Ben Shelton survived a four-set scare from an unseeded opponent, celebrated like he’d won the whole tournament, and by the next morning half of tennis Twitter had decided his reaction was the real story. Worth noting up front: it wasn’t a haka, whatever the group chats are calling it.
Shelton beat Hubert Hurkacz 6-3, 5-7, 7-6(3), 7-5 in the second round on Arthur Ashe Stadium, and the celebration that followed was a hand-to-ear phone gesture, not a Māori war dance. Shelton told reporters afterward that the move is actually borrowed from Grant Holloway, his fellow University of Florida alum and Olympic hurdler, saying “It’s kind of like I’m saying I’m dialed in,” according to Yahoo News.
The blowback online was real regardless of what the gesture actually was. Critics called it excessive for a second-round win over an unseeded player, and Coco Gauff’s father Corey stepped in on Instagram to shut the criticism down, telling Shelton’s detractors to knock it off.
Here’s the part that’s easy to miss once a celebration goes viral: nobody fact-checks the celebration itself before piling on. It got labeled a “haka” in enough corners of the internet that the label started doing the outrage work, because a war dance after beating an unseeded player reads as arrogant in a way that a guy doing his college teammate’s signature bit doesn’t. Once people decided what the gesture meant, the actual explanation Shelton gave in his press conference barely mattered.
Shelton has never been shy about showing emotion on court, and Hurkacz, a former Top 10 player who came in unseeded, pushed him to a fourth-set battle that easily justified some relief spilling out. Whether that reaction was “too much” is a matter of taste. Whether it was a haka is not, and it wasn’t.
