After double faulting and falling behind two sets to none — a deficit he has never overcome — in the second round of the US Open on Thursday night, Carlos Alcaraz slung his equipment bag over a shoulder and trudged toward the locker room.
Glancing in the direction of his coach, 2003 French Open champion Juan Carlos Ferrero, Alcaraz pointed his right index finger at his temple then wagged that finger, as if to say, “I’m not thinking straight.”
He might have been excused for being confused by what was transpiring under the closed retractable roof at Arthur Ashe Stadium on a chilly evening. One set later, Alcaraz’s 15-match Grand Slam unbeaten streak was over with a sloppy 6-1, 7-5, 6-4 loss to 74th-ranked Botic van de Zandschulp.
“It was a fight against myself, in my mind, during the match,” Alcaraz said. “In tennis, you are playing against someone that wants the same as you — to win the match — and you have to be as … calm as you can, just to think better in the match and try to do good things. Today I was playing against the opponent, and I was playing against myself, in my mind. A lot of emotions that I couldn’t control.”
The result eliminated the pre-tournament men’s favorite and certainly was hard to predict beforehand, given the No. 3-seeded Alcaraz’s standing in the game, his excellence of late and his opponent’s far-lesser résumé.
It followed another exit in Ashe for a past US Open champion, Naomi Osaka, who was sent home Thursday by Karolina Muchova 6-3, 7-6 (5). That one, though, was not anywhere near what happened to Alcaraz.
He won the French Open in June and Wimbledon in July to raise his career total to four major championships, including taking the title at Flushing Meadows in 2022. In early August, Alcaraz won a silver medal at the Paris Olympics, losing to Novak Djokovic in the final.
Maybe, Alcaraz acknowledged, a tennis schedule he called “so tight” drained him too much.
“Probably, I came here with not as much energy as I thought that I was going to [have],” he said. “But I mean, I don’t want to put that as excuse.”
What’s clear is he never found his footing against Van de Zandschulp, a 28-year-old from the Netherlands. Alcaraz was off, repeatedly missing the sorts of…
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