Make room in your lives for Alcaraz, Sinner
The next great rivalry is launched by a brilliant French Open final that Alcaraz wins in a fifth-set tiebreak.
Rafael Nadal did not shovel the red clay of Roland Garros into a a U-Haul and take it to Majorca with him, although he surely owns it. It’s still there, along with a plaque that has his name and the simple number 14. Nadal beat eight different players in the 14 French Open men’s finals that he won, including Roger Federer four times and Novak Djokovic three times. He never lost one. Six times he won in straight sets. He never needed a fifth one. He was Muhammad Ali in this house. Everyone else was Jean-Pierre Coopman.
Nadal should have charged rent, on the order of Park Place, anytime anybody else played tennis on his dirt. But, in truth, his mastery had deadened the event. Then came the restorative events of Sunday.
Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner put their souls and skills on merciless display for five hours and 29 minutes, and when it was over Nadal was exclaiming “incredible” on social media, and John McEnroe was saying you could make a “serious case” that either Alcaraz or Sinner could have beaten Nadal Sunday. But the match they actually played was too good to enter the hypothetical. Alcaraz won in a fifth-set tiebreaker, his fifth Grand Slam title. The 22-year-old Alcaraz is only one day older than Nadal was, when both won their fifth Slam championship.
The winning score was 4-6, 6-7, 6-4, 7-6, 7-6, with Alcaraz dominating the final tiebreak, 10-2. The actual play was closer than that. Sinner, who never had a double fault, won 192 points, Alcaraz 191. He also was on the verge of a Nadal-style three-set win, leading Alcaraz 5-3, 40-love on the Spaniard’s serve. But Alcaraz kept firing laser beams, and Sinner was long on a couple of foreheads, and Alcaraz produced an ace. On game point he whistled a forehand down the line and held his hand to his ear, asking for more noise that an exhausted crowd gladly delivered.
That’s three championship points that floated down the Seine, and they never came back to Sinner. But he did break Alcaraz’s serve to tie the fifth set, 5-5, and take it into overtime. Sinner has not lost to anyone but Alcaraz since last August, and he won last year’s U.S. Open and this year’s Australian. He is 23, and was 3-0 in Slam finals until Sunday. Afterward he expressed his obvious regret, but added, “Of course I’m happy to be part of this.”
Only yesterday it seemed that men’s tennis would be a bland pudding for the next few years, unable to find three colossi to approach Nadal, Federer and Djokovic. Instead, we are presented with a classic rivalry, overflowing with contrast and respect.
Alcaraz plays happy for the most part, shaking his fist after virtually every winner, always ready to orchestrate the crowd, and he plays high-risk tennis. Sinner is solemn and businesslike, and usually plays the percentages. Italy is his home country but German was his first language, and he grew up in the Tyrolean Alps. Although Sinner was suspended for three months for PED use, a punishment that most of his competitors considered too light, he is a sportsman on the court, as is Alcaraz. They both conceded points on Sunday on close calls, and Sinner allowed Alcaraz to have a point on a ball that seemed out. (Unlike the rest of the game, the French Open does not use electronic line calls.)
After the trophy presentation, Alcaraz gathered the ball boys and girls, known as the “ramasseur de balles,” and posed for photos with them, and laughed as if he were one of them. Not so long ago, he might have been. He told Sinner, “I’m sure you’re going to be a champion, not once but many times. It’s a privilege to share the court with you at every tournament, making history with you.”
Five other French Open champs have won Sets 3, 4 and 5 to get the trophy. McEnroe was the victim of Ivan Lendl’s comeback in 1984, a loss that kept McEnroe from winning the career slam. Andre Agassi, in 1999, needed the French to complete his own trophy set, and after he lost the first two sets he roared back to beat Andrei Medvedev. Agassi was at Roland Garros Sunday, shaking his head and marveling at this new variant of his game.
Mats Wilander, a 3-time French Open champ, was there as well. Until Sunday he was involved in the longest-ever finals match at Roland Garros, a four-set over Guillermo Vilas in 1982 when Wilander was 17. He said this was better than any Nadal-Federer match he’d ever seen. Andy Roddick, the last American man to win a Slam final, said Alcaraz and Sinner “went to an absurd level, pushing the game to heights that I don’t know if we’ve ever seen before.”
But there’s nothing sudden about it. Last year Alcaraz beat Sinner in the French semifinals after he was down 2-1 in sets. He did the same thing when he beat Alexander Zverev in the finals. The fact that he was 0-8 when losing the first two sets was striking but irrelevant. Most tennis matches are best two-of-three sets anyway, and Alcaraz is traveling too fast to feel the barriers he is breaking.
It’s easy to forget about tennis at times. The endless tournament schedule is indecipherable. Astonishingly talented players come from six continents, too many to get to know. Public courts are being taken over by pickleball; the real game isn’t a good fit for today’s America because it’s too hard. The click-bound U.S. media has little bandwidth for anything but the NFL and the NBA. It’s scandalous that neither Federer, Nadal nor Djokovic ever won Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year.
But for eight weeks a year, spread over four Grand Slam tournaments, the pros face each other across a net, with no cornerman to doctor their wounds, physical or otherwise. On select championship days, they fulfill every promise that sports has ever given us. On Sunday in Paris, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner went one better. They didn’t just leave us a triumph, but an arc.