Tiafoe realises

Frances Tiafoe’s vision was blurry from the tears. He was thrilled – overwhelmed, even – when the last point was over and it hit him that, yes, he had ended Rafael Nadal’s 22-match grand slam winning streak in New York yesterday and reached the US Open quarterfinals for the first time.

‘‘I felt like the world stopped,’’ Tiafoe said. ‘‘I couldn’t hear anything for a minute.’’

Then Tiafoe found himself ‘‘losing it in the locker room’’ when he saw that NBA superstar Lebron James gave him a Twitter shoutout.

‘‘Bro,’’ Tiafoe said, ‘‘I was going crazy.’’

What meant the most to Tiafoe about his 6-4 4-6 6-4 6-3 victory over 22-time major champion Nadal in the fourth round at Flushing Meadows, though, was looking up in his Arthur Ashe Stadium guest box and knowing his parents, Constant and Alphina, were there.

‘‘To see them experience me beat Rafa Nadal – they’ve seen me have big wins, but to beat those ‘Mount Rushmore’ guys? For them, I can’t imagine what was going through their heads,’’ said Tiafoe, a 24-year-old American seeded 22nd. ‘‘I mean, they’re going to remember today for the rest of their lives.’’

His parents both emigrated to the United States from Sierra Leone in West Africa amid its civil war in the 1990s. They ended up in Maryland, where Constant helped construct a tennis training centre for juniors, then became a maintenance man there; Alphina, Frances said, was ‘‘a nurse, working two jobs, working overtime through the nights.’’ Frances and his twin brother, Franklin, were born in 1998, and soon would be spending hour upon hour where Dad’s job was, rackets in hand.

Maybe one day, went the dream, a college scholarship would come of it.

‘‘It wasn’t anything supposed to be like this,’’ Tiafoe said after by far his biggest victory.

He is the youngest American man to get this far at the US Open since Andy Roddick in 2006, but this was not a case of a one-sided crowd backing one of its own. Nadal is about as popular as it gets in tennis and heard plenty of