Cincy Diary: Coco Gauff’s US Open climb gets steeper, and a shell-shocked Ben Shelton hits a wall

MASON, Ohio—On Thursday, I wrote about the daytime summer vibe at the Cincinnati Open: The spectators fanning their faces, the roller-coasters rising and falling at the nearby amusement park, the cars barreling by on the highway, on their way, hopefully, to August vacations.

On Friday, that summer feeling came at night. During the Coco Gauff-Jasmine Paolini quarterfinal, a series of slow-paced pops could be heard coming from the other side of Route 71. Pop…pop…pop. Boom…boom…boom. Soon, lights materialized, and burst into shapes and colors. They were Friday night fireworks—nothing spectacular, the kind you see and hear across the country on summer evenings. Gauff and Paolini didn’t stop playing, and the crowd, perhaps knowing what was coming, didn’t ooh and aah. But the showers of light quietly made the scene more festive, like a pleasantly muggy small-town fair.

While the atmosphere was all-American, it wasn’t a cheerful night for the home fans. Two of their most popular players, Ben Shelton and Coco Gauff, took hard defeats. Here’s a look at how those matches, and Carlos Alcaraz’s earlier win, played out on the stadium court.

“I’m just really happy to be able to live these kinds of experiences”

Andrey Rublev looked ready and revved from the start. He has hit something of a ceiling in 2025, where he’s no longer going deeper at the majors or higher in the rankings. In fact, he’s out of the Top 10 for the first time since 2019. At Wimbledon last month, he lost in four fairly tough sets to Carlos Alcaraz. On Friday, he seemed like he really wanted a breakthrough against a player of the Spaniard’s standing.

Early on, that energy came out as it often does for the Russian—in a fit of rage, this time directed at chair umpire Mohamed Lahyani, about the serve clock. By the second set, though, Rublev had channeled his fury into his shots, and from there he went toe to toe with Alcaraz the rest of the way.

The level was uneven from both, but the intensity matched the heat in the air. The moment I’ll remember most was Rublev giving it absolutely everything, red hair flying and blue eyes wide, to track down an Alcaraz lob and loft back one of his own, over his shoulder. It landed just wide, but the effort, in that weather, was off the charts.

Both hit 27 winners and nearly won the same number of points. Down a set, Rublev came back to win the second. Down 3-5 in the third, he broke to stay alive. Down 5-6, he played a perfect serve-forehand combination to reach 40-30, one point from a tiebreaker.

And then, out of nowhere, he fell apart. He lost the last three points, and double faulted on the final one.

“Today I maintain the positive thoughts,” Alcaraz said. “Lost focus a few times, but I stayed there, strong mentally, and that’s what I’m most proud about.”

“I’m playing a third set accepting that it’s going to be a tough battle, and I love that,” he continued. “It was extreme conditions, but I’m just really happy to be able to live these kinds of experiences.”

“This is a tough watch in so many ways”

That was how a British commentator described the first match of the night session, the quarterfinal between Alexander Zverev and Ben Shelton. It was hard, unfortunately, to disagree. Each player was having his own personal physical meltdown at the same time.

On one side of the court, Zverev called out the doctor to tell him that he was sweating more than he ever had, couldn’t breathe, and was dizzy between each point. After the doctor checked his vitals and gave him a new inhaler, Zverev seemed to recover.

On the other side of the net, though, there was no recovery for Shelton. The American, who was on a nine-match win streak and had gone deep at three straight tournaments, finally hit a wall. He was a step slow from the start, which was enough, eventually, to cause his strokes to go completely awry.

The pro-Ben crowd tried whatever they could think of to rally him, but nothing worked. His shots only sailed farther beyond the lines. By the end, a shell-shocked Shelton had slammed his racquet to the court, pounded it against his bag, and taken off his shirt and thrown that to the ground, too. This time, maybe for the first time, when Ben turned to his dad and coach, Bryan, he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“It’s so much better when you get the serve in the court”

These were the words that I thought I heard come from Coco Gauff, as she failed to make another serve in her quarterfinal with Jasmine Paolini, and watched her early lead continue to erode. By the time the match was over, the lead was long gone, the double faults had mounted to 16, and her forehand errors had climbed toward 50.

As I wrote on Thursday, Gauff, after bottoming out on grass, is trying to rebuild for hard courts, and specifically for the US Open. Some days, it looks like the 2023 champ will make it in time, that it’s only a matter of getting in enough reps for her to steady her serve and get her confidence on her forehand back.

Other days, like today, it looks like a very steep climb ahead. This was a match that, when she has been winning, Gauff might have pulled out on fight alone. And she fought hard and well enough to make the third set competitive. But by then Paolini was clearly the superior ball-striker, and this time no amount of scrap and hustle from Coco was going to change that.

The big Cincy crowd, who stayed until the bitter end, grew quieter with each passing game and Gauff error. The fireworks were all on the other side of the highway.