{"id":107584,"date":"2026-09-10T14:14:04","date_gmt":"2026-09-10T18:14:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/?p=107584"},"modified":"2026-09-10T14:14:04","modified_gmt":"2026-09-10T18:14:04","slug":"frances-tiafoe-tennis-center-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bgodinspired.com\/index.php\/bgodinspired-news\/bgodinspired-sports-news\/frances-tiafoe-tennis-center-father\/","title":{"rendered":"Frances Tiafoe Grew Up Sleeping in the Tennis Center His Father Cleaned"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>8 Minute, 40 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

On Tuesday in New York, Frances Tiafoe was two sets down and, by any sensible reading of the scoreboard, on his way out of the US Open.<\/p>\n\n

Then he wasn’t. He took the third set 7-5, the fourth 6-3, and won the fifth in a deciding tiebreak, 10-6. Final score against Alex Michelsen: 5-7, 3-6, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6.<\/p>\n\n

What he said afterwards was not what you usually hear from someone who has just clawed his way back from the edge. “He’s a helluva player,” Tiafoe said of the man he had just beaten. “He easily could’ve won today.”<\/p>\n\n

On Friday night he plays Ben Shelton for a place in the final. And if you only know Frances Tiafoe as the big smile and the bigger forehand, the most interesting thing about him happened long before any of this \u2014 in a small room with two massage tables in it, inside a tennis center in Maryland, where he slept most nights of the week as a boy.<\/p>\n\n

Where Frances Tiafoe Grew Up: Inside a Tennis Center<\/h2>\n\n

Tiafoe’s parents, Constant and Alphina, came to the United States from Sierra Leone in the 1990s, escaping a civil war. His father arrived first, in 1993. His mother followed in 1996. Frances and his twin brother, Franklin, were born in 1998.<\/p>\n\n

In 1999, his father found work as a day labourer on a construction crew. The job was building a tennis academy next to the University of Maryland campus in College Park \u2014 the Junior Tennis Champions Center. When the building was finished, the center kept him on as its custodian.<\/p>\n\n

And it gave him somewhere to sleep: a spare room in the building.<\/p>\n\n

“It was a pretty small room,” Tiafoe told Andscape<\/a> in 2019. “There were two massage tables in there, and my father slept on one and me and my brother were small enough to share the other.”<\/p>\n\n

Their mother worked night shifts as a nurse. So for about eleven years, the boys lived at the center with their father roughly five days a week, and stayed with her the rest of the time.<\/p>\n\n

“It’s what we had to do to survive,” Tiafoe said. “My parents were trying to make ends meet.”<\/p>\n\n

Think about what that means for a small child. The courts were not somewhere you got driven to on a Saturday. They were just outside the door of the room where you slept. The families paying for lessons went home at night. You didn’t. The place belonged to them \u2014 but you were the one who lived there.<\/p>\n\n