“He slept in the closet at the club”, the confidences of the first coach of Tiafoe, semi-finalist in New York

His second semi-final in three years at the US Open. Frances Tiafoe has never felt better than in New York. His best result in the three other Grand Slams was a quarter-final at the Australian Open in 2019 against Rafael Nadal. In an interview with the daily newspaper L’Equipe, his first coach Misha Kouznetsov recounts discovering a young 8-year-old child, not necessarily destined to become a professional: “At 8 years old, he had never had a coach and no one was interested in him. He knew how to hold a racket but he only used his backhand to drop shots and with his forehand, he hit the clouds”he says.

While his mother did not want to hear about tennis and preferred a university future, Tiafoe – who will challenge Fritz on the night of Friday to Saturday – had the chance to come across Misha, who led him towards his desire to turn professional: “Because their mother worked a lot of night shifts and their father didn’t have a place to live, Frances and her twin brother Franklin often slept at the club, in the closet or the locker room, on a massage table… Our dreams coincided: he wanted to become a pro, I wanted to train one. We both worked very hard, seven days a week, for almost ten years.”