The most US Open?

From the daughters of billionaires to the son of immigrants.

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I love summer. I am obsessed with summer. And I refuse to believe that the season is over while the US Open is still going on. So I’ve been watching the tournament every night, clinging to the last bits of my favorite time of year. 

At first, things seemed dire for ESPN’s viewership the two most famous players on tour, Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic, both lost in the tournament’s early rounds. I could just see the TV executives pacing around, pulling at their hair, and sweating while chugging bottles of Powerade in a beige conference room in Bristol, Connecticut. 

But then, for the first time in over twenty years, two American women and two American men made it to the semi-finals (executives, rejoice!). Emma Navarro, Jessica Pegula, Frances Tiafoe, and Taylor Fritz have given us one more thing to be patriotic about in a summer that seems to have been filled with flag-waving. 

Let’s get this out of the way: all patriotism feels a little weird. Nations are not sports teams. Nations do very bad things, like war. And yet, when the Olympics were on, my name might as well have been Betsy Ross. After the games, the Democratic National Convention took over (because, let’s be honest, the DNC was sports). As embarrassing as this might be to admit, I particularly liked how the Dems are trying to take back chants of “USA, USA” and football in general. 

But the 2024 US Open feels even more “USA, USA” than Tim Walz hugging the former football players he coached to a state championship. 

Taylor Fritz, Emma Navarro, Frances Tiafoe, and Jessica Pegula

In fact, if you wanted to explain this country to an alien who just landed at Arthur Ashe stadium, these players’ biographies – Navarro, Pegula, Tiafoe, and Fritz — would be a good place to start. Theirs are stories of billionaires, of immigrants, of family businesses, and of not giving up.