After that, when Tiafoe noticed NBA star LeBron James had tweeted about him, he "lost it in the locker room."
Tiafoe muttered, "Bro, I was going insane." However, Tiafoe's victory over No. 2 seed Nadal in the fourth round at Flushing Meadows was most meaningful to him since he could see his parents, Constant and Alphina, from his guest box in Arthur Ashe Stadium.
To see them witness me defeat Rafa Nadal? They have witnessed my significant victories, but to defeat those Mount Rushmore men? stated American tennis player Tiafoe, 24, who is seeded 22nd in the US Open. "I have no idea what was going through their minds, to be honest. They'll remember today for the rest of their lives, after all."
During the country's civil strife in the 1990s, his parents fled Sierra Leone for the United States. They eventually settled in Maryland, where Constant worked on building a youth tennis training facility before taking on maintenance duties there. According to Tiafoe, Alphina was a nurse who "worked two jobs, overtime through the nights." When Tiafoe and his twin brother Franklin were born in 1998, they spent a lot of time with rackets near Dad's workplace.
The hope was that one day it would result in receiving a scholarship for college. In the hours following by far his biggest triumph, Frances Tiafoe said, "It wasn't anything planned to be like this."
Since Andy Roddick in 2006, he is the youngest American man to advance this far in the US Open; yet, this was not a case of a biassed crowd supporting one of its own. Nadal is as well-liked as it gets in the world of tennis, and he received a lot of cheers when the retractable roof was closed in the fourth set.