Prince of tennis Alcaraz can redefine the game’s peak

livemint.com:

Fans of Takeshi Konomi’s super hit manga should sit this one out. It’s time for The Prince of Tennis’s graphic novel hero Ryoma Echizen to make way for the coming-of-age story of a real-life tennis star: Carlos Alcaraz Garfia. I’ve been playing tennis since the age of 14.

For more than half of my 36 playing years, since Roger Federer’s first Wimbledon crown in 2003, three men have dominated tennis like never before in its history. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic have together won 65 of the possible 79 Grand Slam tournaments that followed. Together they also held the No.

1 position for an astounding 900 weeks out of the possible 1,000 odd weeks since then. In 2005, Nadal was the first Federer challenger to appear on the scene. The sheer fight that Nadal brought to tennis forced both Federer and him to elevate their games to a level beyond the reach of other ATP tour players.

For lesser players like me, it prompted me to adopt Nadal’s signature Babolat gear on court. Just as we tennis fans thought we had seen it all, arrived a new and improved Djokovic in 2011. That ushered in an era of incredible tennis innovation.

Season after season, the three pushed each other to redefine peak tennis. Along the way, many youngsters and refurbished veterans did everything they could to challenge the trio’s reign through incredible grit and sparks of brilliance. They even managed to steal a few trophies here and there.

But the combined force of Roger, Rafa and Djokovic dispatched most of these challengers to retirement, injury or oblivion. The Wimbledon final on Sunday changed everything. Carlos Alcatraz not only announced his entry to that elite club, he smashed the door on his way in.