Stephens reaches her 1st Slam final
NEW YORK — Sloane Stephens has reached her first Grand Slam final.
She edged No. 9-seeded Venus Williams 6-1, 0-6, 7-5 in the first of two allAmerican semifinals.
Stephens will play for the championship against the winner of Thursday’s late match pitting No. 15seeded Madison Keys against No. 20 CoCo Vandeweghe.
The third set was tense tennis after two lopsided ones, with Stephens continuously running down balls to win long rallies.
Williams was trying for her third major final of the year and her first at the U.S. Open since 2002.
Stephens became just the fourth unseeded player to reach the U.S. Open women’s final in the Open era, which began in 1968, and the first since Roberta Vinci in 2015.
On the men’s side, if Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer had managed to meet in the U.S. Open men’s semifinals, it would have felt as if the trophy were at stake right then and there.
As it is, the No. 1-seeded Nadal’s matchup in the final four Friday against 24th-seeded Juan Martin del Potro, who defeated Federer on Wednesday, will carry that same weight.
That’s because while Nadal owns 15 Grand Slam titles, including two in New York, and del Potro won the 2009 U.S. Open, the semifinal on the other side of the bracket this time involves a pair of new faces: 12thseeded Pablo Carreno Busta of Spain against 28thseeded Kevin Anderson of South Africa.
Neither had ever been this far at a major. They took advantage of all of the injury absences, most notably Novak Djokovic, Stan Wawrinka and Andy Murray, but also Grand Slam runners-up Milos Raonic and Kei Nishikori.
“We are so accustomed to it — a decade, same guys being there,” said the 31year-old Anderson, who won the 2006 NCAA doubles title for the University of Illinois and is making his semifinal debut in his 34th appearance at a major. “A couple of them unable to play this year gave some of the guys an opportunity to go deep into the tournament.”