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Blame the post-Grand Slam season hangover.
Or the odd dynamic of the fall pro tennis season, with players showing up with various levels of apathy and differing priorities.
Or jet lag from the long journey to the Far East. Or mental and physical exhaustion during the year’s final quarter.
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Whatever it is, Carlos Alcaraz, until recently the world No 1, the Spanish wunderkind and heir apparent to the ‘Big Three’ for tennis supremacy, has become eminently beatable during this final limping leg of the tennis season.
Ten days ago, Jannik Sinner of Italy, who looks like he will be a top rival for the next decade, made Alcaraz look mortal at the China Open in Beijing, beating him 7-6, 6-1.
On Wednesday, it was the Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov, a player who was supposed to be a rival to the the ‘Big Three’ for the past decade but wasn’t, securing a 5-7, 6-2, 6-4 win at the Shanghai Masters.
After the match, Alcaraz sounded somewhat shaken by how Dimitrov had the gall to keep fighting after the Spaniard erased a 5-3 deficit in the first set.
“A little bit of a surprise for me,” said Alcaraz, who explained he has struggled lately to maintain his concentration. “When I win the first set, more or less, it’s tough for me to keep the focus at the beginning of the second set.”
What this all means in the larger picture is hard to discern at this time of year. Most likely, not much. Surely, a couple of early-ish losses in tournaments that Alcaraz is competing in for the first time aren’t enough to shake his long-term prospects. It is interesting nonetheless, especially with the prestigious Tour Finals one month away.
Fortunately for Alcaraz, he long ago qualified for the event, which for both men and women includes only the year’s top eight players, with jockeying for the last spots often happening into the final weeks of the season.
Now, if you are one of those tennis fans who zones out after the U.S. Open, the final Grand Slam of the year, or even wonders why top-level tournament tennis gets played after the U.S. Open, take heart. There are plenty of fans just like you.
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There are even plenty of players who ask that same question. If an 11-month season feels like too much for even devout fans, imagine how it feels to players who spend so much of the year living out of suitcases and hotel rooms and catching flights from one tournament to the next.
Some quick answers as to why the show goes on:
- Money. More tournaments mean more content, which means more expensive media rights deals and sponsorships, and more opportunities for players to collect prize money and appearance fees.
- Because tennis has to find a chunk of weeks to get to the Far East, and under the current schedule, the Northern hemisphere fall offers the only availability.
- To give players some final chances to qualify for the tour finals. Looking at you Taylor Fritz, Casper Ruud and Tommy Paul.
Different players place varying degrees of importance on making the Tour Finals. Players who have never qualified for it desperately want to go, seeing it as validation of both their stature and their season-long consistency, as well as it being a chance for a big check.
The men’s total prize money is some $15 million (12.31m; €14.24m). An undefeated men’s winner can collect nearly $5 million, more than at any Grand Slam. The total prize money for the women is $9 million.
In years when Rafael Nadal wasn’t sidelined by injury, he could recite from day to day where his fellow players stood in the standings, like Dustin Hoffman spewing baseball statistics in ‘Rain Man’.
Sinner, 22, said making the Tour Finals — not winning his first Grand Slam, or even making his first Grand Slam final — was his top goal for the season. The tournament’s location in Turin, in northwest Italy, might have something to do with that. Sinner is from Innichen in the country’s northeast.
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Others, though, are running on fumes, or battling nagging injuries that they don’t want to cost them a quality rest and training block in a brief off-season sandwiched between national competitions — the Billie Jean King and Davis Cup finals in mid and late November and the United Cup, the mixed team event that the kicks off the next season just after Christmas in Australia.
It all leads to some odd match-ups, machinations and ramifications in these final weeks, such as Alcaraz struggling with his focus against the 19th-ranked Dimitrov.
On the women’s side, the line-up for the finals beginning in Cancun, Mexico on October 29, is set and will feature the winners of the four Grand Slams in 2023, Aryna Sabalenka, Iga Swiatek, Marketa Vondrousova and Coco Gauff, as well as Elena Rybakina, Jessica Pegula, Karolina Muchova, and Ons Jabeur.
Or maybe it won’t.
Four of those qualifiers, Rybakina (back), Gauff (shoulder), Vondrousova (arm), and Muchova (wrist), have been battling injuries in recent weeks, which might open the door to alternates. Maria Sakkari and Madison Keys are the next two players in the qualifying race.
The men’s side is somewhat more open, especially with one more week of competition before the finals begin on November 12, and plenty of rankings points still available for the taking in the coming weeks at mid-tier events in Tokyo, Basel and Vienna and at the Paris Masters during the first week of November. Just four players — Novak Djokovic, Alcaraz, Daniil Medvedev and Sinner – have secured their spots.
The three players within the closest striking distance of Holger Rune of Denmark, who is in eighth place right now, are Fritz, Ruud, and Paul. Fritz made the semi-finals at the Tour Finals in Turin in 2022 and Ruud made the final, in the same year he also made the final at both the French Open and U.S. Open.
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None of the three have been exactly lighting up the courts with runs to the final weekends lately, but all of them are a hot week, especially in Paris, and a few upsets away from a ticket to Turin.
It helps that it’s a time of year when tying your shoelaces and caring a little more than the opponent because something meaningful is on the line can make a big difference.
“A lot of big tournaments for the rest of the year, a lot of opportunities,” Paul said earlier this week in Shanghai. “I’m excited to play.”
Then he lost his next match, in the round of 16, to Andrey Rublev of Russia.
And on it goes.
(Top photo: Hugo Hu/Getty Images)