Carlos Alcaraz to CNN: ‘I’m playing unbelievable tennis’
Former world number two finds it hard to choose one word to describe his year on tour.
“I would think that for a first year, the year of 2012, it was probably my best year,” Carlos Alcaraz told CNN’s Larry King in a wide-ranging interview, which was his first since signing with Top Rank.
It’s been over a year since Alcaraz found the match-point in a first-round U.S. Open quarterfinal that would change his life and those of those around him, and nearly two full years since the tournament became the backdrop for the biggest showdown in tennis history.
King started the interview with a question about what Alcaraz means to him, and Alcaraz offered the example of his first match at the U.S. Open, when King asked him to explain how a player who had been “kind of a journeyman” in the sport could go on to win a major.
“That’s the first thing you do when you come out of the academy,” Alcaraz said, “You work on that, you put yourself in the tournament environment. And I came in like that. I was a journeyman, I could hold a match, I was not a big star, I wasn’t known as the guy who could make it to the third round. I was known as the guy who could win.
King asked him what it was about his first major that was so important to him, and Alcaraz said, “The journey. The first major was the journey, because I felt like I was putting myself in a situation where people were not going to know me, where I wasn’t going to know me, where I had to prove myself to the people who are watching.
“And I feel like I did that. And then everything snowballed from that and I won my first title.
“The journey that I’ve been on, the journey I’m going to continue, is like