US tennis star Ben Shelton doesn’t want to ‘put a ceiling’ on what he can achieve
CNN
About this time last year, Ben Shelton was an up-and-coming tennis player taking his first-ever trip outside the United States.
About this time last year, Ben Shelton was an up-and-coming tennis player taking his first-ever trip outside the United States. Not long out of college, Shelton was relatively unknown on the circuit having only been pro for the past six months. But armed with a lethal serve and the fearlessness of youth, things were about to change – fast. “I feel like it went from nobody knowing me to a lot of people knowing me kind of overnight,” Shelton tells CNN Sport. “It felt really quick.” Skip ahead 12 months and the 21-year-old American is in Australia preparing to play in his sixth grand slam and second at Melbourne Park. At this point in his young career, Shelton’s results have been excellent: he reached the quarterfinals of last year’s Australian Open and went a step further at the US Open, eventually losing to Novak Djokovic in a fiery semifinal. Several weeks after that, he won his first ATP Tour title in Japan. It figures, then, that Shelton enters his second full season as a professional tennis player with weighty expectations.