australia in December and January and the Davis Cup qualifying round in Lithuania in February. He also played for the United States at the Olympics in Paris. He and Paul won the bronze in men’s doubles, another highlight in a grueling, successful season.
“I’m just really proud of Taylor’s effort and determination, the way he just persevered through a lot of difficult challenges,” Russell, one of his coaches, said. “Especially coming through the summer, going from the grass of Wimbledon right to clay at the Olympics, getting the bronze medal and going deep there, and then having to turn around right back to the U.S. hardcourt swing. We saw a lot of the players really had challenges adjusting.”
Now Fritz will switch to a slow indoor court for the Laver Cup. Two years ago, he was in London when Tiafoe and Sock defeated Federer and Rafael Nadal in doubles in Federer’s farewell match. That was surely the most emotional moment in the Laver Cup’s history.
“It was crazy,” Fritz said. “I definitely cried a lot more than I thought I was going to. I was pretty upset, honestly to see how much hate Frances and Jack got for, like, winning the match. It upset me a lot actually to see people getting mad at Frances for hitting Roger or hitting the ball at Rafa at net. This is not an exhibition. We are playing for a lot, and we’re playing for a lot of money. I know Roger would have absolutely hated it if they just gave it to him.”
The Laver Cup is an official ATP Tour event, but, like the Olympics and the Davis Cup, does not award ranking points. It pays participation fees to the players based on rankings, but Federer made it clear when he cocreated the event that he wanted players to take the event seriously. Members of the winning team receive $250,000 each while the losers get no prize money.
Fritz has made it a priority and, like his American Laver Cup teammates, he passed on representing the United States in the Davis Cup last week, in part because the group stage was in China immediately after the U.S. Open.
Fritz is 3-1 in Laver Cup singles matches and, ranked No. 7, will be the leader of Team World. He is also on a roll after becoming the first American man in 15 years to reach a major singles final, losing to No. 1 Jannik Sinner in New York.
At age 26, Fritz continues to progress. He has long had a big forehand and first serve and a solid two-handed backhand. But he has improved his second serve and mobility. His transition game and net play need work, as the loss to Sinner made clear, but what impresses Fritz’s coaches most is his grit.
“Taylor’s an unconditional competitor,” said Paul Annacone, one of his longtime coaches, who worked with Federer. “It’s the first and last thing I look for. I just know that no matter what is going on in his life, on the court, off the court, with his body, between his ears, he’s not going to not give everything to the next point. It’s not in his DNA. When you have that, and you have the weapons and skill-set he has, that’s going to create opportunities at the highest level. I think that’s why his evolution has gotten him there.”
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