Taylor Fritz, Torchbearer

Never flickering, Taylor Fritz shone like no LAMP before him.

MELBOURNE, Australia — As American women led by Serena Williams continued filling up trophy cases during my first decade covering the tour, the lopsidedness became so glaring that I thought the men should get some sort of consolation prize. If not a trophy, perhaps at least something practical to put on an end table?

Infamously, eighty-three majors have now come and gone since the last men’s singles title won by an American man, Andy Roddick at the 2003 U.S. Open.

American women, meanwhile, took home the women’s singles trophy at twenty-three of those eighty-three tournaments, and made many more finals in that time as well.

But the American men usually were clearing out far before their final, frequently more than a week before. At the 2013 U.S. Open, things seemed to reach a nadir: the last American left flying the flag in the men’s singles draw was improbably 109th-ranked Tim Smyczek.¹

“I’d never heard somebody yell out from the stands, ‘You’re our last hope!’” Smyczek said after losing in five sets to Marcel Granollers. “That was new.”

Smyczek’s loss made it the first time that no American man reached the Last 16 of America’s top tennis tournament since it began in 1881, but the low point also proved inspiring for me. Instead of waiting for a title contender, I began tracking what American man was left turning the lights off as the last of the pack to leave. I gave this last ray of hope the illuminating acronym LAMP: Last American Man Playing.

A lamp I found on eBay.

That someone like Tim Smyczek could have earned an indelible spot on a list that included the likes of McEnroe, Sampras, Agassi, and Connors many times over made the LAMP concept a fun novelty, and I kept tracking it for years to come.

There was an element of luck to being LAMP, for sure. A lot of it depended on who got easier draws at a given tournament; for those who reached the same round, the LAMP was sometimes determined by the whims of the schedule, simply down to whose match was earlier on the order of play. At the 2017 Australian Open, Sam Querrey claimed LAMP by outlasting Jack Sock by just a few minutes as they dimmed to near parallel defeat.

As I kept updating the LAMP list, more unlikely names joined Smyczek, including Denis Kudla at Wimbledon 2015 and Christopher Eubanks at Wimbledon 2023.

Then, last year, Taylor Fritz took the LAMP to unprecedented wattage: as part of a breakthrough season that saw him break a 15-year drought of American men in major finals, Fritz was the LAMP at all four majors: A LAMP Slam.

After realizing Fritz’s feat, I went looking back before my time to figure out the last time the same American man had been the last standing at all four majors in a year.

What I found shocked me.

[To read the rest of this post, and more of what Americans like Coco Gauff, Reilly Opelka, and Frances Tiafoe think of Taylor Fritz’s place atop American tennis—and what Fritz himself thinks of what he’s done—please subscribe to Bounces!]