Stephen Chavez

For Frances Tiafoe, playing professional tennis was always the plan: “I’m the son of immigrant parents from Sierra Leone. When I was a kid, my dad got a construction job at College Park Tennis Club (home of the JTCC) in 1999, a new tennis academy in the D.C. area. When the construction was done, he remained at the facility as the maintenance man. While my dad worked, I picked up the game during nights and weekends at the facility when the other kids weren’t around. I’d hit against the wall by myself, mimicking techniques I had seen older boys at the academy do. I’d imagine I was playing against Rafa or Roger in the U.S. Open, that those guys were just on the other side of the wall. Some nights, my twin brother, Franklin, and I would even fall asleep on the massage tables at the club while my dad worked all night. Eventually, I was accepted into the academy, and the rest is history. But the whole story is actually a lot crazier than you think. Even after I got accepted into the clinics, I played with hand-me-down rackets and gear from my wealthier peers, or used demo rackets the club supplied. I like to tell everybody that I didn’t choose tennis, tennis chose me — that I was built to play this sport — but that didn’t make it any easier for me. When I told people that I wanted to grow up to be a tennis player, they laughed at me. My dad has always been supportive, but he was laughing, too. (‘If you want to do it, then do it!’ he’d tell me). My mom actively did not want me to play professionally. She and I fought about the decision for years, even after I turned pro and started making a little money — all she wanted for me and Franklin was for us to go to college, and I had earned my ticket anywhere I wanted to go. She had a hard time wrapping her head around that. On top of all of that, every kid I played with or against had more than me and would never have to worry about money or whether they’d be able to go to college. While turning pro had a lot of upside, for me, it could also have turned out to be a disaster. I realized early that I could either sit there and be sad about my situation — which I did, plenty of times, wishing I was one of the other kids — or use it as a way out. I look at it like this: Your parents are your parents. You came up how you came up. You can’t change that. What I could control though was how hard I worked. I knew I had an ability to help my family and my community in a way that my peers at the academy couldn’t. No matter what they ended up doing after tennis, they were going to be fine. For me, there was so much more at stake. Tennis was my way out.” playerstribu.ne/FTiafoe @FTiafoe | @usta | @atptour | @usopen