Carlos Alcaraz won his first Australian Open on Sunday in Melbourne, making him the youngest man to achieve the career Grand Slam (winning at least one each of the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and U.S. Open).
It’s not much of a surprise, really. He has been breaking records pretty much from the start. In 2022 at age 19, he was the youngest player to reach world No. 1. And when he burst on the tennis scene when he was 16, he was already generating buzz.
In many ways, his meteoric rise is similar to fellow Spaniard Rafael Nadal — and before him, Bjorn Borg. Anyone who watched him play even back then knew they were watching something special. It would have been a bigger shock if he’d drifted off into obscurity. Fortunately, he is a great and worthy champion. Tennis badly needed him in the wake of the retirement of Nadal and Roger Federer.
He plays with as much heart and courage as you could ever want in a great champion. I covered the Cincinnati Open in 2023 and was present for the best non-slam match I’ve ever seen. It was Novak Djokovic and Alcaraz; Alcaraz lost a heartbreaker, but he scrapped and fought and played with all of the resolve he possessed. In short, the world No. 1 is every bit the worthy successor of the Big 3 (Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer).
And yet there is something a bit different about Alcaraz. Each of the Big 3 — and maybe particularly Nadal — played with a distinct kind of fervor. As though the compulsion to win was a fever; something almost outside their control. Nadal famously said, “I learned during all my career to enjoy suffering.” And suffer Nadal did. He was a participant in more “best of all time” matches than any other player — often against Federer or Djokovic. They were epic matches that often extended beyond five hours and all on feet deformed by a congenital defect that made the entire process painful.
Not so with Alcaraz. Not that he doesn’t suffer, of course. His five and a half hour French Open victory over Jannik Sinner last year is surely going to go down in history as one of the best matches of all time. And just a couple days ago he cramped and vomited his way through part of his battle with Alexander Zverev.
And yet, suffering isn’t the primary state for Alcaraz. It’s joy.
I’ve been watching tennis for more decades than I care to admit, and I can’t claim I have ever seen a top player enjoy tennis as much as Alcaraz seems to.
That’s not to say that he is always happy. His loss at the Paris Olympics to Djokovic wounded him — he barely managed to win a match the rest of the summer of 2024. He’s not impervious to disappointment. But he bounced right back last year and finished the season by adding two majors to his trophy case.
Make no mistake. We are lucky to have Alcaraz; like all other professional sports, the long-term success of tennis depends almost entirely on the star quality of our top players. We could have experienced a post-Fedalovic slump. Alcaraz (and to a slightly lesser extent Sinner) ensured that we didn’t.
Tennis is alive and well.
Yes….tennis is alive and well.
Not a nice person, esp at the US Open