Carlos Alcaraz stimulates the imagination - and how!
Playing like an 18-year-old Spaniard about to conquer the tennis world? Of course! Because: the longer the teenager age is, the more transfigured one's own playing strength seems. A gloss.
by Jens Huiber
last edit:
Apr 05, 2022, 03:11 pm
A few days ago, Wolfgang Ambros celebrated his 70th birthday, an icon of Austrian music that has also achieved great popularity beyond the German-speaking borders. Deservedly, of course. Especially in his early phase, Ambros was primarily a soloist, at least vocally, rather later he united with Rainhard Fendrich and Georg Danzer to form "Austria 3". Somewhere in between there was a duet with André Heller: "Forever young".
Musically rather uncomplicated, this gem of recent music history sums up an essential piece of wisdom: "If you want, if you really, really want, stay (for)ever young." Good. So let's all try really hard now - and we're as young as Carlos Alcaraz . Not quite 19 yet.
Alcaraz fires the imagination
Lo and behold: Suddenly it's back, that trust in your own footwork. Of course, like Alcaraz, we can run for every ball. It makes no difference to the tennis gods that Bregar Wolfi from the Voitsberger Tennis Club was on the other side of the net and not Ruud Casper on a slow hard court in Miami. Just pull the forehand through without fear, inside-in, like Alcaraz does in a playful and brutal manner? No problem. The fact that the ball claps weakly down the T-line can only have been due to the inferior material and/or the Kent-Carlsson memory grip, which was so western that the balls were hit very far to the east again.
The bottom line: With a little more training and the right encouragement from the coach, who is naturally overly critical, we too could have made it far.
Yes, Carlos Alcaraz captures the imagination more than any other player in recent memory. Quite obviously also with the author of these lines. That at almost 19 years of age he is showing off a body that should then raise one or two critical questions? Yes, the author does not intend to ignore these doubts either. When Carlos Alcaraz faces the best Austrian of about the same age - Lukas Neumayer - then it gets dark. An important tennis official in Austria said not too long ago. The question is whether that speaks for Alcaraz or against Neumayer or is it just to be accepted.
Good for tennis
In any case, Miami has shown that Carlos Alcaraz is good for tennis. The otherwise sad event became a happening due to the teenager's run, Alcaraz exudes an energy that is contagious. In principle, no game is given up, the party in Florida could have been over with a score of 3: 5 in the tie-break of the third set in the quarterfinals against Miomir Kecmanovic.
If anything, Wolfgang Ambros had a relationship with tennis that was not documented in his songs. The god of music loved skiing. And if you saw him like that in the old films, on poorly prepared pistes and with skis that were far too long by today's standards, then that almost had Alcaraz-esque proportions of inspiration. And if you were forever young now, you would have set your edges in the firn like Woiferl. Which, objectively speaking, would have been just as impossible as firing a forehand shot á la Carlos Alcaraz.