Carlos Alcaraz, from Palmar to the US Open passing through Villena

This Friday, tennis fans who had not yet noticed the figure of Carlos Alcaraz, hallucinated with the 18-year-old from Murcia, who beat world number three Stefanos Tsitsipas in the third round of the US Open. It was in a great four-hour game, resolved in five sets and on the largest tennis court in the world, the Arthur Ashe, in front of 22,000 spectators and millions on television. But Charly's success story began much earlier in his hometown, El Palmar, specifically at the Real Sociedad Club de Campo Murcia, where his father, Carlos, who had been a player, ran the tennis school.

There he took his four-year-old son. “Every day I had the same problem when we went home, that I did not want to and I saw them and I wanted them to get him out of the club,” he recalled in an article published by The Opinion of Murcia. Years later, in 2016, Alcaraz was the best infantile in Spain and second in the international ranking, when he participated in the Tarbes tournament, a kind of Roland Garros of the category that Juan Carlos Ferrero and Rafa Nadal went through in their day; in 2017, He was national runner-up, and in the summer he participated with Spain in the ITF World Junior Tennis Finals, the children's World Cup where the National Team was runner-up, and was European champion, in the final against Russia in Murcia. At that time Kiko Navarro Lorca entered him. All this was told by AS when the boy appeared at the Lacoste U14 Invitational, a Mini Masters held in London at the same time as the ATP Finals. There, his idol, Rafa Nadal, withdrew due to injury after losing to David Goffin and he won the tournament. “My name is Carlos Alcaraz, I am 14 years old, I come from Murcia and I am going to play the ATP Finals U-14 tournament,” he told this newspaper. “I bought a racket and started hitting the fronton. As a result of that I began to play on the court and give classes, and here I am now, “he counted naturally.

“I always looked at Rafa (Nadal), because his style of play and his character are not equaled by anyone. He is one of the best athletes, if not the best in history, for everything he has done and what he has done. It does. It is my role model. I have seen him in a tournament and I have taken a photo with him, but we have not talked and I would like to, “Carlos said at the time, who did not imagine that one day he would rally with him and that they would even face each other at the Mutua Madrid Open de 2021. That was the first time Alcaraz really stood out. Then came his precocious achievements, the ITF tournaments, the Challengers and his leap onto the ATP circuit. And before that, the Junior Davis Cup, a tournament he won in 2018 together with Mario González and Pablo Llamas, champion of the Orange Bowl.

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To the elite with Ferrero

At that time he alternated training sessions at his club and at the JC Ferrero Equelite Academy, under the command of the former number one and winner of Roland Garros., who had his eye on him and became his coach. “I see a lot of projection for him. He has a dynamic tennis. Play differently in the Spanish style. Not so far behind, he likes to be on top of the line, to take risks. If it will reach high? I don't like giving him numbers that give him added pressure. But I think he will be a very high-level tennis player, ”Ferrero predicted cautiously. “It is a pride to represent Spain and give them the Cup. But I don't think this will make you a professionalAlthough they support you more, that is only granted by day-to-day work ”, explained the boy, who had“ a huge illusion and desire to do it well ”at the hands of Juanki, who seemed“ great ”to him.

The fact is that Ferrero and his faithful coach and adoptive grandfather of his children, Antonio Martínez Cascales, became a kind of second parents for him in Villena, where Equelite is located. There, later his ‘older brother’, Pablo Carreño, who joined the family, also tucked him in. Alcaraz spends a lot of time in the residence, in a cabin with the right comforts, training hard and shaping his physique, one of the aspects in which he has improved the most, especially during last year's confinement. The boy was locked up in Alicante, well cared for and working. Shortly before, he had won his first ATP match in Rio de Janeiro, against Albert Ramos. “He needed a change of strength because he was going to play against people made physically. He had it after two months of hard training and he grew a lot (1.85)”. That helped him to get better. “I needed it to trust and get more on track at important moments,” Ferrero told AS. To prepare her mindset, she had started working with a psychologist, to “better control her emotions.”

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Before arriving in New York a few days ago, he had been champion at Umag, as seeded, and won matches against heavyweight opponents, although none like Tsitsipas., in the game that will mark a before and after in his career. If nothing goes wrong, and it doesn't seem like it, the boy has reached the elite to stay, and he is grateful: “When I fell to the ground, I thought of my family and my friends, of other people who were supporting me from Murcia. My entire team also supported me at the Academy. I thought of every person who helped in Murcia from the beginning of this story when I was a child ”.