A column published by Sport & State, the sports and culture outlet founded by Clay Travis, is taking ESPN to task for the way it promoted Friday’s U.S. Open men’s semifinal between Ben Shelton and Frances Tiafoe — arguing the network reached for a contrived racial storyline when the match already stood on its own.
Writing for Sport & State, Karen Crouse focused on a post from ESPN Insights, a verified account on X with roughly 1.7 million followers, that went up ahead of the all-American semifinal. The post noted that the winner would become the first Black American man to reach a U.S. Open final since Arthur Ashe in 1972, and the first Black American man to reach any major final since MaliVai Washington at Wimbledon in 1996.
Crouse characterized the framing as “equally jingoistic and identity-obsessed,” and argued that it falls apart under scrutiny. Her central complaint is not that the milestone is false — it’s that ESPN chose the narrowest possible lens and, in doing so, obscured a more meaningful picture of how far American tennis has come.
A different set of numbers
If the goal was to celebrate progress since Ashe’s trailblazing career, Crouse writes, ESPN could have pointed out that Shelton, ranked No. 9, and Tiafoe, ranked No. 12, are two of four players of color in the top 12 of the ATP rankings. The others are Canada’s Felix Auger-Aliassime at No. 4 and France’s Arthur Fils at No. 11.
She also notes that a high-stakes match between two Black players is no longer a rarity. Last month’s Cincinnati final, a Masters 1000 event, featured Tiafoe and the eventual champion Fils.
The column argues that presenting Black players as marginalized unicorns in American tennis does a disservice to the women who have dominated the sport for a quarter century. Venus and Serena Williams, Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys and Coco Gauff have all reached at least one U.S. Open women’s singles final since 1999 and have combined for 11 titles.
Crouse also flagged a genuinely historic opportunity that she says ESPN overlooked: Taylor Townsend can complete a career Grand Slam in doubles if she and partner Katerina Siniakova win Friday’s final against Robin Montgomery and Ashlyn Krueger. Only 18 women have achieved the feat in the Open era, according to the column.
A sardonic assist
From there, Crouse offers ESPN’s tennis crew what she calls a few other “scintillating facts” for its men’s semifinal telecast — a list delivered with deliberate absurdity to make the point that milestone-hunting can be done with almost any trivial detail. If Shelton wins, she writes, he would become the first men’s player born on a Wednesday to reach the U.S. Open final since Marin Cilic in 2014. She adds, dryly, “It’s true. I looked it up.”
Shelton and Tiafoe, she notes, are also the second pair of headband-wearing Americans to face each other in the final four of a U.S. Open, after Tiafoe and Taylor Fritz in a 2024 semifinal.
The column then turns to Friday’s other semifinal. Karen Khachanov, Crouse writes, can become the first Karen to reach a men’s or women’s U.S. Open final with a win over Alexander Zverev. Zverev, for his part, reached all four major singles semifinals this year — only the ninth man in the Open era to complete that calendar sweep, per the column.
Crouse also raises Zverev’s Type 1 diabetes, noting he could become the first known Type 1 diabetic to win the men’s U.S. Open title; he lost the 2020 final to Dominic Thiem. She writes that his openness about the condition has likely helped normalize what can be an isolating diagnosis, and that it is no laughing matter — the contrast with the sillier stat-stretches being the point.
The argument underneath
Stripped of the sarcasm, Crouse’s critique is a familiar one in sports media criticism: that networks packaging history into pre-cut graphics can flatten the athletes involved into symbols rather than competitors. Her proposed alternative is not colorblindness but a wider frame — one that treats Black excellence in tennis as an established fact with a deep bench rather than a once-in-a-generation exception.
She closes by urging viewers not to let the manufactured history distract from what the semifinals actually offer: power, grit, grace, athleticism and sportsmanship. The matches, in her view, can stand on their own merits.
ESPN has not responded publicly to the Sport & State column, and there is no indication the network’s pre-match post has been removed. The debate it sparked is likely to outlast the tournament itself — a reminder that in sports broadcasting, the framing of a milestone can become as contested as the milestone itself.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/hey-espn-u-s-open-tennis-doesnt-need-contrived-racial-storyline-to-be-compelling