WIMBLEDON — This wasn’t a torch-passing. It was more like a torch-grabbing, followed by a sprint around the bend and then another mile or two down the road.
Last year, Carlos Alcaraz beat Novak Djokovic by a whisker in the Wimbledon men’s final, taking advantage of a few rare errors from the now 24-time Grand Slam champion to win an up-and-down five-set saga that lasted nearly five hours.
He snuck away with that title. On Sunday, he hammered and danced and drop-shotted his way to a second consecutive Wimbledon men’s singles title. This was a 6-2, 6-2 7-6(7-4) drubbing of Djokovic and his surgically-repaired right knee, on a court the Serb has mostly owned for more than a decade.
When something happens twice, it ceases to be an accident, ailing knee or not.
A deteriorating joint is the sort of thing that a 37-year-old champion who has played professional tennis for 20 years has to deal with.
It’s bad luck. It’s also life in the tennis twilight, as so many others who have gone through it can attest. It’s the sort of slow dying of the light that gives a player such as 21-year-old Alcaraz — a generational talent who plays with a joy so many other players yearn for — the chance to grab a torch and run away with it, lighting up the sport.
For the better part of a decade, Djokovic has been the dominant player. Even last year, when Alcaraz nicked him on Centre Court, it was the lone stumble in one of his greatest seasons. He won Grand Slam titles at the Australian, French, and U.S. Opens; he won the season-ending Tour Finals; he had a No 1 next to his name in the rankings at the end of the year for a record eighth time.
All at 36 years old.
But he is 37 now.
And in seven magical weeks, beginning in Paris in late May and ending Sunday on the most famous court in the sport, Alcaraz made all that look like the last great chapter in the most decorated and accomplished career in the modern era of tennis, which began in 1968.
Djokovic may yet rise again. He did plenty of rising at the All England Club over the past two weeks, when few would have even tried. He should be as good as a a 37-year-old fighting to keep his body in tune can be, by the time he defends his U.S. Open title in New York at the end of August.
Forget all that for a minute, though. With this win, Alcaraz joined one of the most exclusive clubs in men’s tennis. He became the rare player who can win on the slow red clay of Roland Garros in June, then repeat the trick on the slick grass of SW19 in July.
Rod Laver. Bjorn Borg. Rafael Nadal. Roger Federer. Djokovic. And now Alcaraz. That’s it in the Open Era. With an extra chair on the end, they can fit in a booth at one of the pubs in Wimbledon Village.
“A huge honor to me,” the Spaniard said, as he clutched the winner’s trophy in the late-afternoon sun. “Huge champions.”
Then, he said he isn’t one of them yet. He still has a lot of work to do.
He is off to a very good start.
Djokovic called Alcaraz’s win “inevitable”, after 12 days in which the Serbian had made his surgeon, and the physical therapist who guided his rehabilitation from a meniscus operation on June 5, look like true masters of the trade. By the time he dispatched Lorenzo Musetti on Friday to cruise into his 10th Wimbledon final, and 37th Grand Slam final, he appeared to be floating across and up and down the court, as though the surgery had happened in the distant past.
In recent years, he had won Grand Slam titles with tears in an abdominal muscle and a hamstring. At Wimbledon today, he was on the verge of doing it less than six weeks after a knee operation.
Then, however, Alcaraz appeared on the other side of the net.
This was not the nervous, first-time Wimbledon finalist who 12 months ago lost the first five games of the final before somehow recovering from that early blitz. Alcaraz is no longer some boy wonder, and on Sunday he was a man with a championship to defend and a chance to put the sport in a headlock.
“He was better than me in every aspect of the game,” Djokovic said. This final may have an asterisk, one that may grow larger if Djokovic returns to being the player he was before knee surgery, or even a figment of that player. For now, it is an assessment without blemish. “Movement. He was striking the ball beautifully. From the very beginning, he was better.”
Djokovic served first. A dozen minutes later, he was still serving, fighting with everything he had to win what is so often the meaningless first game of a match. Back and forth they went, through seven deuces and five chances for Alcaraz to break.
Alcaraz unleashed his first outrageous shot of the day midway through those 12 minutes, a scorching forehand down the line with Djokovic rushing the net. Djokovic didn’t even bother turning his head. It’s the shot that Alcaraz lands when he is feeling his magic.
Djokovic’s chest was rising and falling between points, his panting audible from 250 feet away. No wonder he was a half-step late to catch up with a volley, the ball dipping below the net before a furtive backhand swish of his racket sent it into the mesh. Then he sent an easy forehand sailing wide. He put himself in a hole — a hole he would spend the next 135 minutes trying to dig himself out of.
Afterwards, he thought back to last year’s epic five-set loss.
“We went toe-to-toe,” Djokovic said, with a mix of pride for having gotten so far so soon after his surgery, and resignation about how dramatically the dynamic had shifted in 12 months. “This year, it was nothing like that. It was all about him. He was the dominant force.”
It’s something everyone is probably going to have to get used to, if they haven’t already.
Jannik Sinner of Italy, the 23-year-old Australian Open champion, remains the world No. 1, because of the complicated formula the sport uses for its rankings. Alcaraz is likely to be back there before too long. Plus, no matter what the rankings say, the Spaniard is now the sport’s alpha dog, a four-time Grand Slam champion with a game that is still developing. He is capable of tennis acrobatics that he relishes almost as much as does winning – and sometimes more. He does plenty of both.
“Shotmaker” doesn’t do the flair of his game justice. Alcaraz is a shot creator, a player who has to always be innovating and improvising, pushing the limits of what he can do with a racket and ball.
After muffing three championship points on his own serve, Alcaraz had to reset to push the final set to a tiebreak and ward off Djokovic one last time.
As he rushed the net, Djokovic fired a ball at his shoelaces. Alcaraz skipped up and dipped the top of his racket to the grass. Somehow, he made the ball spin just over the net. He tried to fight off a grin as he walked back to start the next point, shaking his finger at the crowd.
Then he cracked a 120mph second serve like those three match points had never happened, and then it was the tiebreak and then it was deja vu from Paris. Alcaraz climbed into the stands once more, joining a clump with his team, a three-way embrace with his parents, and then the longest hug of all with Juan Carlos Ferrero, the former world No 1, his coach and tennis father since he was 14.
He knew what he had pulled off, as he rose into the rarefied air of the French Open-Wimbledon double club, ready to sink into another year as the champion of the most important tournament in the sport.
He’s on the road to where he wants to go, still emerging while already a star.
“It’s good for tennis to have new faces,” he said.
Especially him, the brightest new face of all.
(Photos: Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)
