Carlos Alcaraz, tennis’ happy warrior, brings a unique approach to Monte Carlo and clay

Carlos Alcaraz is still just 21, but he’s already challenging some of the received wisdom about a champion’s mentality—how a great one approaches the game, deals with adversity and views rivals.

The No. 3-ranked Spaniard faced a slew of questions from reporters when he met with them before the start of this week’s Monte Carlo Masters. Everyone wanted to know how he feels about leaving the Sunshine Double without having made a final. Is he concerned that the only tournament he’s won this year is the indoor Rotterdam event? Is he concerned about the state of his game?

All good, solid questions, all easily handled and defused by Alcaraz. He is no closer to displacing No. 1 -anked Jannik Sinner at the top of the ATP rankings than he was back in February, when Sinner was banished from the game for three months for a doping violation.

It doesn’t appear to perturb Alcaraz at all.

“I am really happy with the way I am playing,” Alcaraz told the reporters. “Since I started the year I have been playing great tennis. Tennis is not just about hitting the ball. It is about more than that. It is about mentality, physical side.”

The idea that tennis is not just about “hitting the ball” with positive outcomes, or even that life is not just about tennis, has been overlooked often by great players, sometimes for long periods of time. Their anxiety at a loss of form, their rationalizations of a decline in the rankings, their anger when a blinkered fealty to the W-L column fails to pay off can be a painful experience, often played out in the public eye.

But Alcaraz is lousy at creating drama. He is a happy warrior, who takes setbacks—such as they are, for one of his class—in stride. Already a four-time Grand Slam singles champion, Alcaraz has Olympian talent and ambitions. But his attitude is different from that of other giants of the game. It shows in the way he plays the game.

Tennis is not just about hitting the ball. It is about more than that. Carlos Alcaraz

Alcaraz will often choose to try the spectacular shot instead of the safer, smart one. He thereby shatters one of the chief commandments of winning tennis, one that applies at every level. Of course, he does it because it brings him satisfaction. It gives him joy, which is an emotion players are urged to check before first ball, as if it were a piece of oversized baggage.

“The guys that win majors are somewhat predictable when it really counts,” elite coach and ESPN analyst Patrick McEnroe told me in a recent conversation. “But Alcaraz has moved a little bit away from that. He’s an amazing shotmaker with a level of athleticism that’s just off the charts. That has hurt him in the last nine months. In that sense, he’s too much of a shotmaker. He hits his way into trouble.”

Alcaraz doesn’t appear to have regrets. He also bemoaned the way that, win or lose, the focus in matches is almost always on him. When he suffers an upset, some suspect that “something is going on.” He said that isn’t fair to those who beat him, who do it on the strength of great tennis.

If Novak Djokovic were listening, he might have bobbed his head right along with Alcaraz. At 37, and finding those precious Ws considerably more difficult to come by, the No. 3 seed in Monte Carlo has come to value the time he still has left on court regardless of the result.

It once took a Grand Slam singles title to satisfy Dokovic, and chasing it had very little to do with being “happy.” Now, he told the press in Monte Carlo, he’s found that “joy” that comes from playing well in Miami, even though he was beaten in a barnburner of a final by a still-green newcomer, 19-year-old Jakob Mensik.

Alcaraz and Djokovic are on opposite sides of the draw. A meeting between them in the final would be a great table setter for the clay-court season. Djokovic is hopeful but—old habits die hard—worried that he may not be as well prepared as he’d like on the red clay.

Alcaraz has reason to feel concern as well, but you’d never know it.

“I am just happy,” he said, “and ready to play well on clay.”