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Samford's winning big with Bucky Ball. Don't leave home without it

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Samford's winning big with Bucky Ball. Don't leave home without it

HOMEWOOD, Ala. — The house Bucky McMillan grew up in, the one in the Birmingham suburbs where a new owner discovered 18 waterlogged basketballs buried beneath years of leaves in a ditch where they’d collected after running off the driveway, is only three miles from his office at Samford University. The Shades Valley YMCA, where McMillan played his first organized basketball, is less than half a mile away. Mountain Brook High School, where McMillan starred as a player and then built the Spartans into a national prep power as head coach, is six miles away. Birmingham-Southern College, where McMillan walked on, earned a starting job and helped the program transition from NAIA to Division I, is eight miles away.

From Samford, where he’s won three straight Southern Conference Coach of the Year awards and the last two regular-season league titles and has already become the most accomplished coach in school history after just four years, McMillan can be at the scene of almost every important moment from his 40 years of life in 15 minutes or less. His story is as rare as it is remarkable: He’s achieved a lifetime’s worth of success by middle age, without ever really leaving home.

“It’s so fun, because you get to see the happiness of all those who were with you along the way,” McMillan says. “Everybody gets to share in it. It becomes like a hobby for people around here, like a bunch of old friends got together and said, ‘Hey, let’s do something really cool. Let’s make Samford a top-25 team.’”

The strangest thing about McMillan’s story is that seemingly no one involved ever stopped to ask: Is this actually going to work? Not when he became his high school alma mater’s junior varsity coach at 22 or when he became its varsity coach at 24 or when he landed a Division I head-coaching job at 36 without ever having worked in college. People just kept putting him in charge and trusting that he would win, because he always has.

McMillan won a Dizzy Dean World Series as an all-star shortstop in fourth grade, led Mountain Brook to its first state semifinal as an all-state point guard in high school, coached a top-10 AAU team while he was still in college, coached Mountain Brook to seven state championship games and five state titles in eight years, then jumped straight to D1 two years later and introduced a whole new audience to his frenetic style of play: Bucky Ball. He’s won 20-plus games the last three seasons, and this year’s Bulldogs have the best record in program history (26-5). They’re hoping to earn their first NCAA Tournament bid in 24 years by winning the SoCon tournament, which begins Friday.

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“It’s a great story and a great hire,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl says. “Those of us in this state knew what a brilliant coach and program developer he was, so it’s absolutely no shock what he’s done, but kudos to Samford for respecting somebody who was right there in the community and having the courage to hire a high school coach.”

A bigger program will inevitably try to lure away McMillan for more money and the promise of a bigger stage, sooner than later. It would be an easy sell to most people in that position, and there might ultimately be an offer McMillan just can’t refuse. The way he sees it, though, he can still get anywhere from right here.

“I knew at an early age that if you want to excel at something, you’ve really got to be all-consumed on that mission to do it, that people who have their hands in a million different jars aren’t as good as someone with a singular focus,” McMillan says. “You’ve got to consider where you want to live, where your roots are and who you want to do this with. If you build your brand in one place, your network grows exponentially, and when you have a grassroots movement that is building something with the right people in the right place, it can become something so special it gains national attention.

“You can make the thing most people feel like they have to go somewhere else to get.”


That sort of dream, to turn a private Baptist school with 6,000 students into the Gonzaga of the South, would require considerable resources. And here come the resources, sauntering over to speak to McMillan after a recent practice.

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Gary Cooney is a multimillionaire insurance broker who played on one of Samford’s all-time great football teams in the 1970s. His last name is on buildings all over campus, including the football fieldhouse and Cooney Hall, which houses the business school and opened in 2015 thanks largely to a $12.5 million gift from its namesake. Cooney has known McMillan since he was a baby, coached him in youth baseball and shared a beer with him the day he buried his son, McMillan’s childhood friend.

So when Samford was looking for a new coach in 2020, coming off nine losing seasons in the previous 11 years, even though athletic director Martin Newton had already locked in on McMillan as his top choice, Cooney left nothing to chance. “If you hire him, I’ll give you a solid six-figure gift to get it started,” he told the school’s administration. “Because this one is personal to me.”

Cooney looks and talks like Buddy Garrity, the caricature of an overzealous booster on “Friday Night Lights,” the high school football drama in which the slogan — Texas Forever — could be tweaked for McMillan. In Cooney’s eyes, Bucky Ball belongs in Birmingham. Now and always. When talk of another program poaching him arises, Cooney, who this season offered the school another “six-figure bounty” to help McMillan set the all-time attendance record, bristles.

“Shame on us,” he says, “if we don’t figure out how to retain one of the brightest talents in the country, who is one of us. We have an incredible opportunity here, and so does Bucky, because this is where he wants to be. This is where he grew up. It’s where his family and his friends are. It’s where his high school buddies are in the stands every game and their children now come to his basketball camps. It’s where he can go down to Otey’s Tavern after a big win and celebrate with people he’s known his entire life.

“Tell me that’s not kind of a dream come true. It’s Mayberry on steroids.”

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So what exactly is Bucky Ball?

It’s a full-court-pressing, breakneck-running, 3-point-shooting blur of activity. “Play fast, play defense and give it 100 percent or get the hell out,” says Bucky McMillan Sr., the coach’s father. “That’s Bucky Ball, and you can’t beat it.” (Bucky is a nickname that has stuck to both generations, even though their given names are Henry Ward McMillan, the II and III. Bucky works better for slogans, his father says.)

Samford ranks fifth nationally in both offensive pace and 3-point percentage, sixth in turnovers forced. The Bulldogs play 10 guys at least 13 minutes per game and nobody more than 25 minutes, as McMillan overwhelms opponents with fresh legs churning at maximum effort. Everybody on the roster can shoot it, too. Eleven players have made more than 10 3-pointers; seven are shooting better than 40 percent from deep.

“In one word, I would just say fun,” McMillan says of his system. “You want to find the most fun way to win, because recruits want to play this way and fans want to watch it.”


Samford averages 86.9 points per game loves to push the pace with players like Rylan Jones. (John Byrum/ AP)

Alabama coach Nate Oats, who swears by a similar 3s-and-layups offensive style that has brought him two SEC championships, sees a lot of himself in McMillan. Oats was a high school coach who became a Division I head coach after just two years as a college assistant. What impresses him most is that, while anyone could decide to play with pace, space and fire away, “you can tell Bucky is a really sharp guy who understands the why and, more importantly, how to get the best shots within that approach.”

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It’s hardly surprising to learn that McMillan grew up idolizing Rick Pitino. He figures he’s watched every game Pitino coached at Louisville, plus all the footage he could find of Pitino’s time at Kentucky. Every year, he shows his team the Mardi Gras Miracle, when Pitino’s Wildcats erased a 31-point deficit with 15:34 to play at LSU. That team attempted 37 3-pointers and made 15 … in 1994, which was a highly unusual approach to basketball in those days.

“He was just so innovative,” McMillan says, “and the thing that I’ve always loved about Pitino is he was his own guy. He wasn’t afraid to try things just because they were unconventional. He was one of the first coaches to let his teams shoot a bunch of 3s and press the whole game.”

McMillan is equally unafraid to coach his way. He figures some of that conviction is simply a product of his atypical path. Almost every head coach spends at least a little time cutting his teeth as an assistant, somewhere along the way. Having never worked for anyone else, though, the buck has always stopped with Bucky. He started his career with low enough stakes, coaching youth basketball while he was still in high school, that he could experiment with style until he was certain of what worked and what didn’t.

“Most people get their first head-coaching job and suddenly they’re in front of 10,000 people having never called a timeout,” McMillan says. “What, are they going to try trapping missed shots? They’re afraid they’ll look like an idiot if it doesn’t work. But I was fortunate to have enough time to try things out so that I can believe completely in what we’re doing now.”

That is the most Pitino-like trait Newton saw in McMillan when he interviewed him for this job. His father, C.M. Newton, coincidentally, hired Pitino at Kentucky.

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“I remember my dad talking about that ‘it factor’ with Rick,” Newton says. “Bucky is the same way. It was fascinating to hear him talk about the way his mind works, the combination of analytics and instincts, and how he knew exactly how he wanted to play and recruit and build a program. He’s never wavered. It’s one of the things that attracted me to him, and it attracts recruits to him, how that confidence just oozes from him.”

Just because he’s self-assured doesn’t mean McMillan is without mentors. His staff includes Duane Reboul, his college head coach, a 400-game winner with two NAIA national titles, who came out of retirement to join Samford as a special assistant. Mitch Cole, who once taught Bucky at Birmingham-Southern youth camps and later coached him there as a member of Reboul’s staff, is McMillan’s associate head coach.

When he decided to be a full-time pressing team, Reboul was just the guy to help.

“Back when we were playing that way, I’d have other college coaches come to me and say, ‘I want to press this year. How do we do it?’” Reboul says. “I would always say to them, ‘You gotta have it in your blood. You can’t dabble. Because you’re going to give up baskets, and you’ve got to have the stomach to stick with it.’ There just aren’t many coaches who can play that way, because most of them want complete control of every possession. Bucky is willing to let his players make decisions based on what he’s taught them and trust that the coaching is done not on game day, but in practices.”

Asked to summarize his protege turned boss, Reboul recites a famous Muhammad Ali quote: He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.

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How many other coaches would’ve signed 5-foot-8, 140-pound Dallas Graziani from Division II national champion Nova Southeastern merely because they play a similar style as Samford? The number is even fewer — maybe zero? — who would’ve sent Graziani out for the opening tip against 7-foot-4 Purdue star Zach Edey (with a plan to not jump, rather immediately trap and try to steal the ball, which almost worked). McMillan announced the plan in advance and the school made a series of funny social media videos about it before the game.

How many other coaches have everyone on the team shoot 3s, even the ones who show up with no history of being able to do so?

“If you can make a free throw, you can make a 3, and if you can’t make a free throw, you can’t play anyway,” McMillan says, before launching into a monologue about how every time the college 3-point line moves back, percentages dip for a season and then go right back up to where they were. “It’s just repetition. And if you’re really committed to playing this way, if you understand that 3s and layups and free throws are most optimal, now you’re just teaching your players to hit a driver, pitching wedge and putter. Isn’t that easier than learning a 9-iron, 8-iron, 7-iron, 6-iron, 5-iron, 4-iron, all the way down?”

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He says all these things with a tone that adds an unspoken word: obviously. Total belief, not that his way is the only way, just that his way works. Obviously. Samford won 17 straight games and 23 of 24 at one point this season. Wherever McMillan goes, unprecedented winning follows. Getting the right players has a lot to do with that, and of course he has a tried and true method for picking them.

McMillan describes how a recruit can prove himself worthy of Bucky Ball: “Ball is shot, he crashes the glass, he can’t get it but tries to dive on it, gets up, picks up his man full-court, goes to the other end and hawks the ball the whole time, ball comes off the rim, he blocks out, jumps over three people, gets knocked down again, gets off the floor in half a second, bats it to the other end of the floor, sprints down, tries to jump on it, gets the basketball, shot fakes, could lay it up but drops it to a teammate for a layup and then starts denying the guy on the press as hard as he can. That’s going to catch my attention.”

Oh, is that all?

“What is that right there I just described?” McMillan says. “An elite competitor, somebody who freakin’ hates to ever not do their best and not impact winning. That’s what I’ll always look for.”


Jeff Lloyd first played on a basketball team with McMillan in second grade. He won that Dizzy Dean World Series with him 30 years ago this summer. They were on teams together through high school, and now Lloyd brings his own children to Bucky’s camps and to Samford games. There’s a section of seats in a corner of the Pete Hanna Center, where the Bulldogs come out of the tunnel, that is often full of children Lloyd brings to the games — either the rec team he coaches or another group of local hoopers.

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Lloyd knows other programs are coming for his old friend, but he’s not convinced McMillan will leave any time soon. “If you look at Bucky’s life, he’s a Birmingham boy to his core. Should out-of-state teams look at him? One hundred percent. I just know where his roots are, and this community is rallying around Bucky, as it always has, and the momentum is there to grow and build this program and make it a perennial top-25 team that’s competing for tournament slots every year. Selfishly, that’s what I want to see happen.”

He isn’t alone.

Cooney refuses to believe Samford can’t be the one to make him an offer he can’t refuse.

“If an offer comes up that’s better than what we can do, then I’ll be his biggest supporter wherever he goes,” Cooney says, “but I just don’t think this community is going to let him leave. I think this community will realize that this happens once in a lifetime and say, ‘Hey, we can give this coach and his program what it needs.’ ”

Last season, Florida Atlantic made a stunning run to the Final Four. Then the Owls’ coveted young coach, Dusty May, and the entire roster made an even more stunning decision to stay put — even if it was only for one more year.

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Mark Few could’ve left Gonzaga, a Jesuit school with about 5,000 undergrads in Spokane, Wash., for a brand-name program years ago. Instead, he’s spent 35 years as a grad assistant, assistant and head coach turning those Bulldogs into a nationally respected brand themselves. Sometimes you can get where you’re going from right where you are, and few understand that better than McMillan.

“If we’re willing to invest in the program at a high level, there’s no reason we can’t do what those other schools have done,” he says. “There’s no reason we can’t build it here. And all things being equal, I’d love to do it in my hometown. So would all the people that started this with me. How great would that be one day, when we make that run, to say, ‘Hey, we talked about it, and we did it.’”

(Top photo of Bucky McMillan: Courtesy of Samford Athletics)

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Josh Allen, Bills edge Ravens to set up AFC title showdown with Chiefs: Key takeaways

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Josh Allen, Bills edge Ravens to set up AFC title showdown with Chiefs: Key takeaways

With the aid of a dropped two-point conversion attempt, the Buffalo Bills held on to defeat the Baltimore Ravens, 27-25, on Sunday in the final divisional round game of the weekend.

Ravens tight end Mark Andrews was open on the game-tying two-point try with 1:33 to go but couldn’t haul in the pass from quarterback Lamar Jackson. Buffalo recovered the ensuing on-side kick and secured the victory.

The win puts Buffalo in the AFC Championship Game for the second time in five seasons and sets up a matchup next weekend with the Kansas City Chiefs — a nemesis that quarterback Josh Allen and coach Sean McDermott have yet to vanquish in the playoffs.

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Allen emerged victorious over Baltimore and Jackson, a fellow MVP candidate, to improve to 7-5 in the postseason. Allen rushed for two scores, while completing 16 of 22 pass attempts for 127 yards (a season low in passing yards in a game where he attempted a pass). Rookie running back Ray Davis added a rushing touchdown as the Bills totaled 147 yards on the ground on the league’s top-ranked rushing defense (80.1 yards per game allowed in the regular season).

The Bills forced three turnovers — an interception and two fumbles. Buffalo’s secondary took a hit when Taylor Rapp was carted to the locker room in the second quarter with a hip injury and did not return.

The Bills will take on the Chiefs in the AFC Championship Game next Sunday (6:30 p.m. ET on CBS). In three of the past four seasons, Kansas City has eliminated Buffalo from the playoffs — in the 2020 AFC Championship Game and the 2021 and 2023 AFC divisional rounds. During the 2024 regular season, Buffalo was the only team to defeat the Chiefs with Patrick Mahomes starting at quarterback in a 30-21 home win in Week 11.

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Opportunistic defense delivers takeaways

In a game headlined by MVP co-favorite quarterbacks, Buffalo’s defense stole the show, emerging with several critical stops and takeaways.

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Despite the harrowing finish, Buffalo’s defense quashed Jackson and Derrick Henry for most of the night. Baltimore’s most effective weapon through three quarters was backup tailback Justice Hill, who finished with six carries for 50 yards. Jackson threw an interception to Rapp in the first quarter and fumbled while being sacked by safety Damar Hamlin in the second. Von Miller scooped up the loose ball and ran 39 yards to the Ravens’ 24-yard line. The Bills scored a TD four plays later.

Later, with the Ravens down five points and marching late, Bills linebacker Terrel Bernard peanut-punched the ball away from Andrews after a 16-yard gain and recovered the fumble, a pivotal play. It was Andrews’ first lost fumble since 2019. Buffalo turned that takeaway into a field goal and an eight-point lead with 3:29 to go.

Linebacker Matt Milano delivered three quarterback hits, waylaid receiver Rashod Bateman on a third-down play to force a field goal and deflected Jackson’s pass on a two-point conversion attempt to tight end Isaiah Likely late in the third quarter. Edge rushers Greg Rousseau and A.J. Epenesa combined for three tackles behind the line of scrimmage. — Tim Graham, Bills senior writer

Buffalo’s ground game comes up big

The Bills’ offense certainly didn’t have their best day, but when the opportunistic Bills’ defense gave them some chances, they held up their part of the bargain. The Bills focused on the running game, and surprisingly so, given how stout the Ravens’ defense had been against the run all season. The Bills found success early in the game with their trio of James Cook, Ty Johnson and Davis. The Ravens put up a better fight to begin the second half, but the Bills kept with it into the fourth quarter which helped set up what wound up being the pivotal field goal from Tyler Bass to put them up eight.

The Bills have one of the best offensive lines in the NFL this year, and they believed in them so much against this Ravens’ defense that they put the game in their hands, and they responded well. And to put the exclamation point on the day, Johnson gained 17 yards and went down to seal the game, sending the Bills to the AFC Championship Game for the first time since the 2020 season. — Joe Buscaglia, Bills beat writer

A date with the Chiefs awaits

The Bills had some nervy moments late in the game, but in the end, they booked their ticket to the AFC Championship Game for the first time since the 2020 season. The Bills finished the year with a perfect record at home and now get a chance to head to the Super Bowl for the first time since the early 1990s. And, because, of course, it’s them, the Bills will move on to face the Chiefs, the very team that has stood in their way over multiple playoff runs.

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The last time the Bills were in the AFC Championship Game, the Chiefs turned them away at Arrowhead Stadium. The Bills are now a much different team and have certainly learned their lessons in the playoffs and otherwise. Now they get the chance to beat the final boss at the end of the video game, and finally, for the first time since McDermott became head coach, advance to a round in the playoffs further than the Chiefs. — Buscaglia

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(Photo: Timothy T Ludwig / Getty Images)

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Naomi Watts Thinks David Bowie Was Onto Something

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Naomi Watts Thinks David Bowie Was Onto Something

Naomi Watts remembers being told that by the time she turned 40, her acting career would be finished.

Now 56, she is fresh off a Golden Globe nomination for her performance as Babe Paley in “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans.” In March, she’ll star in the movie “The Friend,” based on the National Book Award-winning novel by Sigrid Nunez. And her first book, “Dare I Say It,” out Tuesday, delves into her experience being told at 36 that she was going into early menopause, and navigating that.

“It was shocking to me that half the population was told to zip it through an inevitable time of life,” Watts said of the stigma and silence surrounding perimenopause and menopause. She eventually threw herself into the conversation “lock, stock and barrel,” explaining, “I got sick of holding the secret, which I did for a long time.”

In a video call from Los Angeles, during that brief moment between the glamour of the Golden Globes and the devastation of the fires, Watts spoke about her love of pickleball, her admiration for David Bowie, and her conviction that peppermint tea and milk do not mix.

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

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I’m obsessed with pickleball. Everyone seems to think that if you say you love pickleball you’re really leaning into the old age thing, but I’ve seen people in their 20s in New York getting fired up about it.

Over the Christmas break I played a ton of cards and Bananagrams. I also play this game called Snatch, which is like an aggressive version of Bananagrams. I get pretty competitive, but only when I’m playing games. I think that’s from having a big brother and competing to win. I’m also on a Wordle chain, and whoever wins the day before gets to choose the word. I do that every single day and I’ve only missed a few here and there since we started. My stats are very impressive.

I just watched this Jacques Audiard film and loved it. It’s so innovative and wild, with so many ideas and visuals going on at once. I’d seen his older film “Rust and Bone” with Marion Cotillard, which I also loved. All of the actors in “Emilia Pérez” are just fantastic, and Zoe Saldaña got recognized at the Globes the other night. It’s just a fantastic piece of filmmaking.

I drink it all day. I love builder’s tea, strong black tea like PG Tips. It’s got to be made right, though. I have to educate the Americans about how to make it. It has to be drunk with milk. When you order tea in a restaurant or on a plane and they bring you the hot water and the bag together, it’s all wrong. It’s not going to work. You pour the hot water over the bag. Then sometimes when you order tea with milk, they get confused and they bring you a peppermint tea with milk, and I’m like, This is poison!

I love everything about Paris. I love its romance, I love the walking, I love the restaurants. I like to stay at a place called Le Pavillon de la Reine. It’s a boutique hotel with a fireplace, so it’s lovely in winter.

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One of my favorite things is to eat at home with friends and have a great meal and great conversation. I tend to do roasts, so a lot of roast chicken and veggies. My mom is a good cook, so I learned a lot from her. She’s not a recipe person, she’s a trial-and-error person — you have to be practiced at that. I didn’t learn to become a good cook until I had kids.

I have horribly cracked feet in these dry winter months so I use lots of Eucerin Intensive Repair lotion to moisturize my skin. I put lotion on at night before bed, and it really helps.

I’ve had dogs all my life, and I don’t understand people that don’t love dogs. I barely understand cat people, and I always root for dogs. I like cats; I’m just allergic to them. If you have a cat, though, you better have a dog, too, because at least they’re nice to you.

I’m a big fan of her work as an activist and politician. What she’s doing is wonderful. I’m impressed by how she handles everything with such grace despite the fact that she’s always under attack, for all the wrong reasons. She’s working on fighting against L.G.B.T.Q. discrimination, and I think that’s super important.

The first album I ever bought was “Hunky Dory,” and all those songs — every single one — is amazing. “Changes” is the biggest and best in my nostalgic brain. It’s so interesting to think of what he’d be doing now. I wish he was still around. I really do. When you see those little clips and interviews of him way back when, he just knew so much. He was onto something.

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Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen’s Australian Open is a milestone for American’s men’s tennis

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Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen’s Australian Open is a milestone for American’s men’s tennis

MELBOURNE, Australia — Across seven hours on Friday afternoon, the Australian Open morphed into an American tennis trout farm.

It was nearly impossible to watch a singles match without seeing a red, white and blue flag on the scoreboard, as two early-twenty-somethings and one teenager who looks even younger than his 19 years rumbled through the men’s draw and into the second week.

Did anyone have two Orange County boys, Learner Tien and Alex Michelsen, tearing into the round of 16?

They didn’t.

“I was down a set and a break in the first round of qualies,” Tien, the teenager in the group, said after he had dusted Corentin Moutet of France in three sets. “To now be in the second week feels a little crazy,” he added.

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Michelsen had got there first, putting out No. 19 seed Karen Khachanov in three sets.

Wins for American women sandwiched all this, with Emma Navarro getting through to the second week in her third consecutive three-set win to the start of the day. Madison Keys got there to end the night, beating friend, compatriot and Australian crowd favorite Danielle Collins.

All that was a little less surprising. Keys and Navarro have been there before, as has Coco Gauff. Tommy Paul’s best Grand Slam result came in Australia when he reached the semifinals in 2022, and he joined Gauff, Keys and Navarro with a routine win over Roberto Carballes Baena the previous day. Paul and Gauff then kept the American mojo rolling even further, winning their fourth-round matches over Alexander Davidovich Fokina and Belinda Bencic.

Tien, 19, and Michelsen, 20, who will try to keep the vibes alive Monday in Melbourne, are on a rise that is the opposite of that. Michelsen has some past form: he made the third round in Melbourne last year and he has won a couple of first-round matches at the U.S. Open in the last two years — but not like this, knocking off two top-20 players in three matches.

Tien, a two-time national junior champion, had played two Grand Slam main draw matches before this week, a four-set loss to Arthur Fils at the 2024 U.S. Open, and a three-set loss to Tiafoe the year before. The third time was the charm. He beat Camilo Ugo Carabelli of Argentina in five sets

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Then the draw handed him two matches against the arch antagonists of the ATP Tour, less a baptism of fire than a mind-bending trip into twisting shots, beguiling spins and the dark arts of tennis with the big boys. Tien took on fifth seed Daniil Medvedev for five sets and nearly five hours in a match that ended not long before dawn. Then came Moutet, who at two sets down reminded Tien that he still had to win a third one, which Moutet played as though hobbled by a hip injury on some points while scrambling across the court at full speed on others. Interesting times for a Grand Slam newbie.

“I didn’t really know what was going on with him,” Tien said in his news conference, still with one foot in the washing machine.

Add in Ben Shelton’s four-set win over Lorenzo Musetti, the Italian who had beaten him two times out of two, and a remarkable statistic appears: this is the first Grand Slam since 1993 with three American men under 23 in the second week. Tien and Michelsen are also the first pair of American men aged 20 or younger to reach the third round at a Grand Slam since the 2003 U.S. Open when Andy Roddick and Robby Ginepri, Michelsen’s coach, did it.

It was America’s two most recent major finalists, Taylor Fritz and Jessica Pegula, who found the fourth round a bridge too far. Gael Monfils produced an immaculate four sets to knock out Fritz; Olga Danilovic produced two of the same to take out Pegula.

Yes, it’s a bit weird. But maybe it’s explainable.

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In mid-November, Michelsen and Tien were banged up. The two close friends, who play Fortnite together in their spare time and who have trained at the same Orange County tennis academy for the past four years, had just ended long seasons. They had the usual menu of sore joints from hitting too many balls for too long.

They didn’t boot up the console.

“They basically put the rackets down for two weeks and went to work,” Rodney Marshall, the Southern California tennis fitness guru who has been working with Michelsen the past year, said during an interview from Los Angeles Saturday.

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Everyone calls Marshall ‘Rocket’. He’s one of those experts in sporting torture that American tennis players have trusted with making them faster and stronger and more durable for 15 years.

Marshall, Michelsen and Tien worked together twice a day, six days a week at the academy in California where they have trained together the past four years — and on the sands of Aliso Beach, Calif.

They only had a small window and they needed to figure out what sort of incremental gains they might be able to make. They wanted to gain strength in their lower bodies and fine-tune their movements, so they could get in and out of the corners of the court faster — an essential skill these days.

Tien, who’d missed three months during the first half of the year with a cracked rib, needed some more leverage from his left leg — his back leg on a forehand — to maximize the power he could unleash from his 5ft 11in (180cm) frame. Michelsen, who is 6ft 5in, needed to get better at lowering his center of gravity and finding power from a squatting position.

Life became an endless series of isometrics and plyometrics. The isometrics (holding positions for long stretches) strengthen muscles and tendons; the plyometrics (jumping) build explosiveness.

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Saturdays, they went to the beach — to do sprints. Marshall brought an American football and sent them on passing routes across the sand, with one acting as the wide receiver and the other as the cornerback.

“It was almost like they were cramming,” he said of Tien and Michelsen. “They really embraced the suffering.” If that line sounds familiar, it’s for good reason: four-time Grand Slam champion Carlos Alcaraz, 21, credited finding “joy in the suffering” for his French Open title last June.

Pretty soon, Tien was getting a little more oomph when smacking a tennis ball down the line. Michelsen was getting himself into a ground-level contortion and telling Marshall he could stay there all day. “I love it down here,” he’d yell.

“It’s a constant battle every day,” Michelsen said in an interview after his third-round win over Khachanov, his second win over a seed in six days.

“I look at Marin Cilic. He was like 6-6, and he was always so low. I’ve been trying to replicate that.”

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Alex Michelsen’s explosiveness from the ground has been key to his run in Melbourne. (Adrian Dennis / AFP via Getty Images)

On the other side of the country, in Florida, Paul was going through a fitness block of his own with Fritz before the latter headed to southern California for tennis training. Frances Tiafoe, Reilly Opelka, Jacob Fearnley and several other pros were with Paul in Florida.

“A good group,” said Paul, who often talks NFL and NBA with Michelsen in the locker room. “He’s a crazy good competitor,” he said of Michelsen.

Paul said during an interview Friday that he is determined to play matches on his terms in 2025. He wants to move other people around this season, and not be the one getting moved around as much. That always seemed to happen last year when he ran into Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner. His fast-paced, front-foot tennis could hurt them for a little while. He won a set off Alcaraz at Wimbledon and went up 4-1 up on Sinner at the U.S. Open. But then they would force him behind the baseline, and out of the contest.

“Carlos moves unbelievably well when he has to, but if you look at him when he’s playing his best tennis, he’s dictating,” Paul said.

Shelton was in Orlando, doing his own thing. He was trying to figure out how to go from being a below-average returner to someone who can get free points on his serve while stopping other guys from getting free points on theirs.

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Ben Shelton, serve savant, wants to talk about the return


From the pre-dawn hours Friday, when Tien was beating Medvedev in a match that ended at 2:56 a.m., until sunset Saturday, when Shelton bested Musetti in a fourth-set tiebreaker, the 23-and-under trio showed that the training was worth it.

Tien got back to his hotel after 4 a.m. He ate cold, stale pizza, and didn’t fall asleep until just before 7 a.m. He slept till about 1:30 p.m. before making his way back to Melbourne Park, where he hit tennis balls basically standing still for 45 minutes and endured massage and physiotherapy for five hours.

He was dead asleep by 11 p.m. “That was much needed,” he said.

Then he filleted Moutet, doing to the Frenchmen what Moutet had done to so many others over the years, minus the dark arts of delay and distraction.

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“Incredible effort from him today,” Tien’s coach, Eric Diaz wrote in a text message. “Body was not doing well. Impressive mental rebound as well.”


Learner Tien’s court craft has tied his opponents in knots. (Daniel Crockett / AFP via Getty Images)

Shelton had some rebounding to do as well. He’d watched his two losses against No. 16 seed Musetti over and over, reliving the Italian rolling a series of backhand passing shots down the line. Tied at 5-5 in a fourth-set tiebreak, Shelton hit an awful drop shot that sat up for Musetti’s fearsome running backhand. The point looked lost, but Shelton knew what to expect. He covered the line, stabbed a volley into the open court and served out the match.

He’d spent the afternoon keeping an eye on the other matches, especially Michelsen.

“Me and Alex are boys,” Shelton said in his news conference.

“I’ve texted him and told him he’s a dog after every match that he’s won because it’s true. He is a dog. He’s going to be towards the top of the game very soon.”

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With Shelton watching on, Michelsen effectively sealed his win over Khachanov with three huge points in the second-set tiebreak. All of them had roots in the off-season training block. He won the first with a curving 108mph second serve, a product of the leg strength and jumps. He took the second after sprinting to a ball outside the tramlines and whipping a forehand down the line. He won the third with his bread and butter, a powerful backhand down the line — with a little extra pop from all those medicine ball throws with Marshall and Tien.

As for Tien, Shelton can see a kindred spirit in his fellow left-hander, despite their diametrically opposite styles. Tien’s game is all about changing pace, floating balls deep to the backcourt and then suddenly attacking. His tennis is nothing like Shelton’s full-frontal assault, but Tien is breaking through here, out of nowhere, two years after Shelton did on the same courts.

“Not a bad place to have a breakthrough,” Shelton said. “On top of all the guys that are already at the top in the U.S., we have a lot more coming. It’s really starting to show itself.”

Indeed it is. The trout farm, a lot easier to create in a wealthy country with more than 300 million people, is doing what it is supposed to do. There were 33 Americans across the singles draws, more players than any other country. As the tournament moves into the quarterfinals, there are already two with safe harbor and potentially four more on the way.

Now comes the hard part: breaking the tape at the finish line as Gauff did in New York 16 months ago. That doesn’t require a trout farm. It requires a unicorn — and there are no farms capable of producing those.

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(Top photo: Peter Staples / ATP Tour)

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