He knows what the past five years have been. A couple of near-miss moonshots on the biggest stages in tennis<\/a>, followed by disappointments and the motivational battles that he has been fighting with himself since he began his professional career.<\/p>\n If only he could figure out a way to keep his fire lit, the way the greatest seem to do. If only he could love the game the way they do, even when they hate it. Anything might be possible.<\/p>\n But then he would come up empty on the court. The week-in-week-out grind of the tour would wear on him, so much of it unfolding far from the bright lights of the big events he craves.<\/p>\n Then came last summer\u2019s U.S. Open<\/a>, the highlight of his year, the place where he shines the brightest. Other than a surprise run to the quarterfinals of the French Open, his year had been pretty uninspiring. New York would change all that.<\/p>\n Instead, Jan-Lennard Struff did. The 35-year-old German qualifier knocked Tiafoe off the court in straight sets. He played four more listless matches over the next five weeks and lost them all. There he was, back in a dark hole.<\/p>\n This time though, the people closest to him \u2014 his longtime girlfriend, Ayan Broomfield, and his two agents, Jill Smoller, who spent years working with Serena Williams, and Matt Fawcett, who also represents the almost-always motivated Taylor Fritz \u2014 decided to have a word with him.<\/p>\n Either do this or don\u2019t do this, they said but stop wasting our time \u2014 and yours.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one of those things where you\u2019re just not really even saying anything,\u201d Tiafoe said during a joint interview Friday ahead of the year\u2019s first Grand Slam. \u201cYou\u2019re just getting cooked and kind of got to take it and don\u2019t argue it. Don\u2019t try to fight it. That\u2019s kind of what it was.\u201d<\/p>\n And that\u2019s how he found himself practicing forehands on an empty Margaret Court Arena, after he had beaten Francisco Comesa\u00f1a of Argentina by cruising through two sets and recovering from dropping the third. That 6-4, 6-3, 4-6, 6-2 win took him to the third round of the Australian Open, and a tie with No. 6 seed Alex de Minaur.<\/p>\n By any measure, Tiafoe\u2019s journey from New York to Melbourne has not been peaceful, or anything like what he drew up last summer, after a surprise quarterfinal run at Roland Garros on the red clay he has little use for. At the same time, in retrospect it was entirely predictable, at least to him \u2014 and to anyone who had been following the comments he has made in recent years that have called his occasionally fleeting motivation into question.<\/p>\n There was the time when he said the only two tournaments he really cares about are the Citi Open in Washington, D.C., his hometown tournament, and the U.S. Open. Then the other Grand Slams, especially Wimbledon.<\/p>\n There was the time when he described the opponents who had been beating him through 2024 as \u201cclowns,\u201d suggesting that he would have won had his head been in it against compatriot Marcos Giron, Dominik Koepfer of Germany and Pedro Cachin of Argentina, to name a few.<\/p>\n Tiafoe is a two-time Grand Slam semifinalist who has twice pushed Carlos Alcaraz to five sets, which doesn\u2019t happen very often, and who has come alive at the highest level on several occasions. His best moments add fuel to the fire of questions about what is going on the rest of the year.<\/p>\n He turned 28 in January, and is now trying to hold off kids who are coming for his lunch money. He entered 2026 as the world No. 30, with four Americans ahead of him, all of them either younger or only a few months older.<\/p>\n
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