Tennis news

With the completion of the year’s last major tournament, a roundup from the tennis world for LGM’s fans of the sport:

(1) The future of Carlos Alcaraz. When Alcaraz took Berrettini to five sets in the third round in Australia in January I predicted he would be top ten by the end of the year. This turned out to be more than a bit too conservative, as he’s just become the youngest #1 player of all time.

Looking at the guys who have won majors at age 20 or younger from youngest to oldest at the time:

Chang
Becker
Wilander
Borg
Nadal
Sampras
Edberg
Hewitt
McEnroe
Safin
Djokovic
Kuerten
Courier
Del Potro

All-time greats:

Nadal, Djokovic, Borg, Sampras

Second level greats: McEnroe, Becker, Edberg, Wilander

Guys who were great for a very short window: Courier, Hewitt, Kuerten

Guys who stretch the definition of a great player quite a ways: Chang, Safin, Del Potro.

In Alcaraz’s favor is that he’s in the younger half of prior to 21 winners, and he did it 30 years after most of the youngest guys won theirs, i.e., it’s a lot more impressive to win a major at 19 now than it was in the 1980s/early 1990s.

So I would say that his odds of having a career that’s at least as good as Edberg, Wilander, Becker are real good (I’d actually put McEnroe in between this group and the demigod group. Classic peak v. career value issue).

The big variables as always are health — how does his body hold up to the pounding over years and years? — and mental/emotional: how does he handle getting to the top so early in his career? Note that his rise from new guy on the ATP tour to #1 was much much faster than any of the Big Three’s rise: it took Federer four and half years, Nadal five and a half years, and Djokovic six years to go from their first entry into the top 100 to #1. It took Alcaraz 15 months.

(2) Alcaraz’s most obvious place for improvement is his first serve, but it came up huge down the stretch in the USO final — he served four aces and a quasi-ace, that is, a ball that technically wasn’t an ace only because Ruud managed to graze the ball with the frame of his racket, in his last two service games to wrap up the title. When that gets more consistent, look out.

(3) I’ll say this for Novak Djokovic: he’s willing to sacrifice something real for his noxious anti-vax beliefs. By refusing to get vaccinated against COVID he blew up his entire 2022 season, as it barred him from two of the four majors and four of the eight Masters 1000 events (the ninth, Shanghai, has been cancelled because of China’s COVID policies). Because he didn’t get any points for winning Wimbledon, as the ATP properly refused to count the tournament’s points after it barred Russians from playing in it, he’s probably going to finish the season outside the top ten. All this has clearly ended up hurting him at the margin in the extremely tight race for the informal title of greatest player of all time. So he’s a total jackass, but a principled total jackass.

(4) I have a feeling that there’s a non-trivial chance that Nadal retires at the end of the year, and a very strong chance that he plays no more than one more year. His body is falling apart, his wife is having a baby, and he’s had an awesome season that nobody believed he could pull off at this point. It would be the perfect time to quit, to the extent there ever is such a thing.

(5) Speaking of Del Potro I hadn’t realized he’s played only one match in the last three years, because he’s had like four knee surgeries. He hasn’t officially retired but he’s probably retired.

(6) With the passage of time, the complete failure of the eight birth years between 1988 and 1995 to produce any great or even semi-great players becomes ever-more striking. That’s an eternity in tennis generational terms.

(7) Frances Tiafoe is a great story, and it’s not out of the question that he could still become the first great American men’s player since the aughts — he’s still only 24. On the flip side, although he had been improving this season under his new coach, he really hadn’t done anything that foreshadowed his great run at the USO. So we shall see.