Shelton was the first player of this year’s tournament to play on the iconic Arthur Ashe show court, taking just over two hours to wrap up victory.<\/p>\n
The former semi-finalist is in good form, having won his first ATP Masters 1000 title at the Canadian Open earlier this month. <\/p>\n
“The US Open is the pinnacle of tennis for me and what I dreamed about as a kid,” Shelton said.<\/p>\n
“It is starting to feel like home for me.”<\/p>\n
Shelton beat Fritz in the semi-finals on his way to the title in Toronto and the two could potentially face one another in the last four in New York.<\/p>\n
But Shelton, 22, remained cautious when asked if he could go far at this year’s tournament.<\/p>\n
“As soon as you start looking ahead of yourself you stumble over your own feet so for me it is one day at a time,” he said. <\/p>\n
“We are here for the long haul and I am looking forward to it.”<\/p>\n
Fritz, who lost out to world number one Jannik Sinner in last year’s final, has also performed well in recent months.<\/p>\n
He reached the semi-finals at Wimbledon and won grass-court titles at Eastbourne and Stuttgart, putting him in the sort of form that suggests he can go far at the year’s final Grand Slam.<\/p>\n
Fritz will face either Sebastian Beez or qualifier Lloyd Harris in the second round, whilst Shelton will take on Spain’s Pablo Carreno-Busta.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Shelton was the first player of this year’s tournament to play on the iconic Arthur Ashe show court,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":90644,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[101,118,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-90643","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}