On that Monday morning, the wait seemed long. I'm referring to the wait to talk to Carlos Alcaraz. "Call me Carlitos." This is what he asks to be called: Carlitos (“when they call me Carlos, it seems like I've done something bad,” he told Àlex Corretja a couple of years ago). We'll see how long he remains Carlitos.
My long wait occurred in July of last year. The day before, the man, actually a twenty-year-old boy, had transformed into the most popular athlete in the world: he had won the Wimbledon title, the second Grand Slam of his sporting career, and his communications team had called to a range of special envoys.
The tournament had already concluded, it was pick-up day, we were all playing by the baton. While waiting, a dozen reporters had met us, and we were entering the interview room to see the tennis genius according to our needs. Whoever was in a hurry because he missed the plane passed first. My flight left at the end of the day, almost at night: I became one of the last in line, the wait was inevitably long.
While waiting, I spent a good time looking at the house. It was a spacious and bright single-family home, with an island in the kitchen and access to two gardens, located a stone's throw from the All England Lawn Tennis Club, the Wimbledon venue. Alcaraz's troops wandered there: his parents, two of his three brothers, the technicians Juan Carlos Ferrero and Antonio Martínez Cascales, the communication team, the physio... if they went on foot, they would all arrive at the club in one pispas
The reality is more complicated: Carlitos cannot move around the world just like that. The thousands of curious people and selfie-seekers who line the doors of the All England Club would never allow it (conclusion: when they had to go to the club, the group traveled in the organization's comfortable vehicles). Someone brought a bouquet of flowers for the champion and also a huge vase, and the team members said to each other: "The vase is wonderful but it weighs like a dead person and I don't know how we are going to take it to Spain...".
They offered us juices, croissants and coffees, and Jaime (12), Alcaraz's little brother, played basketball in the front yard of the house. The boy bounced the ball and shot three-pointers, and from the corner of his eye he looked at us, challenging. "What, no one is encouraged?" A classmate was encouraged. He spent half an hour playing with the boy. First they played 21. Then they got into one-on-one. When it was his turn to interview Carlitos, his colleague was both in a hurry and sweaty.
Carlos Alcaraz Sr., the father of the tennis genius, told me that Carlitos, when he was as young as Jaime, had the same spirit as Jaime. "All day with the ball. If he wasn't with the racket, he hit basketball. Inside the house, the boom boom echoed all the time."
He also told me about Carlitos' ability to adapt. To illustrate this, he told me a story: "To prepare for this grass tournament, Carlitos had been watching videos of Federer and Nadal. He had not wanted to focus on Djokovic because Djokovic, in his opinion, 'does impossible things'. For example, he skates on OK, listen to me: it turns out that my son started playing the final with Djokovic, and when they reached the fifth set, I said to myself: 'Wow, Carlitos has started skating on the grass like Djokovic!' And that's how my son resolved that final: learning as he went, adapting."
When it was finally my turn, they gave me a voice. I had begun to worry because it was getting late and I still had to compose the interview before taking the flight. I entered the room and Carlitos welcomed me with an outstretched hand and a frank look: "Man, you again," he said. Well, it was not the first time we had seen each other face to face, but the third.
I had already had the opportunity to interview the tennis talent in April 2021, when Alcaraz was still a promising 17-year-old, just 118th on the ATP circuit. And also in April 2022, during the Godó Trophy, when the teenager already glimpsed the world top ten and confessed to me: “I didn't expect to get here so quickly, but it doesn't surprise me either.”
While I was looking at the Challenge Cup, the Wimbledon cup that was resting on a glass table, I asked Carlitos about his day-to-day life, if he liked being so popular and not being able to move freely around the world, and he answered That wasn't exactly the case: "In Murcia, no one bothers me. Sometimes I'm at someone's house with other friends and at dinner time I suggest going for rice and some hamburgers at the supermarket. They tell me: 'You wait here.' And I answer them: 'Hey, I'm going with you, I want things to be natural.' So I end up going with them."
He also told me that he plans to keep both feet on the ground, even though he now flies on private planes, and that he carries his suitcases and takes the rackets to the stringer himself. "Only by being humble can you continue winning," he told me, and we could do little more, since we had exhausted the ten minutes and another journalist came in behind me and the man, actually a twenty-year-old boy, also had to take a flight. .
"Could the next interviewer go with us in the car and do the interview along the way?" asked the press officer. The “next interviewer” shrugged and nodded. Well, if you have to go, you go. After all, there are few opportunities open to us to talk to a character of such dimensions.
