“It’s a meat grinder” | Relief

London.- Carlos Alcaraz was recently asked if he ever got bored, even remotely, with the sport. A bad morning, a tired afternoon… whatever. A moment of transition that happens to everyone in their profession.

“Oh, no, I’m never bored,” he replied.

And it’s never, ever. “My dad didn’t have to push me to play tennis, I had to push him! I was in a group and played three or four days a week when I was six, but even then, on Sundays, at 8am, when the club was empty and the lights were out, I asked my father to come on the court and be able to play more. If my father didn’t want to come, he would just run into a wall“When you’re four or five years old you don’t know what you want to do with your life, but I knew I enjoyed it, I enjoyed hitting the ball and seeing what happened,” he explained on The Times website at the start of this Wimbledon, where he is already in the final.

That boy with endless energy who always loved to play tennis is today a boy, still small but no longer a child, with endless energy who always loves to play tennis.

It may be a cliche, but in many cases it is pure marketing. Many athletes say they experience things they don’t actually experience.if not the other way around. The difference between the facade and what’s inside.

The thing is, no one could be as good an actor as Alcaraz if he didn’t enjoy what he does. His smile is hedonistic, so natural and wide that he can’t fake it.Anyone who has spent more than ten minutes with him in the press room knows that this happiness is not forced upon him.

The firmness of what he does

There are many cases of players who have not withstood this pressure, stories of boys who have been burned by tennis, a very tough sport. It is almost a literary genre: a book recently published, “Tennis Night,” in which Luis Torres de la Osa describes his adventures in his youth, which eventually almost goes crazy. He is not even the only one, Manuel Jabois also often tells how he stopped seeing pleasure in what he is so good at. And perhaps dozens and dozens more, not lacking in literary talent, experienced the same feeling in their youth. Yes, even Andre Agassi hated this sport.

Torres de la Osa himself explains to Relevo how crazy it is. “They drive you crazy, I don’t understand why there are no more crazy people, the scheme is a butcher shop, it’s a meat grinder“Every year, many tennis players enter this beautiful carousel with great enthusiasm, and how many are left in the end? Take the young champions of Roland Garros and Wimbledon, 3% of professionals? And we are talking about great guys, guys who won Wimbledon or Roland Garros at 17, and all this wasted talent has a good role, but … “, – explains the author.

Being Alcaraz means going through a lot of filters and, worse, accepting a lot of resignations. “We have to realize that a tennis player is formed by training, and the first foundation that a beginner tennis player has to have is a huge dedication of time, which is not really appropriate to the age of this child. When you turn 13, you start training for many hours. This puts pressure on the rest of the activities, and the classic thing is that at 15 or 16 you have to make a decision. Those who pursue a dream, and that’s myriads of children, usually choose tennis above all else, and that means more renunciations, more sacrifices.“Not only to possible alternative lives, but also to meeting friends, meeting girls, going to concerts, having dinners… in fact, to become a great tennis player, you have to spend many years giving up in a very unnatural way everything that life offers you,” says Torre de la Osa.

And these things don’t get better as you climb the hill of fame, quite the opposite. This is explained by someone who has reached the top. “External pressure is something that is not said, but felt. If you’re number one, people expect you to win, sponsors… You don’t want to disappoint, you don’t want to lose.“You make films because you feel this pressure. You’re in the eye of a hurricane, and up there on the mountain it’s very windy, and you feel like you’re being watched,” Garbine Muguruza recently reflected in an interesting interview for Esquire.

An interview in which, by the way, he also noted that he likes Alcaraz more than Nadal precisely because of his naturalness, because he sees him as “more self-confident, younger, who speaks more and says what he thinks.” In short, for reasons of character, because One of the things Alcaraz leaves behind for Spain is proof that you can be a great champion without being so strict and harsh. as his predecessor often did in this matter of tennis skill.

Alcaraz has a fire-and-brimstone mentality, and this should not be confused with a specific character. You can have very clear ideas and always set goals without needing the personality of a hard-working Marine.

Work of the mind

Carlos Alcaraz has a very strong team behind him and a good psychological job. He belongs to a generation for whom this topic is no longer taboo, and it is clear that those who have best managed to embrace and integrate these activities into their daily lives have managed to uncover some purely sporting aspects that were much more difficult before.

“Carlos is a guy with a very level head and a very good advisor.“explains a psychologist who knows him well and also knows the scheme. He is surprised by his ability to guess where he might fail – this week he spoke, for example, about his lapses in certain moments of matches or about how he got caught up.” on his mobile phone – but that is also part of our job.

“The one who admits a mistake is strong, the one who can’t admit a mistake is weak. That’s what we work on with the players. If you can’t let the ball through when Rafa or Novak lets it through, clean it up and move on to the next thing. You just don’t have that ability. The fact that he can express this shows that he not only listens to his team, but he integrates it, and how he integrates it is how he gets the results that he gets.that in addition to having a right hand and a lot of very accurate shots, if he integrates the information he receives from his coaching staff, it will be easier for him to achieve the goals he sets for himself,” says the sports psychologist.

The fact that it is a consequence of working with your team does not mean that it is very, very difficult. And most tennis players, the vast majority, do not know how to reach and do it with the joy of life that Alcaraz represents.

“Alcaraz This is a counterexample, perhaps the only one among the elite, to the thesis, which everyone considers valid, that there is no path to happiness.“It happens after the fact, in the shower or in the locker room, ephemeral, but it is a very demanding sport, Alcaraz seems to be the opposite, he seems to feel happiness during the game, which for me is an oxymoron,” says Luis Torres de la Osa.

This is what you see, and also what Alcaraz himself says. In a previous press conference, he explained it this way, speaking about the times he makes absolutely impossible throws: “Maybe I should play more with the efficient throw, with the safest throw, with what the game requires. But, as I said, to Sometimes finding the interesting moment helps me relax, enjoy the game and play it. This is when I play my best tennis“.

“No one has ever seen such pleasure on the track as he did.. It also challenges the idea that tennis is a rejection of life. Alcaraz is a joy to see, surprising to those of us who know the game from the inside. He managed to conjure up this curse, and he looks very happy,” the author explains. Tennis evening.

It wouldn’t hurt to remember once again the rarity of what we’re talking about. Alcaraz is not like the others, he didn’t come out of the same mold.

And there are cases when some things can only be explained from an exceptional point of view: “They called Gauss the prince of mathematics, but I think Alcaraz is the prince of tennis. They called Gauss because the other mathematicians envied him because he seemed to do it in a divine way, everything came out effortlessly, and the others could not do it. In Alcaraz there is such a point of view“We’re all suffering here, killing ourselves to get to this point, and you have this grace that just seems to come out of you.”

This gifted tennis player, a boy unlike any other, will stand on Centre Court at the All England Club tomorrow to play Novak Djokovic, the greatest of them all, in the Wimbledon final. He has already beaten him once, and from what has been said, no one will be surprised if he does it again.