The tip of one foot sneaks down on the edge In the elevator that leads to the Philippe-Chaatrier gallery and the door opens suddenly again. Suddenly, with all its size, Count Dracula appears, that is, the almighty businessman and former transilvano tennis player, Ion Tiriac. Huge, great glasses with golden mount, one of those beard mustaches that never predict an affable character. The former Roland Garros champion, today a multi -million dollar businessman, enters the cubicle and goes to his impressed interlocutor, perhaps taking him for Italian. “It will only win if it serves better than Friday.” Who? “Sinner, sir, of course.” The Italian, a total tennis player, not only did that perfectly on Sunday. But the game, I didn’t even know Tiriac at that time, was going to be played in another territory.
The news, was the birth of a new era after a quarter of a prodigious century chaired by the big three. Of the extermination of starvation of several generations of tennis players who got used to seeing the finals of the great tournaments from the gallery. Blessed by the newly opened Bladosín on the court with the name of Rafael Nadal, the largest Spanish in Paris, Sinner and Alcaraz, they opened the will in front of everyone what we already knew: the inheritance is for them.
Such a game, the first final they played, could only win. Or enjoying suffering. Saving two sets to zero first. Then three party points followed. At the blow of ace In the second tie break. “The victory belongs to the most tenacious”, the phrase of the Aviator Roland Garros, illuminated at that time by the spring sun of Paris in one the stands of the Philippe Chatrier, before the epic on the track was turning off the lights of the day, remembered the sacrifice and the constancy required by the elite sport. , have a vision of the matter somewhat less Protestant.
The last 15 minutes of the series are an impressive repertoire of allegations in favor of sacrifice, of the need to give up almost everything, life, to be number 1. “If you have the feeling that you have given up too much, you will not get it,” Nadal says. But they are also, in the mouth of Alcaraz, the rupture of that principle embodied by the stories of children, often taken to inhuman limits by their parents, to reach glory. Agassi, the Williams, Steffi Graf, Mary Pierce. An emotional wasteland in childhood memories.
Alcaraz’s attitude to the trade – his way – is also a generational portrait about the relationship with work, with his own life. An expression of joy and hesitation, such as when after winning the third set, the first in the entire championship that lost Sinner, the beginning of the incredible comeback, the Murcian took his finger his ear, as if saying, what happens, I do not hear you, we will have fun. Also against that old idea of the priesthood as a fundamental principle for victory. We have seen it in series and books lately. In our jobs. A general mobilization against that idea that work must provide us with fullness, pleasure, and happiness without taking into account what happens when the working day ends. , in whose tender ideology the trade can be accepted through fun, inside and outside the field.
Alcaraz, who did not give up on Sunday until those left that poison the sand began to enter when they land slowly, destroy all those myths openly defending the need to have fun, to go out at night, to “burst” in Ibiza, to be able to be happy, be well with himself and then give up on the track. A way of understanding life and sport only before Brazilians, but increasingly claimed by elite athletes, also aware of the weight of mental health and the need to be at peace and keep your demons at bay to win.
Some limits, such as this stratospheric final, where we had to pull head when there were no legs left. Not even the total sacrifice, or evasion at certain times transport anyone there. Alcaraz and Sinner, after a party impossible to explain with statistics or artificial intelligence, now enter that mythological sphere of the great athletes who improved competing with each other, moving the lines of their mental trenches thanks to the ambition and the virtues of the other. Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo, Fernando Alonso and Hamilton, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus …
Sinner and Alcaraz, in addition, will push them in the next few years the annoying comparison with their predecessors. The Murcian has achieved his fifth Grand Slam at the age of 22, one month and three days. Exactly the same as Rafael Nadal when Wimbledon won in 2008, also his fifth Grand Slam. One more prophecy than to get rid of. Even at night, as he said in the documentary, having dinner in a glass.
