NEW YORK — Everyone kept waiting for Carlos Alcaraz to turn the tide at the US Open.
Alcaraz thought it would happen at some point. And so did his opponent. And so did the crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium and the people watching on TV. After all, this is Carlos Alcaraz we’re talking about — the 21-year-old prodigy with four Grand Slam titles already, including one at Flushing Meadows as a teenager.
A man who is now at the top of the game. A man who is expected to accept the mantle of the Big Three of Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer. A man who went into the US Open as a favourite and went into the second round in New York on a 15-match winning streak in the majors, with championships in the Roland Garros in June and Wimbledon in July, plus a silver medal at the Olympic Games in Paris early August.
The best version of Alcaraz did not come into being on Thursday evening in the Arthur Ashe Stadium against the 74th-seeded Botic van de Zandschulp, who eventually won 6-1, 7-5, 6-4a result as astonishing for who won as for how easily he did so.
In hindsight it sounded as if number 3 Alcaraz was a little concerned about what this might mean.
“Instead of taking steps forward, mentally I have taken steps backwards. I can’t understand the reason,” he said during the Spanish part of his post-match press conference. “I need to check what is happening to me.”
It wasn’t just that Alcaraz sounded defeated.
He also sounded bewildered.
“I couldn’t see the ball well. … I couldn’t hit it well. It’s a strange feeling,” Alcaraz said. “I’m not good mentally, I’m not strong. I don’t know how to deal with the difficult moments, and that’s a problem for me.”
On the other side of the net was Van de Zandschulp, a 28-year-old Dutchman who seriously considered retirement a few months ago and entered the US Open with an 11-18 record this season and without two consecutive victories at a tour-level tournament.
He has only reached the quarterfinals of a Grand Slam tournament once, three years ago at Flushing Meadows.
Van de Zandschulp was therefore quite certain that the one-sided nature of Thursday’s match would change.
“Even in the third you think, ‘He’s going to come up with something special,'” van de Zandschulp said. “I thought that the whole game, actually.”
But Alcaraz just couldn’t get going.
He couldn’t really explain why he was never able to turn the tide or why he couldn’t find anything that worked.
“Today I played against the opponent, and I played against myself, in my mind,” Alcaraz said. “A lot of emotions that I couldn’t control.”
When a reporter offered a possible explanation – exhaustion after a busy period – Alcaraz acknowledged that a tennis schedule he called “so tight” might have been too tiring.
He went from the clay of Roland Garros to the grass of the All England Club, to the clay of the Summer Games and then to the hard courts of North America.
“I probably came here with less energy than I thought I would have,” Alcaraz said. “But I mean, I don’t want to use that as an excuse.”
Perhaps the devastating loss to Novak Djokovic in the Olympic final, which left Alcaraz in tears, was hard to process. In the only hard-court match he played before the US Open — a defeat to Gael Monfils at the Cincinnati Open — Alcaraz lost his cool and repeatedly smashed his racket on the court, a reaction for which he later apologized.
Now he has lost three of his last four matches and must find a way to bridge this period and prepare for the next Grand Slam tournament, the Australian Open in January.
But then again, maybe Alcaraz shouldn’t be too hard on himself. There must be a reason why only two men in the past 55 years have won the Paris, London and New York championships in a single season: Rod Laver in 1969 (when he completed a Grand Slam in a calendar year) and Rafael Nadal in 2010.
“I have to think about it,” Alcaraz said. “I have to learn from it … if I want to improve.”
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AP sports reporter Eric Núñez contributed to this report.
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Howard Fendrich has been AP’s tennis reporter since 2002. Here are his stories: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich
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AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis