MELBOURNE — “I just want him to be a pure tennis boy,” the journalist behind me said to their neighbor as we waited for Carlos Alcaraz to come to the main interview room. They were saying how they hoped well-paying exhibitions wouldn’t distract the world No. 1 from his main job, his ATP Tour gig. Alcaraz had just arrived from South Korea, where he’d played a hit-and-giggle with Jannik Sinner that paid out at $2 million, and he’d gone to Saudi Arabia for the lucrative Six Kings Slam in 2024 and 2025, but I took the point. Alcaraz is such a smiley champion that it’s more fun to think of him grinning on the practice court than cashing large checks in petrostates.
He lacked his usual happiness when he walked into the room, though, wearing an oversized Nike baseball shirt and a cap pulled over his eyes. He’d abruptly split with longtime coach Juan Carlos Ferrero the previous month, after the best season of his career so far. Ferrero had given his side of the story, and various reports had blamed friction between Alcaraz’s family and coach, or Ferrero’s desire to travel less, but we were yet to hear from Alcaraz beyond an Instagram post. Why had a seemingly summery partnership met its end? It was time to find out.
I tried to make my question as blunt as possible, inevitably clumsy phrasing notwithstanding: “There's been a lot of reporting about what happened with Juan Carlos. I think a lot of people are still kind of confused about what happened. I would love to ask you: What happened?” He ducked the question, saying the split was a mutual internal decision—the many interviews Ferrero has done in the past month were much more specific—and that they still had a good relationship. He didn’t expand much in other answers. A representative soundbite: “As I said, I have the same team that I had last year. Just one member missing.”
Only one member, sure, but a key one. Ferrero, the 2003 Roland-Garros champion, had worked with Alcaraz since he was 16, offering constant dialogue from the side of the court, at times even telling him where to serve. To add to the pressure, Alcaraz went into the Australian Open having never made it past the quarterfinals, despite winning all the other majors twice. Three reputable media members specifically picked the declining Daniil Medvedev to beat Alcaraz in the semifinals here, off the evidence of a little Meddy resurgence at the end of 2025 and the uncertainty of what would become of this outrageously talented lump of clay without its sculptor.
Alcaraz’s first-round match against helpless Aussie underdog Adam Walton offered a clue. When breaking down matches between all-time greats and their first-round opponents, broadcasters often ask the question of what the lesser player can do to win. Sometimes they will evade the real answer (nothing, except maybe pray their opponent has the flu) in favor of bad-faith advice like “make 90 percent of first serves.” For the first set, Walton really did make 90 percent of first serves—93 percent, to be precise. This is not something that ever happens, really, and can’t be gameplanned for.
Alcaraz won that set 6-3. A common knock on him is his willingness to pull the trigger on low-margin shots, when a safer stroke would do. Later in the tournament, I’d ask him about his tendency to hit floppy backhand second-serve returns long, shots that don’t seem designed to do much even if they did land in. (He said he’s always trying to improve his return in general, and that the wind in Melbourne can make it tricky to measure returns hit from a deep position, though I’d seen him miss plenty at other tournaments.) While these are not unfair criticisms, they can elide the fact that Alcaraz is still a masterful returner, particularly on the first serve. He’s in the right place at the right time to return his opponents’ bombs eerily often, and has led his elite peers in winning percentage on first-serve return points since 2023. Against Walton, Alcaraz read the serves and neutralized them immediately with hard or deep backhand returns. Walton’s extraordinary first-serve percentage meant nothing against this returning prowess. A couple times, Alcaraz strained at the end of his range to return a serve that clearly had him beat, making me cringe. At the championship match of the World Tour Finals in 2025, Alcaraz stretched so far for a Jannik Sinner serve that he came up with a hamstring edema (he missed the return anyway).
“He’s got to be careful, you know, he doesn’t run basically for every ball, because it’s not necessary,” Roger Federer said of Alcaraz in 2024. I don’t think Alcaraz would have listened even if Federer had said it’s also sometimes dangerous. The hunt, after all, is the point. Alcaraz won in three occasionally strenuous sets, and in his second round as well.
In the third round against fellow shotmaker Corentin Moutet, Alcaraz shanked a swing volley. I mean he totally shanked it, the ball dribbling pathetically off the frame of his racket. Alcaraz also elected to play a series of batty points in which he abandoned the baseline for wild aggression or desperate defense. Never has a real match felt so much like an exhibition to me as when Moutet netted an overhead volley in the third set, then pulled new balls out of his pocket to practice the shot until he made it. Odd tactics and moments like this made Alcaraz’s eventual win feel inefficient, especially next to Sinner or Novak Djokovic. At least until you look at the scoreline, 6-2, 6-4, 6-1, and wonder if you have adopted the same standard for Alcaraz that he has for himself: becoming the greatest player ever.
When Alcaraz beat Tommy Paul in straight sets two days later, I realized something else: he’d stopped losing sets at majors. Since losing to Sinner in the 2025 Wimbledon final, Alcaraz’s only blemish was one lost set at the U.S. Open (also to Sinner). He’d won 33 of 34 in that span. Sinner, who has set a freakishly high standard of consistency over the past two years, had lost six in the same window. It still didn’t seem like Alcaraz was playing his best. All three sets with Paul were close on the scoreboard, and at no point did Alcaraz separate himself more than he had to.
But Paul cut a despondent figure in press that implied he’d been blown out. “He totally outplayed me,” he said, and called Alcaraz’s crosscourt forehand “devastating.” I wondered if he’d been drawing on his two wins over Alcaraz in 2022 and 2023 for confidence, only to realize those younger, sloppier versions of Carlos no longer existed.
Alex de Minaur probably thought he had a real chance in the quarterfinals. I certainly thought he did, even being well aware that he was winless against Sinner and Alcaraz, with a particularly grisly 0-13 record against the former. But watching his early rounds, I couldn’t believe how much he’d improved. This underpowered speedster’s victory over overmatched opponents now looked as inevitable as anybody else’s. Occasionally, an opponent would lash the ball with all their might onto the line, and it would sneak by de Minaur for a winner. He would then applaud, knowing full well they couldn’t do that again. Who does he remind me of right now? I wondered, as de Minaur walked stiffly to his towel after cleaning the court with his efficient footwork once more. Oh, yeah. Sinner.
Then Alcaraz’s first hard-hit forehand pierced right through his opponent’s defense, and he was up 3-0 in a blink. De Minaur didn’t have a winner or an unforced error through the early rallies, emphasizing that every single point’s outcome hinged on Alcaraz, even when he missed. An Alcaraz backhand vacation allowed de Minaur to claw back the break; he later retrieved another with a leaping backhand winner down the line. But after he lost the first set 7-5, the gap widened. Alcaraz can match de Minaur’s supernatural foot speed and has far more natural power in his serve and forehand, forcing Alex to, as he said after the match, “[play] out of my comfort zone, and at times out of my skin” to keep pace.
Alcaraz demands this, with defense that isn’t quite like any I’ve seen before. It starts with his blinding speed, which makes him the most effective court-shrinker on tour when he chooses to hug the baseline. But he’s also happy to flail from the back wall, which results in more mishaps but also more points in which he returns the five best shots the opponent has ever hit. This is less efficient but more psychologically destructive, especially when Alcaraz is playing someone who can struggle with their offense at the best of times. After his three-set loss, de Minaur was even more deflated than Paul in press.
Aesthetically, there’s no worse matchup for Alcaraz than Alexander Zverev. Though he’s destroyed Zverev in a few of their summits, he’s also found himself befuddled by the odd combination of big serve, rock-solid backhand, and a forehand that vacillates between blinding aggression and “Richard Gasquet.” In the past, Alcaraz’s dubious serve had coughed up some terrible games at worse times, costing him in the quarterfinals at the 2024 Australian Open.
In the 2026 semis, his serve was enough of a strength to win him the first set despite some shoddy baselining. When Alcaraz won the second set in a tiebreak after trailing 5-2, he looked safe. Then he vomited into his towel on a changeover in the third set and became immobilized from cramps. Despite Zverev’s appalling inability to hit the ball to any spot on the court besides the one directly in front of Alcaraz, we found ourselves in a fifth set. Alcaraz’s movement returned for it, but he went down a break immediately.
With Zverev serving at 3-2, 30-15, Alcaraz ran down a drop volley along the gnarliest diagonal of the court, beginning his sprint from the lettering well behind the baseline, and poked a cheeky forehand past his opponent. A frenzied, passionate scream tore from the crowd; every free arm in the section to my left was in the air. A few members of the press box abandoned neutrality and began applauding various winners. Spanish and German journalists around me were tweaking the ledes to their story drafts to account for what seemed like the most probable outcome at any given moment. Alcaraz worked his way to break point in that game, having had break point in the previous game, and would have break point again in the next game. He wasted them all, some with unforced errors he simply does not hit in his favored fifth-set territory. Zverev is regarded as the ultimate big-moment bottom-feeder in men’s tennis, and Alcaraz has lost just one five-set match in his career. I thought Alcaraz would lose—he’d let so many break points go by—and the prospect of him losing to Zverev from two sets up made me think of LeBron James’s eight-point performance in the 2011 NBA Finals, a blemish his biggest haters insisted they could still see long after he wiped it away.
Returning to stay in the match at 5-4, his last chance to break, Alcaraz promptly converted the first break point he had a look at. With his back against the wall, Alcaraz is as reliable as any player I have ever seen, whether he’s playing with a lot of margin or flicking half-volleys that should go in no more than two times out of ten. His best tennis emerges naturally from necessity. Alcaraz then held serve easily for 6-5, and it occurred to me that his win had really been inevitable this entire time. He rises to the occasion, while Zverev shrinks from it. Why would cramps change that? It was like a law of nature.
Zverev later said in press that most of his regrets were from the second set, and he felt like he was clinging on throughout the fifth, even though he played some of the best tennis of his career during that set, even though he led most of it. Alcaraz has now won seven majors. He is 15-1 in five-setters, with that one loss coming in 2022, when he was 18. I am not being facetious when I say these patterns feel entirely sustainable to me. “I just hate giving up,” Alcaraz said after beating Zverev. “Those feelings, those thoughts, just kill myself.”
Somehow the second semifinal topped the first for plot twists. Sinner had beaten Djokovic five times in a row, had won nine sets in a row, was hardly even losing service games against the greatest returner of all time anymore. But late in the fifth set, as Sinner burned break point after break point and Djokovic kept surviving, I thought about inevitability again. I do not believe in fate, but Djokovic's eventual five-set win felt like it made more sense than any other outcome. Conventional wisdom is never to count out the best player ever, but everybody did for this match. (Look up the pre-match odds.)
The whole day felt like a dream. I waited around until 2 a.m. for Djokovic’s presser, subsisting off another writer’s Skittles and Snickers bars with the media cafe closed. We eventually got a message saying that Djokovic wouldn’t be coming to the main interview room, but somebody would bring us to him. We ended up taking a lift to the underground part of the stadium, walking past a wall with a big picture of Monica Seles, and piling outside a tiny room with blue lighting already packed with journalists, obscuring Novak from view. Soft, swirly animations played on parts of the walls, making it feel as though we were in an aquarium. Djokovic’s disembodied voice drifted out from behind the crowd to tell us that he was not surprised, to be honest, that he won a match Sinner was favored to dominate. It was all appropriately surreal. An Australian radio guy shouldered his way to the front of the crowd and asked Djokovic a question the man had already answered before the radio guy arrived. The moderator’s face was distorted through some kind of glass. As the improvised presser ended and people began to stream out, I tried to catch a glimpse of the man, and finally did so in a small crescent of space between crowd and wall. He was sitting in a white chair, wearing a navy cap and a pale green shirt. Then I felt a tournament staff member’s nails on my arm as they escorted us to the door.
I have never read the word “destiny” so many times in a final preview. Djokovic’s win over Sinner brought him to within one match of a 25th major title, but earlier in the tournament, he’d also gotten a walkover when Jakub Mensik withdrew from their scheduled fourth-round match, and was two sets down to Lorenzo Musetti in the quarterfinal when the Italian pulled up lame with a groin injury. The accumulated mileage on Djokovic’s legs had made him impotent in three of four major semifinals in 2025, but everything lined up here perfectly to give him a clean shot at Sinner. This must have meant that he was fated to win the final. ESPN ran a prediction roundtable, and all three of their contributors picked Djokovic to beat Alcaraz.
I felt the predictions underestimated Alcaraz’s own capacity to change an outcome seemingly set in stone, and the effects of the semifinal on Djokovic’s legs. But Alcaraz certainly had reason to be nervous. Djokovic is the only player on tour who he’s never quite figured out. Even against Sinner, there is a sense of comfort. Alcaraz knows his rival will send the best-quality baseline onslaught his way without a whole lot of variety. Sometimes, like at Wimbledon or the ATP Finals in 2025, that onslaught overcomes Alcaraz. But Carlos knows what to do in response, as his 7-2 record against Sinner in the last two years proves.
Djokovic is a different beast. In the 2023 Roland-Garros semifinals, his aura alone forced Alcaraz into full-body cramps; he was lucky to finish that one on his feet. Djokovic turned their 2024 Olympic final, ostensibly played on slow clay, into a fast-court match with a peerless serve-and-forehand performance. He discombobulated Alcaraz yet again at the 2025 Australian Open with more aggression, this time with a bum hamstring. Internet posters often like to say that if a post-prime Djokovic can beat Alcaraz, 2011 Djokovic would annihilate Alcaraz, but I think Novak’s age has been one of his greatest assets against his much younger opponent. Djokovic may have had better legs in his 20s, but he was not yet experienced enough to orchestrate such intricate tactical and psychological masterpieces.
Djokovic won the first set of the final 6-2, and I hope I’m not exaggerating when I say I’ve never seen him play a better set. Rafael Nadal was watching from the front row; he must have been suffering through unpleasant flashbacks to the 2019 final. Alcaraz looked tight and tentative. Djokovic is a master of dissecting his opponents’ forehands, even some of the best in history, and has drawn plenty of errors by whacking flat balls into Alcaraz’s strength. But even when Carlos had time on the ball, he chose to roll rather than belt. At the time, I interpreted it as proof that he had injured his right adductor against Zverev and couldn’t set up properly for his favorite shot. There seemed no good reason why he’d let Djokovic dictate so many rallies. After the first set, Alcaraz was not only down, but seemed to be playing the match without his best weapon.
That sense of jeopardy vanished as soon as it arrived. Djokovic’s level plummeted in the second set. Sinner had left him with only 45 minutes of gas, maybe, or perhaps he picked up an injury. While Alcaraz still wasn’t ripping his forehand, he began employing an angled spinner shot designed to move Djokovic laterally—the same shot with which Djokovic beat Nadal at Roland-Garros in 2021. Running forehands that Novak once might have been able to return with interest, he now missed more often than he made.
The most alarming part of Alcaraz’s performance was his defense. At 1-2 in the third set, he belted a forehand down the line that Djokovic somehow lifted back, at the end of his range, into an uncomfortable position on Alcaraz’s backhand. Carlos rolled a sharp angle crosscourt, but Novak was onto it. He tore forward and winged a vicious backhand around the net post, a better shot than many of the winners in this match. But Alcaraz was there in a few explosive steps, straining, sliding, and scooping a forehand winner back into play. Djokovic put his hands on his hips, the way he sometimes does after a great point, but a knowing grimace was on his face in place of his usual sardonic grin. As he prepared to serve for the next point, Alcaraz applauded Djokovic's losing effort, the first time I’ve ever seen that done, and it was sincere.
On the opening point of what would become the final game, Djokovic unloaded his entire baseline arsenal. He got Alcaraz on the move with a backhand down the line, then kept him there with inside-out forehands and crosscourt backhands. Alcaraz didn’t go for an ill-advised winner. He just kept defending, blocking everything back, secure in the knowledge that Djokovic would tire first. He’d finally learned how to make the best use of his awesome defensive tools. Djokovic eventually slapped the net with an exasperated crosscourt backhand. As Alcaraz raised a fist, steady on his feet, Djokovic staggered. His serve and forehand deserted him after that, and the match was over shortly afterward.
Nadal clapped respectfully but unenthusiastically as Alcaraz dropped to the ground in triumph. He seemed to take pains to hide his allegiances during the match. I wondered who he wanted to win: the old man who got the best of their 60-match rivalry and had already exceeded his legacy, or the young man from the same country as him who posed a further threat to it. Afterward, Djokovic earnestly thanked Nadal for being there, though the main reason he was in Melbourne at all was to show face as an ambassador for a car brand that partnered with the Australian Open.
I wondered if it was a bit more than Nadal deserved. Djokovic’s desire to be closer to Nadal and Federer is no secret, and despite being consistently kind to them, he doesn’t seem to have gotten there. Later, Alcaraz took the mic to tell Djokovic that he inspired him, and that “I enjoy so much watching you play.” Djokovic had never heard anything of the like from Nadal or Federer, and spent much of his career striving to be appreciated in proportion to his mastery of the game.
After the ceremony, Djokovic packed his bags and walked off the court to more applause. The emcee’s request that the crowd give it up one more time didn’t come until Djokovic had departed. It looked to me like Alcaraz watched him leave. Then he returned to his trophy and addressed the cameras with a smile: if not a pure tennis boy in that moment, then close enough.
