Harris vs Tsitsipas goes on Wednesday 2 September at Flushing Meadows, and the two men walking onto that court got there from opposite ends of the draw sheet. Court and start time have not been released yet — the order of play usually drops on Tuesday evening in New York.
Lloyd Harris took the hard road. Three qualifying wins, then American wildcard Jack Kennedy beaten 6-4, 6-2, 6-2 on Sunday in an hour and 43 minutes, as AFP had it. Four matches in eight days for the 29-year-old from Cape Town.
None of them lasted longer than they had to. That matters more than the scorelines do.
At 6’4″, the serve is the architecture of Harris’s game, and it has been holding up all week. A straight-sets opener also means he arrives in the second round with legs — the rarest currency a qualifier carries into week one.
Stefanos Tsitsipas came the other way. Unseeded at the US Open for the first time in his career, the former world No. 3 pulled 10th seed Arthur Fils in the first round, which is the kind of draw that ends a tournament before it starts.
Fils had won Cincinnati eight days earlier. He also led the head-to-head 5-0. Then he won the first set 6-4 and lost the match anyway.
Tsitsipas came back to take it 4-6, 7-6(3), 6-1, 6-4 in two hours and 54 minutes on Louis Armstrong, striking 50 winners across the four sets by the ATP Tour’s count. The third set went in 20-odd minutes of one-way traffic. Whatever had been missing from his year, it was not missing on Monday night.
The gap between Harris and Tsitsipas on paper
This is a first Grand Slam meeting between them, which is its own small surprise given how long both have been on tour.
The résumé column is lopsided. Tsitsipas has two Grand Slam finals, a Nitto ATP Finals title, and the one-handed backhand that still draws a crowd to a practice court. Harris has one Grand Slam quarter-final and a career-high of world No. 31 that now sits four years behind him.
But the pattern that has kept Harris relevant at this tournament is the one nobody schedules around. In 2021 he beat Karen Khachanov, Ernesto Escobedo, Denis Shapovalov and Reilly Opelka in the same fortnight before Alexander Zverev ended it in the quarter-final.
Big servers, hard court, New York night sessions. He has done this here before, and he did it against better-ranked men than himself every round.
The read on Wednesday is straightforward enough. If Harris holds serve at the rate he has held it all week, this becomes a match about who blinks first in a tiebreak. If he does not, Tsitsipas has just proved he can grind through a bad opening set and come out the other side without panicking.
“Harris has spent four years being told the 2021 run was the ceiling. Wednesday is where he gets to argue!” – 🎙️Jay
What Wednesday is worth
The winner of Harris vs Tsitsipas moves into the same section as 15th seed Alexander Bublik and Adrian Mannarino, with one of those two the likely third-round assignment. A third-round place is worth $290,000.
For Tsitsipas, that is a route back into the second week of a major he has never won. For Harris, it would be the deepest he has been at a Grand Slam since the 2021 run, and it would come after starting the fortnight in qualifying — three matches before the main draw even opened.
South African interest in the men’s singles rests entirely on him. That is the whole story of the Lloyd Harris US Open campaign so far, and it survives at least until Wednesday night.
Court and start time to follow once the order of play lands.
Photo by Tennis SA
