NEW YORK — Donald Young wanted to play one more tennis tournament before retiring to focus on professional pickleball.
And so Young, a former youth prodigy in singles who now is 35, asked his longtime friend and fellow Atlantan Taylor Townsend to join him in the mixed-doubles draw at the U.S. Open. Young’s mother and father ran a tennis center in Atlanta, and they coached Townsend into the sport. It was Donald Young Sr. who convinced Townsend, who first played tennis right-handed, to switch to her left hand.
After receiving a wild card to play at the Open, Young and Townsend came close to fashioning a storybook ending before losing to the No. 3 team of Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori of Italy, 7-6(0), 7-5, in the mixed-doubles final Friday at Arthur Ashe Stadium. The winners will take home $200,000 as a team, while the runners-up receive $100,000.
“I just want to say this isn’t the trophy that we wanted, but at the end of the day, I’m the only black woman left in the tournament, and there are two black men left in the draw,” Taylor said on court.
“Ultimately, I hope Donald and I standing here today” along with Frances Tiafoe being in the men’s semifinals and Coco Gauff winning in 2023 “just shows people that look like us that it’s possible.”
Of Young, she added: “He’s been in my life for forever, and I was able to be with him when he won Junior Wimbledon, and seeing someone do this at a high level, it inspired me, and I honestly don’t know if I’d be standing here today if it wasn’t for him and his family.”
Young had hoped to sail off into retirement with his first Grand Slam trophy, but will have to settle for second place.
“We came a step short, but it’s a dream come true for me to play with Taylor; she’s like a little sister,” Young said on court. “To play next to her in the finals of the U.S. Open is great.
The first set went to a tiebreak, but the Italians could do no wrong, dominating at the net and from the baseline to win it without surrendering a point.
Young’s lack of match play over the past 12 months may have caught up with him. His most recent singles match came last September at a Challenger event in Charleston. His last doubles event was 14 months ago in Chicago.
In the second set, Taylor was broken for 1-3 when she sailed a volley long. The Americans got the break back and trailed 4-3.
With Townsend serving to stay in the match at 5-6 in the second, she fell behind 0-40 before saving two match points. But on the third, she netted a backhand, and it was over. Townsend and Young hugged and then shook hands with their opponents.
Townsend, 28, also reached the women’s doubles semifinals with partner Katerina Siniakova. The No. 3 seeds lost Wednesday in three sets to the unseeded team of Kristina Mladenovic and Zhang Shuai, who will play for the title Friday. Townsend and Siniakova won the Wimbledon women’s doubles championship earlier this year.
Townsend has had a career resurgence after returning to the Tour following the birth of her son in 2021. She now is back inside the WTA Top 50 in singles and is a top-10-ranked doubles player.
Young had been 0-2 in doubles finals in his career, including at the 2017 French Open, and 0-2 in singles finals. The former prodigy, who was the No. 1-ranked junior in the world at the age of 15, reached a career-best singles ranking of No. 38 in 2012.
In an interview with the New York Post, Young talked about never living up to the hype he received early in his career.
“Maybe just the pressure of it because leading up to that point, it was all really fun,” he said. “I was a kid, I was winning, I loved to win, I was playing against my peers. Then I was jumped, put into a place where I was playing 25-year-olds, and people my (current) age. And there’s no way that — if I was looking at it in reverse — I was going to let someone 14, 15 beat me.
“Hindsight is 20/20, (but) it could’ve been done a lot different. But on the other hand, that means I was doing something exceptional at the time that people thought it was a possibility. … So that’s cool that you started and (can) hopefully help some other people have a better route to go, or way to go about it.”
Once the hope for the future of American men’s tennis, Young has watched as a group of new American stars has ascended at this Open. Five men are ranked inside the top 20 for the first time since 1996, and two of them — No. 12 Taylor Fritz and No. 20 Tiafoe — will play in an all-American singles semifinal Friday. One of them will play for the men’s championship Sunday against either No. 1 Jannik Sinner of Italy or No. 25 Jack Draper of Great Britain.
It is the first all-American semifinal at a major since Andre Agassi defeated Robby Ginepri at the 2006 U.S. Open. An American man hasn’t played in a major singles final since Andy Roddick at Wimbledon in 2009, and no American man has won a Slam since Roddick at the U.S. Open.
Young said he was trying to help the younger generation of Americans avoid the mistakes he made.
His advice?
“Keep your head down, keep listening to the people that have really got you there,” he told the Post. “There are a lot of people who want to sidetrack (you). You’ve got to stay focused with your head down. There are going to be ups and downs. You’ve got to ride the waves when you have them and just really be a professional because one day you’re going to wake up and you’re 30, and you’re going to have regrets if you don’t do it right.
“Do whatever you can because at the end of the day when you stop, you want to (know), ‘I tried this, I tried that, I did everything I could,’ and you can sleep at night.”
Young can now sleep at night knowing he ended his career with an appearance in a Grand Slam final alongside his close friend.
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