Andrew Wevers/Getty Images
Andrew Wevers/Getty Images
Andrew Wevers/Getty Images
It’s not breaking news that four Americans will constitute the semifinal round of an ATP Tour clay-court tournament Saturday for the first time because eight of them had already made the same history by hogging all eight of the quarterfinal spots in the Fayez Sarofim & Co. U.S. Men’s Clay Court Championship on Friday.
And, yes, whenever the tournament ends — a bad weekend forecast is raising consternation regarding same — a U.S.-born player will finally claim a Tour title for the first time since Tommy Paul prevailed in Stockholm last October.
Here, of course, Paul is the top seed. Both he and the fourth-seeded Brandon Nakashima won with relative ease at the expense of the qualifier Colton Smith and Christopher Eubanks, while the comeback kid, Jenson Brooksby, making a strong case for being the tournament’s sentimental favorite, out-fought the marathon man, Aleksandar Kovacevic, who rarely wins or loses easily.
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In order, Paul took out Smith 6-1, 7-6 (1), Nakashima eliminated Eubanks 6-4, 6-4 and Brooksby rallied past Kovacevic 2-6, 6-3, 6-4 before the first real rainstorm of the tournament brought a sudden halt to the proceedings. Two hours later, after the precipitation stopped, the second-seeded Frances Tiafoe predictably claimed the last spot in the final four, grinding out a 7-5, 6-1 victory over the fifth-seeded Alex Michelsen that was harder than the score would indicate.
Tiafoe, who won the title in 2023, then lost to Ben Shelton in the finals a year ago, and his 20-year-old countryman traded breaks to start, but Tiafoe gradually asserted control, breaking for the first set with a deftly placed crosscourt volley after Michelsen had grittily saved two set points. Michelsen wasn’t yet conceding, however, fending off eight — eight — break points in the fourth game of the second set before yielding to the inevitable. Tiafoe countered with an easy hold, broke quickly in the next game and that was that.
Nakashima, a teenage phenom who hasn’t quite lived up to some very high expectations after he reached back-to-back ATP finals as a 19-year-old in 2019, is up to a career-high 31 in the rankings even if he loses to Tiafoe. He won their most recent meeting in Tokyo in 2024 after Tiafoe had beaten him in their first four meetings, all on hard courts.
Speaking of phenoms … Paul, like Tiafoe a River Oaks veteran, won his first match at River Oaks as an 18-year-old in 2016, but this is his inaugural Houston thrust beyond the second round. He’ll be the first to admit that he’s not the classic clay-court maestro, having experienced, in his words, a “love-hate” relationship with the stuff.
“It’s been a roller coaster for me,” Paul said. “I used to love it. Then I hated it. And now I’m starting to love it again. Feeling really comfortable. I thought my movement was way better today when it wasn’t raining on my match. The court was playing a lot better today. I was enjoying myself.”
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Except sometimes when he was serving.
“It always helps to make first serves,” he said, “and I didn’t do a great job of that today.”
Indeed, just 47% of his landed where they were supposed to Friday. But on those that did go in he almost always won and he prevailed 70% of the time on his second serves. He also saved all three of the break points he faced after breaking Smith’s serves three times in a lopsided first set.
Brooksby, the lowest-ranked player at 507 since at least the mid-1980s to even reach the quarterfinals in this tournament, is also through to his first semifinal on clay.
The now 27-year-old Paul had needed three sets to get past the tournament’s 2019 champion, Cristian Garín, in a slight drizzle Wednesday but made very short work of Smith, who, at 22, is another one of America’s most promising young stars seeking to end what’s now a 22-year-long championship drought in the four Grand Slams.
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The tiebreaker would be no contest with Paul acing Smith on the first point, then mercilessly rolling to a 6-0 lead.
“This was his first tournament on clay in I don’t know how long (five years, to be precise) so I was sure he wasn’t going to be that comfortable moving on the stuff,” Paul said. “My game plan was take the ball early — as much as you can on clay — and change directions a lot. I thought I did that well at the start of the match, but then he picked up his level and made it a little more difficult for me.”
As for Brooksby, who’s 24 going on at least 40, he found himself down a set and a break in his first qualifier at River Oaks Club last weekend, and he needed to fight off three match points in his second-round test against the third seed, Alejandro Tabilo. So, in his mind, there was no reason to panic when he found himself in a third-set bind against the 25-year-old Kovacevic in their quarterfinal, especially since he’d already bounced back from a first-set paddling, when he lost his serve three times.
Trailing 3-4 after Kovacevic’s break, Brooksby answered with a break of his own, recovered from a 15-30 deficit to hold, then broke again with a deftly executed drop-shot winner after Kovacevic had saved a pair of match points against his serve. The consummate survivor would survive again.
Brooksby, a Sacramento, Calif., native who now lives in Dallas, is himself no stranger to tournament final fours, having already played in nine of them. But all happened in what must feel now like a lifetime ago, before surgeries on both wrists followed by an eight-month suspension for three skipped drug tests had derailed his once-promising career.
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In June of 2022, the one-time aspiring Baylor Bear — he never enrolled after qualifying for 2019 U.S. Open main draw, then beating Tomáš Berdych in the first round — Brooksby was ranked 33rd in the world. However, between the 2023 and 2025 Australian Opens, he didn’t play a competitive match anywhere, which explains his freefall out of the top 500.
He’s now back in the mid-300s and two more wins, to go with the five he has already collected this week, would vault him to 175. Nonetheless, he’s not yet giving his ranking much thought.
“I don’t yet have numbers in mind,” Brooksby said. “As I keep climbing I think I’ll set some more specific (goals).”
Note that he didn’t say “if.”
Paul and Brooksby have already tangled on Texas soil in 2025. It was Paul who wriggled out of trouble, rallying for a 6-7 (6), 6-3, 6-4 victory in February on an indoor hardcourt in Dallas in route to the first of his three Tour titles in 2024. A second followed on grass at Queen’s Club in London pre-Wimbledon, as did the one in Stockholm.
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“I definitely could have won that match,” Brooksby recalled. “It was 50-50, a really tight match. He played really well. He earned it. But getting that close gave me a big boost. I’ll be ready for him.”
Paul had beaten him soundly, at least score-wise, in their previous two meetings, losing only 13 games over five sets at the Australian Open in 2023 after the Master Series 1000 stop in Cincinnati in 2022. But Paul made it clear he expects an all-out war in their semifinal.
“First of all, I’m happy to see him back,” he said. “He was out for a while struggling with injuries. He’s a great player and we’ll take every good player from the States we can get. He’s one of the people I really enjoy watching. We’ve had some good matches. The first two might have looked like beat-downs, but they were tight. That’s the way it always is with Brooksby. He digs himself into every match and makes it tough for everyone.
“That’s what I’m expecting. Hopefully he’ll be feeling his legs a little bit tomorrow. He’s had some hours on the court.”
All the while feeling lots of love from the Houston fans, which must know Brooksby’s compelling backstory by now.
“The crowd is really energetic and I’m getting more comfortable on the clay,” he said. “It’s nice to be back in Texas.”
He moved to Dallas in June of 2023 following the wrist operations because his agent, Amrit Narasimhan, lived there. He gives Narasimhan, a former high-school tennis standout himself at Clements High School in Sugar Land who once worked as a River Oaks pro, much credit for helping him negotiate his daunting setbacks with considerable emotional support.
“Just helping me on the path back,” Brooksby explained.
Following him out of the press room, Narasimhan turned and said, “Such a great kid.”
In doubles, the last American team standing, Robert Galloway and Jackson Withrow, bowed out in the final match of what turned into a very long day, going on the court after Tiafoe-Michelsen and concluding shortly before midnight with a 6-4, 6-2 victory by the Argentine Federico Agustin Gomez and Mexico’s Santiago González.
Gomez won the Clay Courts championship in 2019 playing with Aisam-Ul-Haq Qureshi, one of his 23 career ATP doubles titles. He’s also the same guy who seemingly had Brooksby on the ropes in that first-round singles qualifier last Saturday.
Before the rain delay, Brazil’s Fernando Romboli and Australia’s John-Patrick Smith had defeated the all-Aussie team of Matthew Christopher Romios and Adam Walton 7-6 (3), 6-3.
The doubles final will be the third match Saturday following the two singles semis with Paul-Nakashima kicking things off at 1 p.m., weather permitting.
