Tennis players run into roadblocks all the time, but the ways in which they get stymied are very different. Some players run out of solutions and coping mechanisms. They get down on themselves and collect scar tissue. Matches go downhill and they can’t hit the reset button to halt a negative trend.
Other players manage to thrive for two months or several weeks in a season. They ride the wave briefly — some at the start of the season when they’re physically fresh, others at the end of the season when they haven’t overextended themselves and much of the tour has played a lot more matches. For some players, it’s as simple as being good on a specific surface but not others. Playing a complete year of good tennis is elusive. The tour adjusts. The run of great form subsides. Matches become more complicated. Winning with C-plus tennis is hard to come by, a marked contrast to Iga Swiatek and Carlos Alcaraz fighting through difficulties to win matches and stack together good results at each tour stop.
For some players, getting stuck is less about losing faith or belief and generally suffering from a crisis of confidence. Failure becomes more about the physical side than the mental side. Some athletes have to lose some pounds. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova made the Roland Garros final a few years ago after she got noticeably fitter. For other players, it’s about building core strength and a fitness base which can endure in prolonged matches, particularly at the majors.
These players don’t suffer from a loss of will or clarity. They just need to get stronger and tougher.
If you go through these different subcategories of failure or frustration and apply them to first-round losers at the 2023 U.S. Open, which players fit different categories?
In terms of players whose problems are primarily physical, you would clearly start with Holger Rune, whose problem-solving skills and battle instincts are superb, but whose body simply ran on empty at Roland Garros and did not recover.
That’s an easy one.
Felix Auger-Aliassime is in the lost camp. He can’t figure out how to win. Losses have piled on top of losses and a downward spiral has emerged. The reset button is elusive, and an extended hiatus from tennis with an expanded offseason seems to be in order.
Maria Sakkari, clearly ground down into the pits of frustration after her early U.S. Open exit, seems to be in a similar need for an escape from tennis and a complete offseason reassessment, ideally with an elite coach with a proven track record. (Look at what Brad Gilbert has done for Coco Gauff, and what Darren Cahill is doing with Jannik Sinner. These guys (and gals — think of Conchita Martinez or Rennae Stubbs) are credentialed for a reason.
What’s an example of a player who is harder to categorize, who exists between the mental and the physical and struggles for reasons which don’t fit into a neat and tidy box? Caroline Garcia might be an example. She looked lost in her U.S. Open first-round exit, but her career — at least since her 2017 ascent — has been marked by brief bursts of excellence unsustained over a full year. She does lose confidence, and she doesn’t play complete whole seasons of tennis. Yet, the marker of failure for Garcia is as simple as this: majors versus non-majors. She has won the WTA Finals. She has picked off some lower-level tournaments and made some late-season runs.
She just doesn’t handle the pressure of the biggest tournaments. Only twice in a 12-year career at the majors has she reached a quarterfinal. Only eight times has she reached the second week, despite having more game than the vast majority of players on tour.
Sakkari has never really recovered from losing that 2021 Roland Garros semifinal to Barbora Krejcikova after having match point. Her story is one of continuous descent. Garcia isn’t descending so much as she keeps running up against a mental block which emerges in specific contexts. Garcia isn’t lost so much as she is frail.
Holger Rune? He’s spent.
Failure comes in different forms in tennis. Keep that in mind as the U.S. Open continues.
Tennis with an Accent 