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advantagesinner · 23 hours ago

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please speak about carlos' perspective on the 2025 Wimbledon metamatch 🥺

so first i'm going to slap one million caveats on this baby because what i don't want to do is reopen the whole sincaraz discourse cycle that cropped up after the win where a faction of tennis fans were like "aw carlos wanted the boy more than the trophy" and then another faction was like "are you saying carlos LITERALLY threw the match?? you want your fave ARRESTED in REAL LIFE?" whole week of bad faith pancakes and waffles. let’s preemptively not.

as always the most important thing to remember when talking about the pressures of sports narrative on the players are that few to none of the responses are conscious (and where they become conscious that in fact… becomes another facet of the story). personally i'm a nonpartisan in the rivalry, in that neither of these guys are My Guy. i'm here for the tennis and the stories told about the tennis that become the tennis.

carlos alcaraz Loves the stories about the tennis. he has been trying so hard to make them become his tennis.

this post was a joke but it was a joke about a handful of things that are real:

that we won't know that we're in a New Era, or that we have New Greats, until we had more than one new credible slam winner

that those credible slam winners needed to have a good public relationship. tennis is the civility sport, the self-conscious self-aggrandizing gentleman's game. the tolerance for trash talk and public tension is lower than almost any other sport and the fedal rivalry codified the ideal way a rivalry should look. the image of fedal is still the standard for tennis rivalry: that idea that you recognize your rival across the net as your most intimate relationship in the sport. that competition at its highest level, where no one else can touch you except the one (maybe two) guy(s) that can beat you, changes your relationship into a higher understanding that is more love than hate. that the enclosure of 'greatness' into a space for two or three is what affirms you as great, what creates the podium of the sport, what grants you access to generational history. it's large-r Romantic even before* you start doing rpf to it. (*false assumption! everyone from david foster wallace to luca guadignano was doing rpf to it the whole time.)

the atp loves this, the slams love this, the sponsors love this, it IS pr. arguably the enforced publicly civil-to-friendly relationship becomes more real (enclosure of intimacy and shared specific experience) the more pr you have to do (because that's time in the enclosure).

the atp et al also loves this because it affirms the Civility Sport narrative, the sponsors love it because it means that no one has a bad or negative thought ever, which would make them less salable as a sports product. the sports romance and sports personalities are there to sell the sport

what this is asking of the players is in some ways inevitable — the enclosure! is real! — and in some ways completely unreasonable. of course you are going to hate your competitor and rival a little. the big 3/4 all did at times. you can find every great player being a huuuuge bitch about every one of their fellow greats somewhere in the record. and now there's less and less space for that because there's more access to the players' private lives and more general surveillance of personalities.

now to the present. enter carlos: first slam in 2022, first wimbledon in 2023 over novak, which was the bigger deal. carlos's narratives: 1) spanish prodigy with seemingly limitless physical reserves and daring, walking the path of nadal 2) beat one of the b3 in a slam, stuck his foot in the door of novak's calendar slam, kept novak from catching up to roger's wimbledon record. there was no obvious same-generation contender when he was winning in 2023, and all the above-game stories were about tethering him to the sport's glorious, matchless past. insane pressure, sure, and also, how lonely! for the athlete: how frustratingly divorced from the present, and from the public being able to see you as an athlete as you are (let alone what you might become)! for fans: who remembers what the fan response was like during that period? because i remember a lot of conversations about how boring the sport was going to be if nobody caught up to him.

lmfao. lol.

before sinner pukes in late 2023, becomes Post Puke Sinner, wins ao 2024, and becomes the unbeatable monster the world knows and loves, carlos picks sinner out of the lineup as his chosen rival. somewhat in/famously he puts this on the record in 2023 (source; translation), right after he's won his wimbledon and put his foot in the door of history. sinner is at the time world #8, not bad by any means but not close to carlos or to what he will become. carlos gets mildly clowned on by press and fans. but athletes know what goodness, or greatness, in their sport looks like earlier and better than we do in the stands. elites of the form are better at (not perfect at) identifying the it-factor. sports in general and tennis in particular has incentivized politeness but... some of the peer testimony is real, and in particular saying "we're going to contend together" is putting a certain number of chips on the board. (to put this kind of thing on record you need to be willing to get clowned on. sometimes the future will clown on you. i think it was tsitsipas i think who said he could see him/meddy/zverev becoming the next big 3?)

sinner 2024-25, world no. 1, slam winner and defender... on hard courts, anyway. carlos has slams across all three surfaces. sinner has the aura of indomitability but ultimately there are questions of versatility. sinner comes back after the ban bang into the middle of clay season with something to prove. carlos and sinner together play the first capital-g Great match of our lifetime in the roland garros final, skeptics of the premise (inc. yours truly) are like "damn okay" and early adopters get to gloat and everyone gets to benefit from being in a new generation of tennis. sinner blows three match points. if you're reading this, you were there.

and before that they play the rome final, which played like a taster of that: the first set played purely in what the girls call Sinnerball(TM), that suffocating restrictive aggressive baseline game dictated completely off sinner's racquet. kind of a boring set tbh. carlos wins it. squeezes through on sinner's terms, goes completely insane on his own in the second set. it is a carlos win in straights. for all the inarguable best of 5 grand slam razzle dazzle of the rg final, i come back to rome when i need a reference point for how the rivalry works, and its current biggest imbalance: that carlos has proven he can win jannik's game, played on jannik's terms, and that jannik has yet to prove he can do the same in carlos's. (not a prophecy, just a state of the union in august 2025: he hung very close in rg, he played that game to the very end even when it was being played on carlos's terms. i look forward to jannik sinner's first win in a match whose play is dictated by carlos alcaraz. i want to see the tennis he plays in that situation.)

i'm running these back in detail because these are the ingredients going into the wimbledon 2025 final. a match i would describe as: not the best sincaraz match; the grand finale of a wimbledon i would describe (charitably) as: not the best wimbledon. don't get me wrong, jannik plays a fucking great game! does things at the net that i didn’t know he could do, that i dont know if he knew he could do before then! charly plays... some of his tennis. wins a set with some highlight moments but even that set is still distinctly in jannik's game. after that he flounders. there's never really an equivalent moment to rg or rome where he figures out how to dictate play. he loses his confidence uncharacteristically, to the point that midmatch he's shouting "he's much better than me" ("mucho mejor que yo") to his box.

it happens. i'm not trying to retroactively solve carlos’s performance, no one is great every day, and it’s not like every big 3 final was historic and amazing either. just from a spectator pov the match they left us with wasn't exactly wimbledon 2008, or for that matter roland garros 2025. which isn't about sinner winning or carlos losing so much as it doesn't have that same feeling of both players playing equal and opposite 110%s. nevertheless, both sinner and carlos both leave beaming.

what did we get from that win? so the tennis was just ok, graded on the curve of what sincaraz tennis can be. but it gives sinner a slam on a second surface, it balances the 2025 channel slam between sincaraz, it gives sinner the immediate slam win after the devastation of roland garros, it doesn't give the rivalry a chance to tip into the "sinner can beat everyone except carlos" place where it stops being a mutual affirmation and starts being a weak point. it rebalances a whole bunch of scales. it is of course great for sinner, who just won wimbledon (first italian in history to do so), and it's great for carlos, who has been actively engaged in telling the story of how good they both are and how evenly matched. and of course, the atp, and the slams, and the tennis coverage ecosystem, and everyone who wants to believe that tennis greats come to us walking two by two out of noah's ark. not that anyone would have minded a carlos win (insert: picture of royal children trying to kill sinner with their mind) but the balance and the implicit pairing is holistically Good For The Sport, on the preferred terms of the sport.

and i don't want that to be mistaken for carlos not showing up to play! but i'll freely say he didn't play that match like it was his last chance at a wimbledon final. he has, and this is whether you think it’s good or bad an inconceivable luxury of perspective, no reason to believe that it would be. it would have been his threepeat. he's 22. he doesn't play slams with a scarcity mindset. all of this is a different kind of competitive self-belief, the kind that comes from stepping into the kind of career everyone in the sport wants. but in addition to all of that, as the no. 1 believer and creator of #sincaraz as a sports story he has to invest equal belief into sinner's ability to beat him. him looking across the net in wimbledon and seeing a better, ‘unbeatable’ player that day is both a real time reaction to jannik skiing across the grass with one foot on each corner of the baseline and an incentivized belief about what not just that match but the future of tennis—his future, their shared future—needed out of that matchup that day. from a player who has a huge emotional buffer against this particular prospective loss this day and hates to be alone at the top.

the thing is that fedal were never playing with the specter of creating fedal in their head. you can't have a second fedal because the first one already drafted the blueprint for the public perception of what that benevolent, large-r Romantic rivalry is supposed to look like. and i think it's so interesting to see the next generation iterate on that design, to see the players doing it publicly and consciously, to see it inform the terms of how they want to compete with each other. i am interested in it as an amplifier: a kind of competitive sportswriting yaoi 4d chess where you're competing with the guy across the net for the match whilst also engaged in a doubles match, paired with him, against the guys of the past. i am interested in it as a new problem, or at least a new source of polarized desires and friction: when does having the guy at your level make you play better, when does creating and litigating the balance of shared greatness potentially trip you up in the game? and i am hugely interested in carlos and jannik’s respective willingness to engage with the narrative, which is not balanced and not alike. but i will say sinner seems happier to take part in this particular story now that he has a wimbledon. so consider that a metamatch won.

#oh this is so interesting #AND well written #"doubles match

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