The sound off the racquet of Ben Shelton’s flat serve is a thwack cranked to eleven. Late Monday morning, out on a small field court at the hushed southern edge of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, it resounded. None of Shelton’s serves, in the first hours of this year’s U.S. Open, quite matched the missile that he fired in March at Taylor Fritz, at Indian Wells: a hundred and forty-seven miles per hour, the fastest serve recorded on the men’s tour this year. But he did hit a hundred-and-forty-two-mile-per-hour ace up the T, and any number of his first serves exceeded a hundred and thirty miles per hour. He secured his hold on the first game of the second set with a second serve of a hundred and thirty-four miles per hour, which his opponent, Pedro Cachin, couldn’t return. The rise of bleachers alongside the court was packed, and the oohs and wows accompanying each of Shelton’s blasts—even his faults—created a steady murmur of astonishment.
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