Ben Shelton shook off a rough opening set and still moved on. The No. 8 seed won his U.S. Open first-round match in three straight sets after dropping the first 1-6, and now he is set to face Hubert Hurkacz in the second round.
The timing matters because Shelton is back in the U.S. Open spotlight again, where his run has often ended before the week gets deep. He reached the semifinals in 2023, but he was bounced in the third round in each of the last two years, a slide that has made every early-round match feel bigger than the ranking next to his name. He is among the top five in the odds to win the title, which says how much faith remains in his hard-court serving and how much room there still is for him to prove it.
That is what makes this next match interesting. Hurkacz needed four sets to advance, and he has a clear pattern here: he has reached the second round in seven of his eight U.S. Open appearances, but he has never made it past it at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. The two have never played before, so the matchup starts without a history to lean on and with Shelton carrying the stronger current form.
Even so, Shelton has not exactly arrived in New York as a clean favorite with nothing to answer for. He was bounced in the third round of the U.S. Open last year, and his Grand Slam results have been uneven since that 2023 semifinal. He did reach the quarterfinals of the 2026 Australian Open, but the rest of his recent major results have not matched the promise of a player who can serve his way through pressure and then still has to finish the point.
For Shelton, the next step is simple to name and hard to take. He has already survived one scare, and now he gets a second-round opponent who usually gets this far at the U.S. Open but has not found a way beyond it. If Shelton handles that test, the next stage of this tournament starts looking a lot more like the kind of run his ranking suggests he should make.
