Shifting to Shelton: How a kind word and a headband won over young Gabe

pHas a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/ben-shelton/s0s1/overview'Ben Shelton/a found his newest and biggest fan?/p

pWhen the 21-year-old American walked onto court to face a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/tomas-martin-etcheverry/ea24/overview'Tomas Martin Etcheverry/a on Thursday at the a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/tournaments/cincinnati/422/overview'Cincinnati Open/a, he received the majority of support at his home event./p

pHowever, there was one young boy, Gabriel Green, who was cheering loudly for Etcheverry and could not hide his disappointment at the Argentine’s three-set defeat. After the match, Shelton found Gabriel in the crowd at the Lindner Family Tennis Center, where he chatted with the youngster before giving him his headband./p

blockquote class="twitter-tweet"p lang="en" dir="ltr"Ben#39;s newest fan likes his headband VERY MUCH????a href="https://twitter.com/BenShelton?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"@BenShelton/a a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/CincyTennis?src=hashamp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"#CincyTennis/a a href="https://t.co/OKdqcVqEjf"pic.twitter.com/OKdqcVqEjf/a/pmdash; Tennis TV (@TennisTV) a href="https://twitter.com/TennisTV/status/1824541557803909446?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw"August 16, 2024/a/blockquote script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"/script

pA day later and Gabriel was courtside again, but this time wearing Shelton's headband and loudly supporting the 12th seed, who defeated a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/fabian-marozsan/m0ci/overview'Fabian Marozsan/a to reach the quarter-finals on Friday./p

p“He was going at me yesterday,” Shelton said when asked about Gabriel, who was born in Mexico and is coached by an Argentine. “I was playing his guy Etcheverry. I heard him the whole match and after the match he looked pretty upset and I went up to him and said, ‘I have a lot of respect for your cheering because when I was a little kid and watching my dad’s teams college matches, that was me’./p

p“I think that is where the love from the game starts. So it is really cool to see things like that from kids at such a young age. I went over and gave him a headband and I gained a fan yesterday, so maybe we will see him out here one day.”/p

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pShelton will play third seed a href='https://www.atptour.com/en/players/alexander-zverev/z355/overview'Alexander Zverev/a in the quarter-finals and will hope to see Gabriel courtside once again./p

p[NEWSLETTER FORM]/p