Permanent Residency

Carlos Alcaraz is the real thing.

Ever held your breath while handling a priceless antique, scared that one misplaced finger will send it crumbling to dust? Something brimming with so much beauty that even the most basic movement felt fraught with danger? In such situations, we are so jittery. We coddle that vase, treating it like a fragile flower. We remind ourselves and everyone around us to not get carried away by the vibrant colours on top.

But sometimes, that apparently fragile thing can surprise you. Take off the bubble wrap and it emerges as this unbreakable block, as if made of iron.

Carlos Alcaraz first made us squint at the 2021 US Open. He was 18, on his first trip to New York, but you couldn't tell that from his game. He tore through seeded players on his way to the quarter-final. By the end of the tournament, the speed gun readings left everyone rubbing their eyes - his forehand was three miles per hour faster than any other man; his backhand five.

Alright, seems like a good player, no?

A few months later, Alcaraz was in Madrid for the ATP Masters 1000. He first dismantled Rafael Nadal in the quarter-finals. Granted, Nadal was about as fit as a week-old croissant at the time, but this was still Nadal on clay. Wiry teenagers don't get to mess around with the guy who literally owns the surface like some territorial lizard. A day later, Alcaraz took down Novak Djokovic in the semis.

Four ATP titles in four months, the youngest to crack the top-10 rankings since Nadal himself. Quarter-finals at the French Open; fourth round at Wimbledon; the title at the US Open. World number 1. At 19 years of age.

I'm in Shillong, sipping red wine bought from a shack on the Assam-Meghalaya state highway. It's misty outside, and the evening drizzle turns the mid-September hilly air into an embrace of chill. The network is patchy, but a friend manages to send me a link he's found on Reddit. It's an article on Alcaraz, written the month before. The writer's name sounds familiar.

What do I tell you? We're in love.

2023, French Open. Alcaraz on clay, again. But he's a more rounded, mature player by now. There are more arrows in his quiver. We're calling him Nadal's heir in hushed tones, a title exciting, heavy, and careless in equal measure. Unfortunately, we wouldn't get to see the master play against the prodigy this time, for those taped knees have forced Nadal to seek another long break. Alcaraz breezes through the tournament, his confidence and boldness literally bouncing off the Parisian clay. In the semi-finals, he finds Novak Djokovic, alkaline water and gluten-free haemoglobin running through his veins, staring at him.

Alright, Carlos, show us what you got.

Djokovic wins the first set; Alcaraz wins the second. Here we go. A five-setter between a bottomless well of endurance and a kinetic fireball is a mouth-watering prospect. Much more appetising than the soulless omelette I was going to cook on this midweek night. Health plans be damned, I pick up my phone and summon a couple of food delivery apps.

The details of the remaining sets will blur with time, but this match will find a mention, if not a passage, in the Alcaraz biography. The scorecard tells a story - 6-1, 6-1 to Djokovic in the final two sets - but not in entirety. Alcaraz cramped at the end of the second set, right when he had Djokovic crouching on the ropes. The cramps worsened with every rally, and well, Djokovic wasn't going to miss out. After the game, Alcaraz confessed to letting the pressure of a big semi-final get to him.

I settle on some thai curry for dinner. Not the night for greasy chinese.

A month later, it's Djokovic across the net again, this time in the final at Centre Court, Wimbledon. The Wimbledon title match can, by now, be called Djokovic's personal garden party. A decade has passed since anyone has beaten him here; seven years since anyone has beaten him anywhere at Wimbledon. The first set, surprise surprise, goes 6-1 to Djokovic.

Life comes at you fast, eh? Not quite at the top yet.

But Alcaraz roars back, taking the second, third, and fifth sets. By the final hour, he flies on a different level than Djokovic, both physically and technically. As the shadows lengthen in mid-summer London, Alcaraz gets to wrap his arms around that gleaming golden trophy.

“I haven’t played a player like him ever, to be honest,” - Djokovic, in his post-match press interview after the Wimbledon final

One year since, and he has added the French Open trophy to his cabinet too. I learn of a term called "surface slam", meaning a Grand Slam title on each of the three surfaces - grass, clay, and hard. Alcaraz has ticked that off at 21. For perspective, Sampras never won a slam on clay, Roger Federer was 27 when he finished the surface slam, and Nadal was 22.

Real? Absolutely real.

In this time, Carlos Alcaraz has made people stop in their tracks, skip dinner, cancel plans - the entire works. He is wired to be a showstopper. His tennis is like a heavy metal song composed entirely as a chorus section in different octaves, set to a rhythm unlike anything we’ve known before.

And it comes with perfect timing. As an era of the highest possible technical competence and consistency draws to a close, Carlos Alcaraz is whirring up the rocket to take tennis to a completely new dimension.

"Week in and week out, he’s doing what young talents are supposed to do; he’s finding entirely new ways to bend the game to his imagination. He’s so fast that when he sprints to get to a ball, it looks like an editing gimmick—like someone cut out the middle of the video. He’s stronger and more lithe than Federer, quicker than Nadal, more creative and audacious than Djokovic." - Brian Phillips, here.

Sportswriting has a curious way of twisting language. Words morph and their weights shift depending on the context. Take "great," for instance. We love throwing this word around in regular conversations – on that new pair of shoes, the restaurant we just tried, or the latest Netflix binge. But when it comes to athletes, we hesitate.

We reserve "great" like a precious jewel, only bestowing it when the evidence is undeniable and time has validated it. We hesitate because that word implies greatness, a sustained legacy.

And with young prodigies, we're especially cautious, bordering on superstitious. Careers can rise spectacularly like a soufflé, only to deflate just as rapidly. Not every shooting star maintains its trajectory. Perhaps ours is a fear of tempting fate, a premonition of the inevitable Icarus fall. We grapple with doubt – are we witnessing a true genius, or just a flash in the pan, a pretender in borrowed clothes?

"Good" and its variations are much more comfortable territory. Twenty goals in five consecutive seasons? Good. Two Olympic podium finishes? Nice. Do we know if Maria Sharapova was good or great?

It took Diego Maradona a decade of sold-out stadiums and a World Cup crown for him to be spoken of as a true icon, a peer to Pelé. And how long did we stall before we finally conceded that Lionel Messi could probably be the greatest ever to kick a football? That his ability and longevity indeed rack up favourably against St. Diego himself?

Similarly, you would shift in your chair and look at your screen with grave suspicion if I told you that Rishabh Pant already has a better Test batting CV than any other Indian wicketkeeper-bat, ever. But it's not an opinion. He does.

Sometimes, there's a whisper of envy lurking beneath our withheld praise. We struggle to accept the audacity of someone so young rewriting the conventional path to the top.

“When you see somebody at his age who can hit the ball that big already off both sides and moves that well, it’s close to unique. To me, his backhand is better than his forehand. He misses his forehand. It’s huge, but he misses it. He doesn’t miss the backhand much at all. Sometimes I wonder, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, whether someone who plays like that is fearless or doesn’t have any tennis IQ yet. That’s the unknown, but if you look at the kid’s tools, once he understands how to open up the court, use short angles, and realise he doesn’t need to blast everything, it will be pretty scary.”

This is Paul Annacone, who has coached both Sampras and Federer, speaking in 2021.

Three Grand Slams and a career win-loss ratio that, after more than 200 games, is better than what Boris Becker and Pete Sampras eventually finished with. Fitness permitting – and that's a major spectre considering his ferocious playing style – greatness for Carlos Alcaraz is a question of when, not if. We might hold off on the grand labels for a bit longer, spoiled as we are by the Big Three and Serena in these last two decades. But when we finally do crown him, the wait will have been well worth it.