'People Are Always Watching Things You Do And Say': Shelton On Growing In Popularity
ATP
Ben Shelton's popularity on the ATP Tour is rising by the day, and the American is learning how to deal with that on the fly.
Popularity for an athlete is an excellent thing because it opens up opportunities to earn money outside of just hitting a tennis ball and entertaining tennis fans on the court.
Endorsements are very important for athletes because you have to be really good if you want to earn good money from tennis. Most of the time it goes in hand, and Shelton is staring at that kind of future.
He's already in the Top 20 thanks to a breakout at the US Open, and he's in the Shanghai Masters quarter-final following a superb win over Jannik Sinner.
It's only going to get better in the future, and he's learning on the fly how to deal with his ever-increasing popularity, not just all over the world, but also in the native United States.
Most important lesson? I think that there's a couple. I think that, you know, being out on tour as a tennis player, it's easy for you to think that the world revolves around you, but it doesn't.
For me, I think how I treat people every single day, around the site, and the people who work for the tournament, it really couldn't happen without them. I think that it's easy, just being in the situation myself and seeing it, it would be easy to take it for granted and think that, you know, you're a star or you're bigger than you really are.
Shelton's humbleness comes both from his upbringing and also his aspiration to emulate some of his role models - most notably Rafael Nadal, who is widely described as one of the humblest tennis players ever.
Another part for Shelton is just staying true to himself because he's just an ordinary person with a cannon of an arm and is pretty good at tennis.
I think that staying true to myself and treating people the right way day-in and day-out, no matter how I'm feeling, losing a match, winning a match, I think that's probably one of the biggest lessons that I've learned.
People are always watching the things that you do and say. Being a college kid a year and a half ago, that wasn't something that I expected or to be in that situation now. It's something that, you know, happened quite quickly and was kind of a shock to me.
