![]() “Your big toe’s sticking out of the hole of your shoes - you need a new pair!” “ What’s with that same Pikachu shirt you wear every day?” Some of those kids, looking like a million bucks in their designer gear, teased Tiafoe. He was the son of a tennis center custodian, wearing hand-me-downs while the kids in his orbit arrived at the JTCC in chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces. ![]() Tiafoe, the son of immigrants from the African nation of Sierra Leone, was the poor kid who fell in love with a rich man’s sport. ![]() Then he’d go to the back wall of the facility and mimic everything he saw. “But he’d watch the top players, and the coaches who were working with them, and was always completely focused. “You’d see him sitting on the bench, but he was so small his feet didn’t even touch the ground,” recalled Vesa Ponkka, a founder of the JTCC who currently serves as the senior director of tennis. While literally growing up at the Junior Tennis Champions Center (JTCC) in suburban Washington, D.C., he paced the grounds of the 15-acre indoor/outdoor tennis complex, racquet in hand, until he found the best competition.Īt 6 years old, he was too young to take those opponents on. Frances Tiafoe was always in search of a good game.
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