MELBOURNE, Australia — In the fog of his 150mph serves, his seemingly limitless athleticism and his frightening forehand, it is sometimes hard to figure out why Ben Shelton doesn’t win just about every tennis match that he plays.
He struts onto the court with those shoulders and biceps. He picks volleys off his shoelaces on dead sprints into the net. He’s left-handed.
He looks like a champion, doesn’t he?
Shelton, 22, would be the first to say that he fell a little short of his expectations in 2024 after making a quarterfinal and a semifinal in two Grand Slams in 2023. Last March, on the heels of winning the title at the U.S. Clay Court Championships in Houston, he became the American No. 1. At the time, it seemed like he might hold that spot for the next 10 years.
Taylor Fritz made sure it was more like five minutes, but by the end of the summer the top 10 was within shouting distance as Shelton rose to No. 13.
Now, it is January, and he has entered the Australian Open as the world No. 21. Importantly, he knows why.
Shelton is better than most at so many tennis skills, but he is lacking the second-most-important one, the thing that every tennis player has to do on almost half the points they have to play: returning the opponent’s serve.
“My biggest focus,” Shelton said late last year during a visit to new York for an exhibition against Carlos Alcaraz. He may get plenty of so-called free points with his serve, in the form of aces and serves that rattle players’ rackets, but he can also give just as many straight back, even to opponents who don’t have a serve anywhere near as potent as his.
Like so much else about Shelton, it’s all a bit of a work in progress, as it was Tuesday in Melbourne during his 7-6(3), 7-5, 7-5 first-round win over compatriot Brandon Nakashima on Tuesday.
“I knew if I got a high percentage of my first serves in, I would be able to hold my serve pretty easily,” Nakashima said in his news conference when it was over. He wasn’t wrong, hitting a series of second serves in all three service games that he lost.
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Through most of the first set, Shelton struggled to get into return games at all. He moved up. He moved back. He blocked. He chipped. Nothing really worked, as he fought to get out the hole he had dug for himself by letting Nakashima break him in his first service game.
With Nakashima serving for the set, he wobbled, double-faulting on break point to get Shelton back on track. Three games later, the set went to a tiebreak and Shelton only had to return for two points at a time.
Ironically, hunting for a break in the final game to clinch the match, Shelton looked like a returning savant. He sent his compatriot backpedaling and twisting and lunging as he gained the upper hand point after point. One screaming return on to Nakashima’s toes brought up match point; the next one pinged off his racket and landed way out of bounds. He still stole the break and moved on to the second round; to get further, he will have to do that kind of work time and again.
Shelton said his strategy in those moments is to not give away free points, because he knows his opponent is feeling pressure. He tries to play a little bit more conservatively early in the point and in the game to let an opportunity develop. Then, “once it gets to the big moment, I just trust myself and go for the shot.”
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The serve is the one thing in tennis over which players have total control. It can make the ball fly faster than any other shot. For so long in men’s tennis, it was the “get out of jail free” card, as Shelton describes the impact of having a point-starting bomb since he was just a kid.
Well into the 1990s, the top of men’s tennis was pretty much a serving contest.
Serving big meant winning big, so pretty much everybody had to serve big to win. Then, racket and string technology development made it easier and easier to serve faster and faster, moving the top of the speed gun from around 130mph in the 1990s and early 2000s to 150mph now. Shelton, who can trouble 150mph when he wants to, is an outlier, but having a big serve is no longer. In the early 1990s, a player like Pete Sampras would average around 119mph and win Grand Slam titles on the strength of that serve.
Today, everybody in the top 100, more or less, is hitting 125mph with some regularity. The edge in men’s tennis is no longer with the server, but with the returner, the ones who can actually do it. A great many players in the generation hamstrung by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Djokovic are undercooked in their ability to neutralize a big serve with a block or slice.
Ben Shelton dominates most of his peers with his serve, but he struggles to return on their level. (Shi Tang / Getty Images)
Shelton’s serve numbers — and many others — are better than most other players. On the return, he’s below the tour average by just about every measure, according to data compiled by TennizViz and Tennis Data Innovations for the ATP Tour.
Shelton returns 58 percent of first serves into the court. The tour averages 62 percent.
He gets 77 percent of second serves back. The tour averages 82 percent.
Overall he gets 65 percent of serves back in the court. The tour averages 69 percent.
His first serve return speed is 59mph. The tour average is 61mph.
On and on it goes.
For context, Novak Djokovic, arguably the greatest returner ever besides Agassi, wins 33 percent of the points off his opponent’s first serve and 56 percent off the second. He gets 66 percent of the first balls serves and 86 percent of the second serves. He gets back 70 percent of his forehand returns, compared with 59 percent for Shelton, and an astonishing 77 percent of backhand returns, compared with 72 percent for Shelton.
Shelton said his return stats are nowhere near where he wants them to be. His conversion rate on break point is getting closer though.
“I think that I’m a great frontrunner. I think that whenever I do get a break, I feel pretty confident serving out sets, finishing sets out. So for me, it’s just important to be able to either get that early break or get a guy enough in the deep end to the end of the set to make them come up with something.”
Shelton, who didn’t start playing tennis seriously until he was 12, describes himself as being pretty bad as a junior, not really good enough to justify competing outside of Florida very often. There were plenty of players who could beat him in his backyard.
Not many of them could handle his fastball. Even when he got good enough for top-level college tennis at the University of Florida, whenever he got in trouble his serve could usually get him out of it. Not having a great return meant he might struggle to break his opponent’s serve, but no one was breaking his.
The same dynamic unfolded during his first year on the ATP Tour. Opponents hadn’t seen his combination of power and spin, but unlike college, the pro tour structure leads to matchups that repeat themselves. Like batters in baseball who get familiar with a pitcher’s tricks by the third game of a series, opponents started to learn how to manage Shelton and how to break him more often.
“It’s something that is a gift and a curse from big servers and great servers from a young age,” he said.
“You get away with a lot of things that other guys don’t. So I feel like I’m playing catch up, but I think I’m doing a good job.”
Ben Shelton is trying to recover his return deficit. (Asanka Brendon Ratnayake / Associated Press)
Returning a small, fuzzy ball rocketing at roughly 125mph and spinning at a rate of a couple thousand revolutions per minute looks more like art and science, but it’s also a matter of repetitions and practice. Still, it’s one of those skills that that can make tennis seem like billiards. The best returners make split-second adjustments to redirect balls just so, or guess right and take a sweet cut when they see a meatball approaching.
Shelton said last week he knows the playbook servers can use against him. They can trick him into swinging too hard when he is standing back, and then jam him with a serve at his body when he creeps close to the baseline to try and gain back some territory.
He spent much of the off-season experimenting with quick grip changes and improving his reactions, with the aim of being able to float balls back to the vicinity of the lines and his opponent’s feet. He knows how important it is for him to improve, rattling off his return statistics against the big servers he had faced while dropping four of five matches going back to late October.
That’s not exactly the kind of streak he wanted to ride into the year’s first Grand Slam. Shelton is something of an eternal optimist though. If he needs to manifest himself into a solid returner, he will.
“My return game is definitely evolving,” he said.
If he wants more deep Grand Slam runs, starting here in Australia, it better.
(Top photo: Shi Tang / Getty Images)
