Watching Carlos Alcaraz should count as a cardio workout. For starters, the clapping is constant. You can’t help it. Soon enough, as your hands descend from a fresh round of applause, he produces a shot, a coming together of gymnastics and tennis, that makes you lunge forward and yelp. You stand, partly for comfort and partly out of excitement. A running forehand down the line activates your toes. A couple of quiet moments later, as you catch your breath, he sends an ace flying past his opponent. By the end of the first set, your heart rate is as high as the speed of his serve. Watch him at a Grand Slam, and there’s your half-marathon. Running is overrated.
To quote the incredible Brian Philips, “Alcaraz sends you to the far side of Andromeda. Week in and week out, he’s doing what young talents are supposed to do; he’s finding entirely new ways to bend the game to his imagination.”
His style, physical without being brutish, is so visceral that you get involved by just existing in the vicinity of a screen. It’s like watching AB de Villiers or Lionel Messi at their most unhinged. You didn’t need to know the DRS rules to be caught by their genius.
You watch their kind for the adrenalin. Every moment is an opportunity for more. But the thing is, adrenalin is also addictive. And after two years of near-constant supply, I can’t watch a Carlos Alcaraz game sitting still anymore. Especially when it’s not against Nadal or Djokovic. Against those two, I can understand that a game can go either way. But against Alexander Zverev at the Australian Open quarterfinal, I have no such consideration. Give me the running forehand, Carlos. GIVE IT.
Before I can blink, Zverev leads 6-1, 6-3, 5-2. A couple of games away, at most, from sending Alcaraz back home in straight sets. Alright, Siri, I’d like Tears in Heaven on full volume and a double shot of espresso.
And then something switches.
I am convinced Alcaraz has a nitrous oxide-style button on his body. For the next hour and a half, Alcaraz turns the Rod Laver Arena into a boxing stadium. The noise is deafening. Every point gets a shot out of him. To watch Zverev in that moment is to understand the effect genius can have on opponents. So much in control of his game until then, but he is suddenly helpless in the face of this wave of electricity.
But Zverev (more on him in another piece; he’s, well, sketchy) is a bloody good tennis player too. He sees the third set go past him but finds his composure in the fourth. He rides the Carlos Wave™, lands on his feet, and sees out the fourth set without much fuss. Into the semi-finals.
Sigh.
A quarter-final exit for a 20-year-old shouldn’t feel this underwhelming. With Alcaraz, it always feels like something is incomplete when he leaves a Grand Slam too early. I wonder if it is a function of the halo around him. Comets like him - think Brian Lara, or Venus Williams in her early years - shine so bright most of the time that anything of a softer hue feels almost dull.
Alcaraz’s rise has been so explosive that there hasn’t even been time for a drop in form yet. And I am scared to find out what that looks like. What if there is a tentative and prosaic brand of tennis hidden behind all these layers of effervescence?
I still carry scars from watching Sachin Tendulkar turn, owing to a chronic elbow injury, from a belligerent dasher to a quiet accumulator. It was a jarring, disturbing sight. In those three years, he played innings of great precision and control, but it didn’t quite fit with his aesthetic. Give me that lofted drive over covers every two overs and a straight drive every, umm, four overs. I am a simple man with simple demands.
These demands are, of course, utterly unfair and unrealistic. When performance dips, aesthetic appeal is relegated to irrelevance. A pro swimmer spends years trying to shave 0.05 seconds off her butterfly timing. It would be naive to think she cares about how fluid her hands move on camera.
I feel that these days while watching Shubman Gill. On Friday morning, as he pushed and prodded to a bizarre 23, he was unrecognisable from the batter we had gotten used to, and more crucially, demanded for ourselves.
Three years back, when Gill and India did that thing at Brisbane, there did not seem to exist a world in which he wouldn’t score 8000 Test runs while sounding like the most sexually arousing thing to come out of this frankly boring sport. A thousand or so days later, on the back of a year where he was awarded BCCI’s Cricketer of The Year, Gill is on the verge of losing his Test spot. So, what changed? In the last six months, he hasn’t been able to buy a run.
And it is showing in his body language at the crease. What was pristine is now laboured. His feet, so nimble, such a strength to his game, were rooted to the crease on Friday as two spinners dished over after over of soft pies towards him. Such was his inertia that when he finally decided to break some chains, he tripped over and ended up chipping one of those pies straight to a fielder.
It is only natural to shrink in a moment of pressure. Indian cricket produces more premium batting talent than it can bother to remember. Even Virat Kohli, at a similar, nascent stage of his career, was within a couple of games of losing his Test spot. Giving him the Perth Test was a show of faith by captain MS Dhoni that he is still grateful for, twelve years later.
Unless Alcaraz is built from the same ore as Djokovic, Nadal, or Federer, he will have to endure a time when the machine malfunctions. The first serve won’t land as deep, the cross-court backhand goes too wide, and the taping on the net will look like a wall. When that time comes, I hope he is injected with the confidence to be himself, to keep extending the ceiling of tennis as an athletic endeavour. And I hope there is someone around Shubman Gill passing on a similar message about trusting the rare gift he is blessed with. Of course, professional athletes, especially the good ones, set themselves loftier goals than becoming vibe-generators for junkies like me, but hopefully, there is a school of thought within coaching circles that reinforces the idea of joy amidst the crushing din of medals and runs and goals.
I leave you with an excerpt from Jonathan Liew’s wonderful piece on Jurgen Klopp from this week. He writes about football here, but it is valid for so many other sports.
“Football has never been purely an intellectual exercise and it has never been purely a professional pursuit. At its best it is the background music to life, the backdrop to nights in and nights out and comedowns and breakdowns and hook-ups and break-ups.”
If Carlos Alcaraz ever starts playing for control, and in that process, becomes as colourless as four sets of split squats, I will need to find a mental asylum.
I am halfway reading the guardian piece.
“All of us have to do whatever we can to protect one another,” he wrote to Liverpool fans in March 2020, as the nation prepared to lock down. “In society, I mean. This should be the case all the time in life, but in this moment I think it matters more than ever. Please look out for each other.”
I love this man though I did not know if he is a player, was a player, or a coach. Yet another example of you making me cooler. Much gratitude.
There is so much in this write up. Thank you. I am missing everything including tennis so thank god I did not see this one. Shubhman has hit a 100 today, I am told. (He said, sheepishly)