If he doesn’t like big crowds, he does a bang-up job of galvanizing them. He plays with an admixture of ease and intensity, smiling, joking, grimacing, his emotions an open secret upon his face. He went viral for a spontaneous gesture during a breakout match against Frances Tiafoe at the US Open two years ago: After nailing down match point, Shelton turned to his box and pantomimed a kind of jubilant, ecstatic phone-hang-up move. And when Djokovic then beat Shelton in straight sets in the next match, he seemed to mock Shelton by imitating the same move.
After the sting of the loss faded, Shelton was besieged by flirty DMs: “They’d be like, ‘Oh yeah? Are you going to hang up the phone on me too?’ ” (For the record, Shelton isn’t dating anyone at the moment: “I have enough responsibilities on my plate right now,” he says. “I’m just trying to figure out me.”)
At that night’s sold-out exhibition, both Shelton and Alcaraz walk out to raucous applause from the crowd. The atmosphere is loose, fun. When Shelton’s first serve to Alcaraz goes wide, he makes a supplicating gesture toward the line judge, punctuated by a “C’mon, bro….” Shelton’s smirking, the crowd is chuckling. We’re veering toward slapstick territory.
Then Shelton steps to the baseline to serve again. He tosses the ball in the air, corkscrews his lower body, and the rest, frankly, is a bit of a blur: The ball makes a cracking sound upon impact, travels at something in the realm of 150 mph, catches the corner of the serve box, and ricochets off the court and into the crowd behind Alcaraz. A kind of shocked hush of Oooooohs and a smattering of Oh nos from the crowd—did Shelton’s serve just injure a spectator? A few beats later and it seems that the answer is no—nothing requiring medical attention, at least. But let’s just say: The mood inside the Garden has changed.
