No sound was as sweet as the roar in Ashe for American semifinalists

NEW YORK—The four American women who will play in the semifinals at the US Open on Thursday agree on one thing: This tournament has been a lovefest for them, and they might not be where they are without some timely—and deafening—help from the fans at Flushing Meadows.

Venus Williams, Sloane Stephens, Madison Keys and Coco Vandeweghe have each come from a break down in the final set of a match in Arthur Ashe Stadium, and have each credited the crowd with helping them pull through.

“Thank you guys so much. I felt every single one of you behind me,” Sloane Stephens said after her third-set-tiebreaker win over Anastasija Sevastova in the quarterfinals.

A few hours later, Stephens was echoed by Williams when she won her own quarterfinal over Petra Kvitova in a third-set tiebreaker. "I have to say, I felt every single one of you guys behind me, all 23,000," Williams said. "I didn't want to let you guys down."

“You guys were amazing,” Keys said after reeling off four straight games to beat Elina Svitolina in the fourth round. “Thank you for helping me through that one.”

“It’s hard to beat a New York crowd when they’re for you,” said Vandeweghe, a native daughter of the city, after the fans in Ashe carried her past Agniezska Radwanska, a player who has traditionally been a nemesis for her.

Suddenly it’s all happening in U.S. women’s tennis.

For a few years now, the country has had quantity, but not (the highest) quality. As of this spring, 14 women in the Top 100 were from the U.S., by far the most of any country. But for the better part of a decade, only the now-35-year-old Serena Williams was a regular member of the Top 10, and a regular in the later rounds at majors.

Now that’s changing, too. Venus, 37, has turned back the clock and reached two major finals in 2017, and the next generation is finally making its move. Keys, 22, Vandeweghe, 25, and Stephens, 24, have now reached their second Grand Slam semifinals. Young and old, the women are gutting out the tight matches that we’ve become accustomed to seeing them lose. The crowds are helping it happen, and eating it up when it does.

It wouldn’t normally be worth noting that an audience in a certain country is rooting vociferously for athletes from the same country. But it hasn’t always been the case in cosmopolitan, contrarian New York City. In the 1977 men’s Open final, Jimmy Connors was cast as the villain, and Guillermo Vilas of Argentina was the player who was carried around the court when the match was over. In 2013, a Louis Armstrong audience chanted for Gael Monfils of France, rather than John Isner of North Carolina, in their second-round match. And Roger Federer always had at least half of the crowd on his side in his matches with Andy Roddick there.

Just ask Venus Williams, who has never taken the fans’ backing in New York for granted. The reaction to the rise of the Williams sisters at the Open in the late ’90s was a tense and ambivalent one, with strong reactions in all directions. Some saw their brilliant games and competitive grit and thought they were the best thing that could happen to the staid old sport of tennis. Others saw them as brash and standoffish, and thought their father, Richard, was a loose cannon who fixed their matches.

After her debut at the 1997 Open, Sports Illustrated made the racial subtext of the story obvious by putting Venus on the cover under the headline “Party Crasher.” Four years later, little had changed. When Venus beat crowd favorite Jennifer Capriati in the semifinals in 2001, tension ran as high as it ever has in Ashe.

It would take another 11 years, in fact, for Venus to feel entirely at home at her home Grand Slam.

After losing to Angelique Kerber at the Open in 2012, she said of the raucous crowd in Ashe, “There were a lot of people shouting out. I know this is not proper tennis etiquette, but this is the first time that I’ve ever played here that the crowd was behind me like that. Today I felt American, you know, for the first time at the US Open. So I’ve waited my whole career to have this moment, and here it is.”

Five years later, Venus probably still doesn’t take anything for granted at the Open. But she can say with a confident smile that she feels “every single one” of the 23,000 people in Ashe behind her. Twenty years after her “party crashing” debut, Venus can also look around with pride at what she has helped create.

Not much has been made of the fact that three of the four women’s Open semifinalists are African American. A 4-year-old Keys was inspired to pick up a racquet (a racquetball racquet, but close enough) after seeing Venus on TV playing in a dress she liked. While Stephens has more frequently cited Kim Clijsters as her favorite player growing up, she has also said that the Williams sisters were motivators for her. And Naomi Osaka, a Japanese-American player who had a successful US Open, and whose father is Haitian, idolizes Serena. I’ve never seen a more multicultural crowd at Flushing Meadows than the one that came out for Osaka’s third-round defeat this year.

Maybe the fact that we don’t have to talk about any of these players being black, or refer to them as party crashers, is a sign of progress in tennis—the Williams sisters blazed a path to Ashe Stadium for them.

Some say that stadium is too noisy these days, but there has been no greater pleasure at the Open this year than hearing the roar of the crowd in Ashe for these four American—and three African American—women. Let’s give them a deafening hand.