Eleven Tien and Alex Michelsen’s Australian Open is a milestone for American men’s tennis

MELBOURNE, Australia – Over seven hours on Friday afternoon, the Australian Open turned into an American tennis farm.

It was almost impossible to watch a singles match without seeing a red, white and blue flag on the scoreboard as two early twenty-somethings and a teenager who looks even younger than his 19 years rumbled through the men’s draw and into the second week .

Did anyone have two Orange County boys, Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen, go in the Round of 16?

They didn’t.

“I was down a set and a break in the first round of qualifiers,” said Tien, the teenager in the group, after he dusted Corentin Moutet of France in three sets. “To now be in the second week feels a little crazy,” he added.

Michelsen had got there first and postponed no. 19 seed Karen Khachanov in three sets.

US women’s wins put all of that on hold, with Emma Navarro coming through for the second week in her third straight three-set win to start the day. Madison Keys got there to end the night, beating friend, compatriot and Australian crowd favorite Danielle Collins.

All that was a little less surprising. Keys and Navarro have been there before, as has Coco Gauff. Tommy Paul’s best Grand Slam result came in Australia when he reached the semi-finals in 2022 and he joined Gauff, Keys and Navarro with a routine win over Roberto Carballes Baena the previous day. Paul and Gauff then kept the American mojo going even more, winning their fourth-round matches over Alexander Davidovich Fokina and Belinda Bencic.

Tien, 19, and Michelsen, 20, who will try to keep the mood alive on Monday in Melbourne, are on a rise that is the opposite of that. Michelsen has some past form: he reached the third round in Melbourne last year, and he’s won a couple of first-round matches at the US Open in the last two years – but not like this, knocking out two top-20 players of three matches.

Tien, a two-time national junior champion, had played two Grand Slam main draw matches before this week, a four-set loss to Arthur Fils at the 2024 US Open and a three-set loss to Tiafoe the year before. Third time was the charm. He beat Camilo Ugo Carabelli of Argentina in five sets

Then the draw gave him two matches against the arch-antagonists of the ATP Tour, less a baptism of fire than a mind-boggling tour of twisting shots, seductive spins and the dark art of tennis with the big boys. Tien took on fifth seed Daniil Medvedev in five sets and nearly five hours in a match that ended not long before dawn. Then came Moutet, who at two sets reminded Tien that he still needed to win a third, which Moutet played like it was swollen from a hip injury at some points while crawling across the court at full speed at others. Interesting times for a Grand Slam rookie.

“I didn’t really know what was going on with him,” Tien said at his press conference, still with one foot in the washing machine.

Add Ben Shelton’s four-set win over Lorenzo Musetti, the Italian who had beaten him twice out of two, and a remarkable statistic emerges: This is the first Grand Slam since 1993 to feature three American men under 23 in the second week. Tien and Michelsen are also the first pair of American men aged 20 or younger to reach the third round at a Grand Slam since the 2003 US Open, when Andy Roddick and Robby Ginepri, Michelsen’s coach, did so.

It was the USA’s two most recent major finalists, Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula, who found the fourth round a bridge too far. Gael Monfils produced a flawless four set to knock out Fritz; Olga Danilovic produced two of the same to shut out Pegula.

Yeah, it’s a little weird. But that might be to explain.

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In mid-November, Michelsen and Tien were beaten up. The two close friends, who play Fortnite together in their spare time and have trained at the same Orange County tennis academy for the past four years, had just finished long seasons. They had the usual menu of sore joints from hitting too many balls for too long.

They did not boot up the console.

“They basically put the racquets down for two weeks and went to work,” Rodney Marshall, the Southern California tennis fitness guru who has worked with Michelsen for the past year, said during an interview from Los Angeles on Saturday.

Everyone calls Marshall ‘Rocket’. He is one of the experts in sports torture that American tennis players have trusted to make them faster and stronger and more durable for 15 years.

Marshall, Michelsen and Tien worked together twice a day, six days a week at the academy in California, where they have trained together for the past four years — and on the sand at Aliso Beach, California.

They only had a small window and they had to figure out what kind of incremental gains they could make. They wanted to gain strength in their lower bodies and fine-tune their movements so they could get in and out of track corners faster – an essential skill these days.

Tien, who had missed three months during the first half of the year with a cracked rib, needed some more leverage from his left leg – his back leg on a forehand – to maximize the power he could unleash from his 5ft 11in (180cm) frame. Michelsen, who is 6ft 5in, needed to get better at lowering his center of gravity and finding power from a squatting position.

Life became an endless series of isometrics and plyometrics. The isometrics (holding positions for long stretches) strengthen muscles and tendons; plyometrics (jumping) builds explosiveness.

On Saturdays they went to the beach – to do sprints. Marshall brought an American football and sent them on passing routes across the sand, with one acting as a wide receiver and the other as a cornerback.

“It was almost like they were cramming,” he said of Tien and Michelsen. “They really embraced the suffering.” If that line sounds familiar, it’s for good reason: four-time Grand Slam champion Carlos Alcaraz, 21, credited finding “joy in suffering” for his French Open title last June.

Soon Tien got a little more spirited as he hit a tennis ball down the line. Michelsen was doing a contortion on the ground and told Marshall he could stay there all day. “I love it down here,” he shouted.

“It’s a constant battle every day,” Michelsen said in an interview after his third-round win over Khachanov, his second win over a seed in six days.

“I look at Marin Cilic. He was 6-6 and he was always so short. I’ve tried to replicate that.”

On the other side of the country, in Florida, Paul went through his own fitness block with Fritz before the latter headed to Southern California to train tennis. Frances Tiafoe, Reilly Opelka, Jacob Fearnley and several other professionals were with Paul in Florida.

“A good group,” said Paul, who often talks NFL and NBA with Michelsen in the locker room. “He’s a crazy good competitor,” he said of Michelsen.

Paul said during an interview Friday that he is determined to play games on his terms in 2025. He wants to move other people around this season and not be the one being moved around so much. It always seemed to happen last year when he ran into Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. His fast front foot tennis could hurt them for a while. He won a set from Alcaraz at Wimbledon and went up 4-1 over Sinner at the US Open. But then they would force him behind the baseline and out of the competition.

“Carlos moves incredibly well when he has to, but if you watch him when he’s playing his best tennis, he dictates,” Paul said.

Shelton was in Orlando doing his own thing. He was trying to figure out how to go from being a below-average returner to someone who can get free points on his serve while preventing others from getting free points on theirs.

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From Friday before dawn, when Tien beat Medvedev in a match that ended at 2:56 a.m. until Saturday at sunset, when Shelton beat Musetti in a fourth-set tiebreaker, the 23-and-under trio proved the practice was worth it.

Tien returned to his hotel after 04.00. He ate cold, stale pizza and fell asleep only just before 10am. 7. He slept until about 1.30pm before heading back to Melbourne Park where he basically hit tennis balls. stand still for 45 minutes and endure massage and physiotherapy for five hours.

He had died in his sleep by 11 p.m. “It was needed,” he said.

He then filleted Moutet and did to the French what Moutet had done to so many others over the years, minus the dark arts of delay and distraction.

“Unbelievable effort from him today,” Tien’s coach, Eric Diaz, wrote in a text message. “Body wasn’t feeling well. Impressive mental rebound too.”

Shelton also had some rebounding to do. He had seen his two losses against no. 16 seed Musetti again and again, reliving the Italian rolling a series of backhand passing shots down the line. Tied at 5-5 in a fourth-set tiebreak, Shelton hit a terrible drop shot that set up Musetti’s fearsome running backhand. The point looked lost, but Shelton knew what to expect. He covered the line, volleyed into the open court and served out the match.

He had spent the afternoon keeping an eye on the other matches, especially Michelsen.

“Me and Alex are boys,” Shelton said at his press conference.

“I’ve written to him and told him he’s a dog after every fight he’s won because it’s true. He’s a dog. He’ll be towards the top of the game very soon.”

As Shelton looked on, Michelsen effectively sealed his victory over Khachanov with three huge points in the second set tiebreak. All had roots in the offseason training block. He won the first with a curved 108 mph second serve, a product of leg strength and jump. He took the second after sprinting to a ball outside the fairways and whipping a forehand down the line. He won the third with his bread and butter, a powerful backhand down the line – with a little extra pop from all those medicine ball throws with Marshall and Tien.

As for Tien, Shelton can see a kindred spirit in his fellow left-hander, despite their diametrically opposed styles. Tenen’s game is about changing pace, flowing balls deep to the backcourt and then suddenly attacking. His tennis is nothing like Shelton’s frontal attack, but Tien breaks through here, out of nowhere, two years after Shelton did on the same courts.

“Not a bad place to have a breakthrough,” Shelton said. “On top of all the guys that are already at the top in the U.S., we’re coming up a lot more. It’s really starting to show.”

Indeed it is. The trout farm, much easier to create in a wealthy country of more than 300 million people, does what it needs to do. There were 33 Americans across the singles draws, more players than any other country. As the tournament moves into the quarterfinals, there are already two with safe harbor and potentially four more on the way.

Now comes the hard part: breaking the tie at the finish line, as Gauff did in New York 16 months ago. It does not require a trout farm. It takes a unicorn – and there are no farms capable of producing them.

(Top photo: Peter Staples / ATP Tour)