US men at the US Open actually have a chance to make history after wild start to tournament

There’s a great scene in The West Wing in which President Bartlett calls his chief of staff Leo McGarry “the Charlie Brown of missile defense” because he keeps thinking they’ll figure out the missile defense system but it keeps failing. It’s a reference to Charlie Brown repeatedly thinking he’ll kick the football as Lucy holds it, only to have it pulled away each time as he goes flying in horrified embarrassment. Well … I’m the Charlie Brown of American men’s tennis.

I have written tomes about the US men’s tennis Grand Slam drought, now going on 24 years, but however long it extends it won’t change how old I was for the last one, when Andy Roddick won the 2003 US Open: I was seven months old.

But I never stop believing, and the 2026 US Open is the latest in a streak of “no, for real this time, THIS is our chance” tournaments in which things are breaking shockingly well for the Americans. Being Charlie Brown, I will inevitably be disappointed; but with the how the draw looks right now? Like … come on.

It’s not a slam dunk, but I cannot tell you the last time two of the top four betting favorites to win the US Open were Americans after just a round and change. Taylor Fritz (+750) and Ben Shelton (+900) trail the leaders Carlos Alcaraz and Alexander Zverev, and not even by much. With both Jannik Sinner out with injury and Novak Djokovic already eliminated, the home court advantage and the relatively chill draw look positively tantalizing. 

It’s not just those two. Frances Tiafoe and Tommy Paul represent real, ranked threats, and Learner Tien and Alex Michelson are upstart challengers with serious potential. These guys are a tight-knit group, too, and ESPN ran a segment during their night session on Wednesday about how Tiafoe, Fritz, and fellow American Reilly Opelka were at Tommy Paul’s wedding with some hilarious clips of them hitting each other with tennis balls. These are the kind of positive vibes we need if we’re going to break the curse.

American men aren’t necessarily favored versus the field, far from it, but there’s a lot of time for Zverev and Alcaraz’s tournaments to go awry, particularly for the Spaniard who hasn’t played a major since Australia. This really must be a team effort — keep throwing guys at the castle wall until we manage to break in.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention New Jersey native Michael Zheng, the 22-year-old American who recently made the third round of Wimbledon and won his first-round match here. Also, shoutout to my friend Tom whose New Jersey high school tennis team played against Michael Zheng years ago, I believe their number one took a game off him before getting 6-0’d in the second set. 

Alcaraz is definitely the main issue, as none of these guys (really … no one anywhere) have a good track record against him. But I will continue to think we can kick the football until we do; We Americans are born on the hardcourt, whether you’re a prodigy at a prestigious academy, Michael Zheng in New Jersey or me on my local concrete courts playing with my friend Max last week. We are an army of Charlie Browns, and I’ve had it up to here with all these European Lucys constantly winning. Home crowd, home courts. If the drought is going to end, it’s going to end at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens.