Jon Wertheim answers your questions on Carlos Alcaraz’s win, Novak Djokovic’s next move and more from The Championships.
• I like a question with a lot of options . There is so much to like here, both about the way he handles his tennis and the way he handles his business.. Imagine this: you are serving for the Wimbledon title against Novak Djokovic, playing supernatural tennis. You have three—successive!—match points. On grass. You squander them. Did we mention Djokovic is the opponent? Whose ability to recover from match points down in a Wimbledon final is already documented.
Wait, you’re using our event to assign points for your rankings, and you have changed the distribution. Is this something you were going to tell us? The easy take is that Djokovic’s mortal tennis coil is unfurling. At two majors this year, he has lost—resoundingly—to the sport’s two young stars. At the other, he stopped midway through with a. I am not prepared to declare his haul of major titles complete. A) Djokovic is extraordinary and B) the structure of tennis—to wit: his soft Wimbledon draw—allows for twists. Assuming his knee improves and he catches a few breaks, how is he not considered a contender at the U.S.
I am inclined to give Djokovic a pass here. I can’t imagine he reads everything on social media. I can’t imagine that the same player who takes issue with disrespectful fans would, wittingly, be amplifying someone with this level of incivility and toxicity. I have to believe he doesn’t know how many of his colleagues this “fan” has insulted and offended. This account would seem to be everything Djokovic stands against and would want to disavow.
Television, however, wants live action. So the next match goes off 15 minutes or so later. And when it does, the players walk into a venue partially filled, and with less atmosphere than a Walmart warehouse. Eventually, though, the fans returned. And the match—like, Djokovic, the winner—closed strong.•I’d say the best sheer performance was Alcaraz in the men’s final. The best match was the Jasmine Paolini-Donna Vekić women’s semifinal.
That said, coaching is here. And it is not the game-changer many of us predicted. Does, say, Alcaraz, benefit from being told where to serve or how to change his return positioning? Sure. Does it win him matches? No.
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