The Pulse Newsletter 📣 | This is The Athletic’s daily sports newsletter. Sign up here to receive The Pulse directly in your inbox.Good morning! There’s an NFL game in a few hours. Inside:
While You Were Sleeping: An American breakthroughMany times during the Carlos Alcaraz-Ben Shelton quarterfinal at the U.S. Open last night/this morning, we at Pulse HQ thought, “That will make the perfect GIF.” We landed on this one, which only barely fits in your inbox but captures the pure tennis flow state at hand:That sort of play spanned an unbelievable four and a half hours, in a match that didn’t start until after 11 p.m. local time. It’s worth a scroll back through our live blog to fully catch up on what our Matthew Futterman called a “heavyweight prize fight.”The 6-7(5), 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6(7) win is the biggest of the 23-year-old Shelton’s career, a truly massive breakthrough for the No. 8 seed at a tournament that’s shaping up pretty exquisitely for Americans in both draws.
Earlier in the day, on the men’s side, Frances Tiafoe came back from two sets down to shock his friend and countryman Alex Michelsen. The two had a proper moment afterward. Tiafoe will face Shelton in a can’t-miss Friday semifinal, guaranteeing an American man will reach the U.S. Open final.
