Carlos Alcaraz: The Emerging Titan of Tennis

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed “Alcaraz Moments.” These are times, as you watch the young Spaniard play, when the jaw drops, the eyes widen, and sounds are made that bring roommates or family members rushing in to see if you’re okay.

The moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the improbability of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the quarterfinals of the 2022 U.S. Open, Alcaraz serving to Jannik Sinner in the fifth set. There’s a grueling exchange of groundstrokes, both players yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the elusive winner. Suddenly, Sinner hits a ferocious forehand that pulls Alcaraz way out wide to his backhand side. Alcaraz manages to get to it but slices a desperate backhand short, landing just past the service line. Sinner seizes the opportunity, moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and smacks it back to the same corner, trying to wrong-foot Alcaraz. What Alcaraz does next is somehow reverse thrust, skip backward impossibly fast, and hit a forehand down the line, all his weight moving backward. The shot screams past Sinner at the net, landing precisely in the corner for a winner. It’s like something out of “The Matrix.” The crowd erupts, and the commentators, in stunned awe, can only manage, “How does he do that?”

Anyway, that’s one example of an Alcaraz Moment, and that was merely on TV. Seeing him live is an entirely different experience. The truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis as video is to the felt reality of human presence.

Journalistically speaking, there is no hot news to offer you about Carlos Alcaraz. He is, at 21, the most electrifying young player currently alive. Perhaps the most promising prospect tennis has seen in decades. Bios and profiles abound. “60 Minutes” did a feature on him just last year. Anything you want to know about Carlos Alcaraz—his background, his hometown of El Palmar, Spain, his parents’ unwavering support, his junior tennis career, his early challenges with consistency, his beloved coach Juan Carlos Ferrero, how Ferrero’s guidance has molded him, Alcaraz’s swift rise through the ranks, his Grand Slam breakthrough, his unprecedented athleticism and mental toughness—it’s all just a Google search away.

This present article is more about a spectator’s experience of Alcaraz and its context. The specific thesis here is that if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the hard courts of Flushing Meadows, through the sweltering heat of the U.S. Open, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press photographers describes as a “transcendent experience.” It may be tempting, at first, to hear a phrase like this as just another hyperbolic trope that people use to describe the feeling of Alcaraz Moments. But the photographer’s phrase turns out to be true—literally, for an instant, ecstatically—though it takes some time and serious watching to see this truth emerge.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

Of course, in men’s sports, no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s. You too may find them so, in which case Rafael Nadal, with his powerful physique and primal intensity, might be the man’s man for you. But Alcaraz represents something different. He combines the passionate energy of Nadal with an almost balletic grace, his movements on the court both explosive and fluid.

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Alcaraz’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a versatile weapon that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice with finesse. His serve has both pace and precision, and his movement is the best in the game. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this young man play. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or—as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject—to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

(This was a creative writing exercise to create a post just like the OG DFW one)

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