Carlos Alcaraz makes magic again. Watch out.

It happens every time Carlos Alcaraz appears in court. One insanely goofy point where he does something that people who have watched tennis for decades will swear on the life of their favorite doubles partner that they’ve never seen before.

And they’re probably right, because even as he battled his way (for him) through the past six months and experienced some version of a sophomore slump, Alcaraz has never been able to produce the spectacular.

On Sunday, in the final of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, the moment came just over halfway through the first set against Daniil Medvedev.

A perfectly lifted short-range lob came to Alcaraz as he approached the net. At first he thinks he can jump back and hit him, but halfway through that maneuver he realizes he has to turn and jump and chase him, which he does, just before hitting the purple hard court for the second time.

And that’s when the Alcaraz of it all really comes into being. At the last moment he realizes that because of the way he holds his racket in his forehand grip, he cannot get under the ball. At this point, pretty much everyone who’s ever done this for a living takes a desperate hit and the ball skitters across the ground and into the net. Not so with Alcaraz.

In a split second he does this little wrist rotation and swipes at the ball with what is currently the back of his strings.

And the point continues and a few shots later he blasts a forehand down the line and Medvedev sees it whistle past.

And just like that, tennis was on its way back to where it was last summer, with Alcaraz staking his claim to the present and future of the game, leaving an opponent reeling with every stroke, taking a title while seeing one final mistake from the court to conduct. , and then embraces his tennis father and coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero, and his real father as thousands of fans bathe him in their roars of adoration.

Hours later, with a large glass trophy next to him after his 7-6(5), 6-1 victory, Alcaraz could not explain what exactly had happened in that small first miracle of a point.

“Something happened to my feet and I couldn’t jump,” he said. “When something like that happens, you have to put another ball in and just run to the next one.”

Alcaraz has repeatedly said in the past two weeks that he has had a difficult time in recent months. Losing was strange, of course, but the biggest problem was that when he stepped onto the court, whether it was training or competing, he struggled to find the joy he had always felt when he had a racket in his hand. His family and his coaches kept asking him what was wrong.

He had no answers for it, which in some ways made it worse. When he sprained his ankle in Rio last month, he was as low as he has been since the start of his career.

For almost 200 years and probably longer than that, people have been coming to California for a reboot, to relaunch their identity, or to try to find their old, true identity. And that’s pretty much what happened to Alcaraz in the Coachella Valley over the past two weeks.

The boy came back, and when he did, the show started again and never more so than during those crazy moments of sprinting, wrist flicking and crossing the line in the first set, bringing the capacity crowd of 16,000 to the first set. pleasure.

“Points like these give me extra motivation to put a smile on my face,” he said – with a smile on his face.

This would happen soon. Alcaraz is simply too gifted and too dedicated to the sport to allow this eight-month drought without a title to continue much longer. Why would the arc of his early career be different from then on?

At the moment when the first doubts sounded, when his good friend and rival Jannik Sinner played out his battle for supremacy, Alcaraz came to life. He defeated Sinner in the semi-finals here, ending the Italian’s nineteen-match winning streak. He then took revenge on Medvedev, who had ended his attempt to defend his title at the US Open in September when this fallow period had only just begun.

Alcaraz is nothing if not resilient, especially when an A-list crowd is present, as they were in the desert on Sunday. Rod Laver was there, and Maria Sharapova, and actors Charlize Theron, Zendaya and Tom Holland. When Alcaraz is on the court, especially in a final, a tennis match turns into a happening and for the first few years he almost always performs. When that stopped happening over the past eight months, something felt off in the tennis universe.

Not anymore. The victory gave Alcaraz his second consecutive title in what many players and much of the sport considers the most important tournament that is not a Grand Slam. It was the thirteenth title in a career that is only just getting started, even though the next time he claims the sport’s top spot (it will happen soon enough) it will be his second attempt at number one. In 2022, at the age of 19, he became the youngest player ever to top the rankings.

When it was over, Medvedev sat in the locker room with his coach, Gilles Cervara, told him he had no regrets about the afternoon, and asked Cervara if he did. A few shots here and there, Cervara said, but this was at Alcaraz’s racket.

Medvedev said that when Alcaraz raised his level in the first set, he “I managed to be there and try to get to his level, but I was just a little down. Finally it went down, down, down, and it went up, up, up.”

Alcaraz was not the only one who put the world back in order on Sunday. In the women’s final, Iga Swiatek defeated Maria Sakkari to win her second Indian Wells title in three years. Swiatek won 6-4, 6-0, eliminating Greece’s most successful player with the sharp efficiency that has become her trademark. And Swiatek being Swiatek, the victory came with at least one set of pure dominance – a second-set ‘bagel’ in the scoring that so often adds an exclamation point to so many of her victories.

Swiatek, 22, already the winner of four Grand Slams but none since June, showed her resilience last fall after losing the No. 1 ranking she had held for 76 weeks. She got it back by the end of the season, but she stumbled early at the Australian Open, and with Aryna Sabalenka hitting her stride, Swiatek’s supremacy looked threatened. There were more reasons for jitters when things started for her at Indian Wells 10 days ago.

She opened against Danielle Collins, who almost beat her in Australia. Then came Linda Noskova, the young Czech who sent her to Melbourne. Collins got three games. Noskova got four. Both received a bagel from the second set.

When Swiatek won here two years ago and two weeks later completed the ‘Sunshine Double’ with a win at the Miami Open, it was a breakthrough moment for her. She was a master of clay tennis and had suddenly proven to herself that she could win on the hard court.

“This time I’m just super happy with the work,” Swiatek said.

Her opponents, not so much. They know she turned her dominance and efficiency into a strategy that translated into a 19-4 record in the finals and six straight wins in the final match because she has so much energy in her reserves.

“I’ve played against bigger hitters, but at the same time they take away your time,” Sakkari said. “It took me a few games to get used to her timing.”

The scary thing for all the other women is that the highlight of Swiatek’s season, the clay court swing, is still three weeks away. In recent years, stepping on the red clay felt like coming home and she looked forward to that.

“It doesn’t really matter now,” she said, somewhat tensely.

For Alcaraz, the bows often come in the form of small miracles that he manages better than anyone. Medvedev, who can make a few every now and then, knows the effect they can have if you do manage one.

“You feel like, OK, you can do more and more, hit stronger, hit faster and get better,” he said.

And that’s what happened as the match went to the second set and its seemingly inevitable conclusion. At times it seemed as if the balls coming off Alcaraz’s racket defied the laws of physics and lost no speed at all from the moment they shot off his racket to the moment they bounced off Medvedev’s eyes or flew past him.

Medvedev pounded the ball again and again and Alcaraz sent it back undisturbed.

“He makes one good shot, I’m in trouble and I lose the point,” Medvedev said. “It’s tough. Mentally it’s not easy to play against this.”

No one knows this better than Alcaraz. From a distance of 25 meters it is not at all difficult to see an enemy’s shoulders slump, his spirit breaking and his head shaking in surprise and helplessness.

And nothing helps matters as much, at a moment or in the long run, as a little magical thinking and hitting. That wild flurry of shots when the tension rose is good for the game, both for him and for the wider one, he said, and more importantly, good for his soul.

“I always say I play better with a smile on my face,” he said. “Points like these don’t matter whether I win or lose them, it always puts a smile on my face. I think it will help me to continue to improve my game during the match and show my best tennis.”

The smart money says Alcaraz’s best tennis is yet to come.

(Top photo: Matthew Stockman/Getty Images)