Alexander Zverev hit a return long, watched it sail past Ben Shelton, and turned back toward the baseline to play the next point. There wasn’t one. He had just won the US Open, and for a few seconds he didn’t know it. Only when his eyes found the scoreboard did the moment register — arms up, a run to the net, a long hug with the man he’d just beaten in four sets. He later admitted he thought the third set had finished 5-1, not 6-2. That’s what six years of waiting does. It stops you from trusting the ending even when it’s right in front of you.
Six years earlier, on the same court, waiting had been the whole problem. Zverev led Dominic Thiem by two sets in the 2020 final, served for the match, and lost it 7-6 in the fifth — the first man in 71 years to blow a two-set lead in a major final. That collapse followed him through a Roland Garros final loss to Carlos Alcaraz in 2024 and a beating from Jannik Sinner in the 2025 Australian Open final. Three finals, three losses, and a growing sense — his own, as much as anyone’s — that the trophy might never come.
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It came at Roland Garros in June. Then Zverev reached the Wimbledon final and lost to Sinner in four sets. Then, on Sunday, he beat Shelton 6-3, 7-6(2), 5-7, 6-2 to win his second Grand Slam title in three months. The number that matters here isn’t two. It’s four — as in, Zverev is only the fourth man in the Open Era to win his first two major titles in the same season, joining Jannik Sinner, Guillermo Vilas and Jimmy Connors. That is not a participation stat. That is a company he now keeps whether the debate is comfortable with it or not.
Alexander Zverev is the fourth man in the Open Era to win his first two Grand Slam titles in the same season, joining Jannik Sinner, Guillermo Vilas and Jimmy Connors.
Here is the case, laid out plainly: two Grand Slam titles. Two ATP Finals championships, 2018 and 2021. Olympic gold in Tokyo in 2021. Seven ATP Masters 1000 titles. A 25-2 record at majors in 2026 alone — the most match wins by any player at Grand Slam level this season. Zverev is 29 years old, and for most of his career the majors were the one line on the résumé that stayed blank. It isn’t blank anymore, and everything else on the list was already Hall of Fame-calibre before Sunday even started.
Zverev finished his 2026 Grand Slam season 25-2 — the most match wins by any player at major level this year.
None of that made Sunday’s final simple. Shelton broke serve chances aside, Zverev took control early, breaking in the opening game when Shelton double-faulted under pressure, and closing out the first set 6-3. The second set turned on a tiebreak that had nothing subtle about it — Zverev won it 7-2, opening with a service winner down the T and closing it out without dropping a point on his own serve. Two sets up, the match looked over.
It wasn’t. Shelton lifted his intensity, broke for 5-3 in the third and closed it out 7-5, the only set he’d take all match — but the loudest twenty minutes of his tournament. Arthur Ashe, packed and mostly his, believed for a stretch that the twenty-three-year-old might actually do this: become the first American man to win a Grand Slam singles title since Andy Roddick in 2003. Zverev’s response was immediate and, in its way, the most telling passage of the whole final — an instant break to open the fourth set, a second break for 5-2, and a match sealed on a 137mph service winner down the T. Whatever door Shelton had opened in the third set, Zverev shut it inside four games.
Zverev’s route to the final was not the coronation the scoreline suggests. He opened the tournament with back-to-back five-set matches — surviving Lorenzo Sonego from two points of defeat in the fourth set, then grinding past Quentin Halys in another five-setter — before finding a straighter path through Alejandro Tabilo, Luciano Darderi and Botic van de Zandschulp. His semi-final against Karen Khachanov needed two tiebreaks, the second of them a 34-stroke rally that decided the set outright. That’s a man who spent the tournament being tested, not coasting through a soft draw toward a second major.
Shelton’s road there, and the shape of his loss, matters just as much to how this final should be read. He beat defending champion Carlos Alcaraz in the quarter-finals in five sets that finished at 3:33am — the latest finish in US Open history — then came from a set down to beat fellow American Frances Tiafoe in the semi-final. That is two of the hardest matches anyone played in New York, back to back, and it is difficult not to wonder how much of the third-set fight was Shelton finding another gear and how much was simply what was left in the tank after nineteen-plus hours of tennis across the fortnight. Shelton will rise to a career-high No. 4 in the world regardless. The 23-year drought he was chasing to end remains exactly that.
Ben Shelton is the first African American man to reach the US Open final since Arthur Ashe in 1972, and the wait for an American men’s major champion now stretches to 23 years since Andy Roddick in 2003.
There’s a version of this tournament that never happens without a strange, unpredictable draw around both finalists. Novak Djokovic went out in the first round to world No. 49 Mariano Navone, blowing a two-sets-to-one lead and losing eleven of the final twelve games — his 77-match first-round winning streak at majors gone in an evening he later attributed to back, shoulder and stomach trouble. Alcaraz, back from a four-and-a-half-month wrist injury, played the tournament’s best match against Shelton and still lost it. None of that takes anything away from what Zverev did. If anything, it sharpens the point: the draw opened, and he was the only man left standing capable of taking full advantage of it, twice, at two different majors this year.
The dry fact underneath the sentiment is this — Zverev has still won nothing outside the two majors in 2026. No Masters title, no ATP 500. Just the two biggest trophies in the sport, back to back, at 29, after six years of major finals that ended the other way. Federer never managed that. Neither did Murray. It’s an odd little gap on an otherwise stacked résumé, and it’s the kind of detail that will get mentioned in every profile written about this season for years.
He is currently leading the race to the ATP Finals in Turin and could finish the year ranked above Sinner if results elsewhere go his way over the closing months. That would be a separate story, decided on hard courts in Asia and Europe rather than in New York. What Sunday settled is narrower and more permanent: two Grand Slam titles are now on the record, sitting alongside two ATP Finals championships, Olympic gold and seven Masters 1000 trophies. Add a rivalry-defining head-to-head — Zverev had never lost to Shelton in five previous meetings before Sunday, and that record now stands at six — and the résumé reads less like a case still being built and more like one already filed. Whether he does or doesn’t add Turin to it, the Hall of Fame conversation isn’t waiting on it anymore.
He still had no idea the match was over when it ended. By the time he did, the whole point of six years of near-misses had already answered itself.
FAQ
How many Grand Slam titles has Alexander Zverev won? Alexander Zverev has won two Grand Slam titles — Roland Garros in June 2026 and the US Open in September 2026. Before this season, he had reached three previous major finals (2020 US Open, 2024 French Open, 2025 Australian Open) without winning any of them.
What was the score of the 2026 US Open men’s final? Alexander Zverev beat Ben Shelton 6-3, 7-6(2), 5-7, 6-2 in the 2026 US Open final at Arthur Ashe Stadium. It was Zverev’s second Grand Slam title of the season, following his win at Roland Garros in June.
How old is Alexander Zverev? Alexander Zverev is 29 years old. He reached his first Grand Slam final at the 2020 US Open and did not win a major title until Roland Garros in June 2026, six years and three lost finals later.
When did an American man last win the US Open? An American man last won the US Open singles title in 2003, when Andy Roddick lifted the trophy at Flushing Meadows. Ben Shelton’s run to the 2026 final kept that 23-year wait alive after his four-set loss to Alexander Zverev.
By Akos | Tennis Analyst, Sportspherearena
