“I wanted to be a little bit different from anyone else,” Ben Shelton said recently in Madrid.
He was actually talking about his decision last year to sign a major deal with the small-but-growing Swiss shoe and apparel manufacturer On, rather than pursuing a certain American behemoth with a famous swoosh. (More on that in a bit.) The Floridian was in the early days of a three-month sojourn in Europe that will last as long as he does at Wimbledon, which ends in mid-July.
But Shelton, who is 21, could have been talking about anything to do with his budding tennis career, which has been the opposite of cookie-cutter.
Football (the American kind), in addition to tennis, until middle school? Different.
Regular high school rather than a tennis academy? Different.
Zero junior Grand Slam appearances? Different.
Major doses of collegiate exuberance: the “Yeah!” after big and small shots, the since-retired, hang-up-the-phone exclamation point on his wins? Different.
And now that the clay swing is here, Shelton is once more cutting against the grain, moving on to Rome and the Italian Open as he treats a third-round loss in Spain last week as just another step in tackling something that has beguiled most American men for a good long while.
That would be that red clay.
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The easy brutality of Shelton’s tennis, which carried him to the semi-finals of the U.S. Open last year, can be deceiving.
He can blast his serve at 150mph (241kph) and rocket forehands like few others, cutting points short at a breath or stealing momentum in a rally.
At first glance, that gives him the sort of stereotypical, big American game that won’t easily translate to the dirt. Other notable Yanks with those qualities have basically held their noses and endured these months of attritional-style tennis, counting the days until the grass and hard courts of summer.
Well, that’s not how Shelton rolls.
He spent the two weeks leading up to his departure for Spain at a hardcore clay-court boot camp.
“I worked on the things that I needed to: on the court, off the court, strength, fitness, moving,” he said. “
I just really honed in.”
Rather than enduring the soft stuff, Shelton is embracing it. This is something other American men have traditionally avoided, including
his own father and coach, Bryan, a touring pro in the 1980s and 1990s. He often swerved red clay other than the French Open, and the odd other tournament, for most of his career.
“I realized too late that my game was pretty well-suited to it,” he said after a practice session with his son last week. “I had this big kick-serve. I could push guys back. It opened up the court.”
He shook his head, still annoyed with his younger self, 30 years on.
His kid isn’t letting such assumptions take root. He’s taking a different approach.
Late last year, Shelton asked Gabriel Echevarria, a veteran trainer, to join his team full-time as a strength and conditioning coach. It was another off-beat but logical move for someone who is as strong as a lumberjack and can run like a deer but remains prone to being wrong-footed or taken off-balance.
Shelton wants to move on the dirt like the best of them (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
Echevarria, who spent the past dozen years working for the U.S. Tennis Association and Tennis Australia, is Argentinian. He has a reputation for possessing a special knowledge of what it takes to attain proper movement and balance in tennis — especially on clay, the most common tennis surface in Argentina.
The ideal candidate to lead a crash course.
The most common mistake for clay-court newbies, Echevarria said, is sliding after the shot, which wastes time, rather than sliding into the shot. Certain shots require fewer steps, or smaller ones, or an extra step.
“If we learn the skill, then we can develop the skill, but the first thing is to learn the proper way,” Echevarria explains. “Once you learn the proper way, the model pattern, then we can develop that skill.”
Shelton perceives Echevarria as a kind of clay whisperer, who has helped him to understand its idiosyncrasies. “The clay court is just a little bit different than the hard court,” Shelton says. “You can’t do the same things.”
So, before each day of training, not in Monte Carlo or Barcelona where tournaments were happening but back home in Florida, Echevarria and Shelton’s father would talk about what movement to focus on. Sometimes, it was learning how to run diagonally, which happens often on clay because of all the drop shots and slices. Other times, it was how to recover and shift from one shot to the next.
Then, Shelton would head onto the court to try out what he had just learned for two or three hours. After a break and some lunch, afternoons consisted of more time on the court if Bryan felt it was necessary, and/or up to 90 minutes in the gym. It was gruelling, and exposed Shelton to the need to attune himself to what he found under his feet.
“Every clay court is just a little bit different,” he says.
Shelton’s serve allows him to dominate, even on the slower surface (Julian Finney/Getty Images)
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