At 18, Taylor Fritz has a huge serve and a new wife. Just dont call him a kid.

August 01, 2024

The world’s 67th-ranked tennis player has, in his own estimation, matured this year. He has refined his diet and started going to sleep earlier. He thinks he’s more able to handle the details of life on the road, that “in every aspect of my life I’ve really committed to being a pro and committed to doing all the right things.” He even got married this summer, and if you point out that Taylor Fritz is sure acting like an adult, he might interrupt.

“I am an adult,” Fritz said with a grin Tuesday evening at Rock Creek Park Tennis Center.

He’s also 18 years old.

That story Fritz sometimes tells, about streaming a Roger Federer-Juan Martin del Potro U.S. Open final while in elementary school? It happened less than seven years ago. His childhood friends from Southern California? They’re still getting ready for their first year at college. His tennis heroes when he was growing up — say, two years ago? He’s kind of reluctant to name them.

“I’m playing against them,” Fritz noted. “So it’s weird to say I look up to these guys, because I might have to play them. It is pretty crazy.”

Teenage phenoms aren’t unusual in this sport; Fritz will face 19-year old Alexander Zverev on Wednesday at the Citi Open, in a meeting of the world’s first and third-ranked teenagers. (Zverev, a 19-year old, is ranked 27th.) And Fritz oozes pedigree: mother Kathy May was a top 10 player and father Guy Fritz also played professionally. Taylor’s been playing the game his entire life; his profession isn’t a surprise.

The novelty is how quickly it all happened. Fritz was the world’s 1,148th-ranked player in early 2015. His audacious goal this year was to crack the top 100; he got there by late February. He made his first final that month in Memphis, the youngest American to do so in a quarter century. And he earned the headlines you’d expect: “Fritz on the fast track to stardom,” and “Taylor Fritz could be the next big thing,” and “Why Taylor Fritz is American men’s tennis’ best hope in the new generation.”

Such talk is new to him. Before the past eight or 10 months, he said, he had never been considered one of the best juniors, and he wasn’t supposed to be the next big thing. It’s all novel enough that he even still enjoys doing interviews; “ask me in a couple years,” he joked, with self-awareness that an 18-year old shouldn’t have. And his reaction to the first wave of Taylor Fritz Is Coming stories?

“I mean, it really makes you think, like, wow,” Fritz said, running his hand through his Bachelorette-worthy hair. “And you just can’t let that get to your head. I can’t think that just because people are saying it, it’s going to come true.”

If he needed a reminder, the past few months may have helped. He lost his Wimbledon debut, lost his French Open debut, and went 2-6 this season on clay and grass. The attention, he said, was reassuring in a way, hearing that people had high hopes for his career, and he’d like to make fans happy by leading a surge of talented American youngsters. But the topic is awkward for him, he said, because “I think U.S. tennis is perfectly fine the way it is.”

“I don’t really feel the pressure that’s put on me from all these other people saying the future of U.S. tennis, yadda yadda yadda,” he said. “I just want to be the best that I can be, and I’m focusing on my own career. It’s not too big of a burden, but it would be good if people could tone it down for the sake of all the U.S. players coming. Just let the guys develop.”

That development, though, will come in a celebrity fishbowl that demands the sort of maturity he talks about. Fritz’s peers now might be twice his age, and that’s not hyperbole. Tuesday afternoon, he bombed forehands across the net with fellow American teenager Frances Tiafoe, while on the adjoining practice court, 36-year old Frenchman Stephane Robert warmed up for his own match. He matter-of-factly describes turning pro as starting a job, something “that I know I’m going to have to basically live off of for the rest of my life.”

Even his recent marriage — to fellow tennis player Raquel Pedraza — feels like a part of that transition. Asked about the marriage, Fritz mentioned how many top pros have been in serious relationships since the earliest days of their career, and how traveling around the world together is quite a bit different “from where you just see someone in between classes at school or something like that.”

“I have a lot more responsibilities, I guess you could say,” Fritz said. “I have a lot more responsibilities than a lot of people my age.”

He also has a game that seems more mature than anything a teenager should possess. He’s 6-4, his serve explodes and he attacks the net whenever possible. This, he said, is by necessity, because “I’m a pretty big guy and I don’t move as well as a lot of other people, so I definitely need to take advantage of the points as soon as possible.”

But it all feels related to the rest of his life. He doesn’t seem old enough to be an adult, or to play like one. He doesn’t seem old enough already to have revised his 2016 goals. (Now he wants to break into the top 50.) He doesn’t seem old enough to talk about his non-tennis friends as if he’s entirely removed from their lifestyle.

“Of course, going to school and going to college would be a lot of fun,” he said. “But I would never trade what I have here for that.”

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