American men finally have a tennis major finalist

There was a time when that sentence above would be as newsworthy as writing that the sun appears to rise in the East every morning. No longer. Now, it’s as rare as a cicada emergence.

This year’s American cicadas are 26-year-olds Taylor Fritz and Frances Tiafoe, who both won quarterfinal matches on Sept. 3 to advance to a semifinal showdown against each other at the U.S. Open in New York. The winner, whoever he is, will be the first American in a major tourney final since — get this — Andy Roddick took Roger Federer to a 14-16 fifth set back in 2009. Yes, 15 years ago. And it was even longer ago, in 2003, when the last American man, also Roddick, actually won a major.

For observers of a certain age, this tableau has been as baffling as the first Dadaist paintings must have seemed. If someone grew up in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, American dominance in men’s tennis seemed like a birthright. In the 36 years from 1971 through 2006, half of the U.S. Opens, 18, crowned American champions, while 15 of the 36 Wimbledons did. Except for a four-year drought in the late 1980s, Americans always had one, two, or as many as five of the main contenders in almost every Grand Slam event.

From Stan Smith and Arthur Ashe through Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe to Jim Courier, Pete Sampras, Andre Agassi, and Roddick — not to mention the cast of near-top-tier stars that included Vitas Gerulaitis, Roscoe Tanner, Michael Chang, and Todd Martin — Americans usually had multiple players fighting off an assortment of Swedes and Australians, except with random other Europeans and Latins usually dominating in France. Several times, five Americans finished among the top eight, and at least once, the United States provided all four semifinalists….  [The full column is here.]