I get a kick out of several of the Gen Z tennis players becoming huge, global celebrities. Coco Gauff is the highest-paid female athlete in the world, and she’s a bonafide superstar, on magazine covers and in gossip columns. Coco’s closest contemporary in age and experience is Carlos Alcaraz, the Spanish superstar who completed his career Grand Slam earlier this year when he won the Australian Open. He’s only 23 years old and he’s already got seven major titles. It’s completely appropriate that Vanity Fair wanted Carlos for their cover ahead of this year’s Roland Garros, where he’s the two-time defending champion. Unfortunately, Carlos developed a wrist injury this spring, and he’s missed almost the entire clay season, and he’s going to miss Roland Garros too. Still, we can enjoy this VF piece. Some highlights:
Youngest male player to win the Grand Slam: [His] new Nike duffel bag [reads] “YOUNGEST EVER TO WIN THE 4 OF THEM.” As it often happens with almost anything Alcaraz does, the bag lit a match—as journalist José Morgado pointed out on X, the statement seemed to forgo a key word: man. In the Open era, Steffi Graf was 19 when she achieved the feat in 1988, and Serena Williams was 21 when she did it in 2003. But the flip side of Alcaraz’s bag read: “El más joven de la historia en ganar los 4 grandes.” In Spanish, the line is gendered, as any bilingual Alcaraz zealot may point out. His detractors will say that, in Spanish, the masculine form is the general one. Was the omission classic Alcaraz audacity or a mere translation issue?
Is Carlos immature? Skeptics question whether what they see as immaturity is affecting his play. During a Miami match against American Sebastian Korda, Alcaraz approached his box. “I can’t anymore. I can’t anymore, dude, I want to go home, dude,” Alcaraz told his team in Spanish. (Last month, as the Monte-Carlo Masters kicked off, Alcaraz said he regretted these comments. The Spaniard lost to Sinner in the final in Monte Carlo, falling to number two.)
The criticism he faces: Did Alcaraz intentionally flunk out of Miami? Is he “bored” from Masters 1000 events, as French tennis coach and commentator Patrick Mouratoglou suggested? Had he come to Miami to party, as some online said mockingly? “Well, I think that nowadays we have to be way more careful with what we say, and what we do, but at the end of the day, we’re just human, you know?” Alcaraz tells me. We spoke in Spanish, both our first language. What he is acutely aware of is that people will react. “It’s stressful, because you have to think about what you do and when you do it and where you are all the time,” Alcaraz says. “But as a person, we have good days and bad days, we wake up sometimes not wanting to do anything, but we still have to show up, and sometimes we don’t react in the way we should.”
He really is a young guy: “I don’t want to say vertigo,” he answers when I ask him about having already accomplished so much. “I’m aware that I have so much ahead of me, and I try not to think that I have 12 or 15 years left of my career because I get overwhelmed,” Alcaraz says, laughing. What he doesn’t want is to end up leading a monotonous life that makes him “a slave to tennis….I know I’m living a dream life, a life I dreamed of. But I sometimes wish I could have more moments for myself, to do things a 22-year-old guy would do.”
Injuries: “There’s been times in which I didn’t stop to take a break,” he says, “and that led to me not playing well, or becoming injured, or…” he pauses. “Let’s just leave it at that, that it didn’t end well.” (In the months after we spoke, Alcaraz injured his wrist. He’s since withdrawn from tournaments following the Monte-Carlo Masters and decided not to defend his championship at Roland Garros.) He’s been vocal about the intensity of the tennis calendar and tells me he’s working to change it. “I think it’s just as important, or more, than taking care of your body,” he says about his mental health. “There’s people who are, fairly so, obsessed with body aesthetics, but to me it’s just as important to take care of your head.”
His rivalry with Jannik Sinner: “We’re showing the world that we can be on court and give our best, and try to do the most possible damage to the other while playing, try to beat each other, and then, off court, just be two guys who get along really well,” he says. “We help each other give our best.” There is, as Alcaraz says, no bad blood. “We are fighting for the same goal, but there’s no need to hate each other because we want the same thing.” That said, “when you are competing at this level, having a close friendship is complicated,” he says. “It can be done,” he clarifies. “I’m all for it.” Rivalries are “long processes,” he says. “It’s not comparable to the historic rivalries that have happened in tennis, because we both have so many years ahead. Hopefully, we will continue playing against each other many times, at many finals, and that we will split the greatest tournaments.”
Last year, I talked about Carlos’ Netflix series, which is an interesting watch. It showed a young tennis player really in transition from wunderkind to established star. What was even more notable about that series was the look at the team of people around Carlos and how they treated him. He was being treated like a child by many in his team, and they were all trying to force him to grind harder and harder, even when his body was breaking down. One of the best things to happen in the past year is that Carlos fired his coach Juan Carlos Ferrero and brought in some new people. Yes, he’s still dealing with injuries, but we’ve already established that Carlos is very injury-prone and I’m not worried about him at all. I actually love the fact that he’s always resisted trying to fit into the preset box of “this is how to be a great tennis player, you have to stop partying and live like a monk.” Let Carlos be Carlos – he’s a young guy who likes to party with his friends and he LOVES female attention, and not in a gross way. Hopefully, he’ll be back for Wimbledon.
This photo has made everyone go feral this week:
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover courtesy of Vanity Fair.
