Before Carlos Alcaraz was great, he was good enough to be lucky

Carlos Alcaraz is so good, so young and wins so often that his success seemed predestined.

Of course, someone that fast, with hands as soft as a craftsman’s and a physique that puts him right in the not-too-tall and not-too-short Goldilocks zone of the modern tennis greats, would become the youngest No. 1 in the world during the 50-year history of the ATP rankings. He also has good genes. His father was a nationally ranked professional in Spain as a teenager.

So this was destined for Alcaraz, the 20-year-old champion who comes to Paris this week as the prohibitive favorite to win the French Open, wasn’t it?

Maybe not.

As so often happens in sports, and especially in tennis, where early exposure and training are essential, there was a luck factor that helped create the heir to the sport that was clearly visible for the troika of Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic who ruled the men. game for most of the last two decades.

That happiness eventually took the form of a local candy company’s logo, which graced the shirts Alcaraz wore to his matches from the time he was 10 years old. It was all thanks to chance encounters with Alfonso López Rueda, the tennis-playing president of Postres Reina, a Spanish dessert and candy conglomerate known for its puddings and yogurts. López Rueda’s interest in Alcaraz and the support that enabled him to travel across Europe and compete against older boys in unfamiliar environments may explain how, from the start of his short career, Alcaraz almost always had a kind of joyful serenity has shown. even as the stage got bigger and the floodlights hotter.

“Some personalities are just adept at that, some have to learn it,” says Paul Annacone, who has coached the greats Federer and Pete Sampras, among others. “He just seems to really enjoy the environment — winning, losing, whatever — seems to embrace it.”

The greatest fortune an aspiring tennis player can have, it seems, was born to parents who played the game at the highest level. The pro ranks, especially on the men’s side, suck with fake babies. Casper Ruud, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Sebastian Korda, Taylor Fritz and Ben Shelton are all descendants of former professionals. All of them had a racket in their hands from a young age and almost unlimited access to someone who could handle it best.

For everyone else, some kismet is key.

The skills required by professional tennis are so specialized and the long and expensive process of honing them has to start at such a young age. But the player development system in most countries is broken and coincidental at best, with all school programs usually limited. Either a family consciously decides to expose a young child to tennis, or the child does not play, at least not seriously.

It’s no surprise, then, that so many creation stories in professional tennis seem to include a sliding door moment.

Frances Tiafoe is unlikely to become a Grand Slam semifinalist if his father, an immigrant from Sierra Leone, becomes a handyman at an office park instead of at a local tennis club.

Novak Djokovic was lucky enough to meet Jelena Gencic, one of the best coaches in Serbia, when he was 6 years old and she gave a tennis clinic on the courts near his parents’ restaurant in Kopaonik, in the Serbian mountains near Montenegro .

Arthur Ashe was traveling in Cameroon in 1971 when he saw an 11-year-old schoolboy with raw talent to burn. He called his friend Philippe Chatrier from the French tennis federation and told him to come and have a look. That boy was Yannick Noah, the last Frenchman to win the French Open.

As with the others, Alcaraz’s supernatural gifts and abilities played the greatest role in his good fortune. When he got the chance to impress, he did, but first luck had to give an opportunity.

The story of that opportunity begins with Alcaraz’s grandfather’s decision decades ago to develop tennis courts and a swimming pool at a yacht club in El Palmar, a suburb of the city of Murcia. It would have been cheaper to put in all the hard courts, but the Spaniards like the red clay. So Grandpa Alcaraz (another Carlos) made sure to get those jobs involved in the development.

Now flash forward to a dozen years ago. López Rueda is the tennis-mad CEO of Postres Reina, based in Caravaca de la Cruz. But López Rueda doesn’t just like tennis; he likes to play tennis on red clay. He lives in the same region as the Alcaraz clan, and the best and most accessible clay courts for him are in a club in El Palmar, so he plays there, said Jose Lag, a longtime Postres Reina manager and a friend of the Alcaraz- family, speaking on behalf of his boss, López Rueda.

At the club, he befriended Alcaraz’s father and played as his uncle’s doubles partner. López Rueda’s son, who is three years older than Alcaraz, also had the same coach, Kiko Navarro, who couldn’t stop cheering Carlito’s talents. One day López Rueda agreed to watch the boy play and it was unlike anything he had ever seen. Carlito had everything, but his family’s resources were limited. His father was a tennis coach and club administrator, and his mother was busy raising the boy and his younger siblings.

López Rueda agreed to loan the family 2,000 euros to travel to a tournament, but then he started thinking bigger and decided to involve his company in supporting this local boy who was already able to grow bigger, stronger and older beat competition.

Postres Reina had long supported local basketball and soccer teams, but tennis was López Rueda’s favorite sport and the company had never sponsored an individual athlete. Alcaraz became the first and wore the company logo on its shirts.

The company’s support, which lasted into Alcaraz’s early teens, allowed him to continue to have access to the best coaching in his region and travel across Europe to play in the most competitive tournaments.

“It’s not done out of marketing interest,” Lag said. “It was just to help him. We never thought he would be number 1.”

Seeing Alcaraz’s success, IMG, the sports and entertainment conglomerate, signed him at the age of 13, giving him even more access, most notably to his current coach, former world No. 1 Juan Carlos Ferrero.

Chances are that Alcaraz would have ended up being a top player if López Rueda had never seen him. The Spanish tennis federation, which has one of the world’s best talent development pipelines, would probably have gotten wind of him soon.

Max Eisenbud, the director of tennis at IMG, said that in any tennis success story, the most important ingredient is a close-knit family willing to take a long-term view of a child’s success.

“That’s the secret recipe,” Eisenbud said in a recent interview, but he acknowledged that financial aid for a family in need can certainly help.

When a player develops as fast as Alcaraz and rises from outside the top 100 in May 2021 to number 1 16 months later, it can be said that every detail of his development plays a role in the outcome.

Alcaraz’s colleagues have watched in awe as he raised his level of play with each tournament, at a time when the constant spotlight tortures so many of them. During the first months of Alcaraz challenging the top sports of the tour, Alexander Zverev marveled at his ability to play “just for the joy”.

Alcaraz said that regardless of what people saw, getting used to the increasingly rough and crowded environments took some time, but he learned quickly. A beating by Nadal in Madrid two years ago helped, but his mentality never changed.

“I’ve always wanted to play in the big stadiums,” he said. And it seemed like he really did.

Tennis is usually one big hoot for Alcaraz, from his first Grand Slam tournament victory on a back court at the Australian Open in February 2021, to his back-to-back victories over Nadal and Djokovic at the 2022 Madrid Open, to his semifinal against Tiafoe at the US Open last September in front of 23,000 fans and with Michelle Obama in the front row until his victory in the final two days later.

How is that possible? Allen Fox, a Division I champion and Wimbledon quarterfinalist in 1965 who went on to become one of the leading sports psychologists, used the term professionals use when there is no rational explanation. He described Alcaraz as both a “genius” and a “genetic freak.”

“The only way he loses is when he’s missing,” Fox said. “He just plays the same risky game and never takes his foot off the accelerator.”