Taylor Fritz is back in a big ATP tennis final, with only the best of the best left to beat

TURIN, Italy — After nearly 74 matches in 11 months of traipsing across the globe, Taylor Fritz has reached the point where there aren’t all that many players left for him to beat.

Six days after dispatching an irate Daniil Medvedev, the world No. 5. Fritz beat world No. 2 Alexander Zverev 6-3, 3-6, 7-6(3) to become the first American in 18 years to make the championship match of the ATP Tour Finals. Fritz spent most of the final set scrambling out of trouble, then cranked up his serve and rode a series of clean and efficient groundstrokes to take the tiebreak, finishing Zverev off with a whipping inside-out forehand.

After keeping a lid on his emotions for nearly two-and-a half hours, Fritz, pumped his arms and let out a “come on!” that broke over the roars of more than 12,000 spectators at the Inalpi Arena. As he did at the U.S. Open this summer, Fritz has reached a plateau no American man has seen since George W. Bush’s presidency. In September, he became the first American man to make the U.S. Open final since Andy Roddick in 2006 and the first American man to make any Grand Slam final since Roddick’s Wimbledon heartbreak against Roger Federer in 2009.

Now Fritz has become the first American to make the championship game of the ATP Tour Finals in 18 years, when Roger Federer made short work of James Blake.

“I have believed that I belong, that I’m one of the best players,” he said in a news conference. “It’s not results-based. It’s more I can feel how I’m playing.”

There are American men with flashier games. There are American men with larger profiles on social media, who light up stadiums and Instagram feeds more than Fritz does. Fritz wins a lot more tennis matches.

He made the quarterfinals or better at three Grand Slams this year. That, along with titles in Delray Beach, Fla. and Eastbourne in the U.K., as well as semifinal runs in Madrid and Shanghai, got him his second invitation to the Tour Finals in three years, and a second consecutive appearance in the tournament’s final four.

No surprise there. The slick court and breezeless air of indoor tennis play into his strengths. Fritz likes taking big cuts at the ball. Get rid of the sun and wind, and take away bad bounces, and he is free to close his eyes and rip whenever he gets the chance.

He also had the right opponent.

Fritz has now beaten Zverev in four consecutive matches. Three of them — at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and here — have been as tight as a clinched fist, decided on just a handful of points and a break of serve here and there. Tennis is a sport of matchups and Zverev, just like Fritz, has been running out of players to beat lately. He knocked Carlos Alcaraz out of this tournament on Friday. He nevertheless has something of a Fritz problem, according to both him and the underlying tennis numbers, which also chart a scenario in which Fritz manages to play better against Zverev than he does against the rest of the ATP Tour.

On a scale of 1 to 10 devised by TennisViz and Tennis Data Innovations, Zverev’s return of serve has averaged 7.5 out of 10 throughout the season when evaluated according to speed, spin, depth and width. Against Fritz, Zverev’s return rating drops to 6.2. That’s no condemnation: Fritz has one of the best serves in the men’s game, especially on an indoor hard court.

Fritz also earns a 7.5 rating for his returns throughout the season, but against Zverev he has averaged 7.8. More importantly in this humdinger battle of serve and return, for which Fritz spent 35 minutes of 50 practicing yesterday, Fritz is 8-2 up in their last 10 tiebreaks.

“He’s very competitive,” coach Michael Russell said in an interview in Turin on Friday.

“He wants the racket in his hand in those big moments. He likes them.”

On Saturday, Fritz won the return battle once more, with an 8.8 rating compared with 8.2 for Zverev. He also was able to dig in for the backhand-to-backhand baseline battles that Zverev uses to wear opponents down, while leveraging his more aggressive and more confident forehand when he needed it.

Zverev spent most of the match looking like he had done enough, even after dropping the first set. He seized the initiative to draw even and at 2-2 in the third set, with Fritz struggling to hit the ball through the court as he had at the beginning, Zverev looked like he was heading in for the kill. A missed backhand and forehand from Fritz had given Zverev three break points.

Fritz grabbed two back of with big serves, before pushing in to the front of the court — not his favorite zone — to put a ball away to get to deuce. Then he got the good fortune of two rare missed backhands from Zverev, who hits that groundstroke as well as anyone in the sport. He held on and then took advantage of a familiar looseness to the German in the tightest moments, winning the third-set tiebreak at a relative canter compared to everything that had gone before.

Taylor Fritz has beaten Alexander Zverev four times in a row (Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

Fritz also had the comfort of his serve most of the afternoon, landing nearly seven out of 10 and winning 82 percent of the points when he did. When the crucial moments arrived, especially facing those break points, he told himself to play aggressive rather than safe, to try to blitz Zverev when he might not be expecting it.

When it was over, Zverev didn’t run from the irony of being one of the few players who has been able to get the best of Alcaraz while struggling to solve the riddle of Fritz. He’d actually chatted this week with Alcaraz about how the opposite opponents trouble them.

Alcaraz is plenty comfortable against Fritz and Medvedev, but can struggle with big hitters. Zverev isn’t bothered by the pace of Alacaraz or Jannik Sinner, but Medvedev and Fritz make for some long, juddering afternoons.

“He has a lot bigger serve,” Zverev said of Fritz, pointing to the staccato points that prevent him from building rhythm. Fritz also had an extra day of rest while Zverev spent yesterday afternoon tangling with Alcaraz for two hours in an emotional, high-level duel. Zverev said he had felt like a “jumping ball” on Friday. On Saturday, in both his warm-up and early in the match, he said he felt empty. His movements felt unnatural. Fritz, as usual, kept him from finding his flow.

Still, he had his chances in third set, when he seemed like the better player for long stretches, and didn’t take advantage of them.

“I did everything, to an extent, maybe better than him, except to win in the important moments, the break points, the tiebreak,” he said in his news conference.

“That’s how you lose a match.”

GO DEEPER

The crowd of Turin: Jannik Sinner’s sea of green, white, red and orange

The trick for Fritz now, if it can even be called that, will be finding a balance between aggression and execution against the best of the best. There’s no mystery about which players make Fritz uncomfortable. He’s 0-12 combined against Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic and 1-3 against Sinner, Italy’s tennis hero, who he hasn’t beaten in three years.

He will face him again on Sunday in front of the Italian throngs with their red wigs and their chants, after Sinner beat Casper Ruud 6-1, 6-2.

“I really believe the match in the group stage was closer than you might think by just looking at the score,” he said. 6-4, 6-4 is pretty close. He needs closer.

(Top photo: Shi Tang / Getty Images)