Carlos Alcaraz defeats Frances Tiafoe at the US Open semifinals in a battle of tennis’ rising stars
If there is one question that can be answered with certainty, it’s whether the current generation of young players will continue to grow up into the best, or whether they will reach the end of their careers in the same way as when they were just children.
The answer to that question is easy to answer, but the answer it will require will be more difficult to answer.
For the young Carlos Alcaraz, it’s simple: it depends on how he plays.
The 20-year-old has achieved a level of excellence beyond anyone’s imaginations. He can defeat the likes of Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. This week he will face one of the most important opponents of the last decade, the man who is considered the greatest tennis player of all time, Marin Cilic.
For all his brilliance, however, Alcaraz can also be considered a player who is still, in many aspects, still very young. So far this season, he has won only two tournaments, the Australian Open and the French Open. He lost in the second round of Wimbledon and at the US Open.
When I met him in New York this week, Alcaraz said the one area that he is still improving – and he is still improving – is his mental strength. He admits he can often get in a bad mood during matches and says he is still not happy with himself.
But what he has learned in the last year or so is that as he has gotten better, his mental strength has grown stronger as well. As a young player, he struggled with his mental strength, especially in comparison to an older generation of players. Now he is able to bounce back from bad matches and come back from those that are even worse.
He admitted that he has not fully understood this concept – that he has to be mentally strong the way other people are mentally strong – but now he is finding that there are aspects of tennis that he is willing to learn about and master.
“Tennis, like any sport, has the ability to give you confidence and it’s that mental strength that I’m talking about,” said Alcaraz. “To be able to deal with the tough moments of losing on tennis courts and how you deal when you play a bad match or a tough match and in a