A Match That Took Our Breath Away

I’m still breathless. The French Open final just ended — that five-hour, 29-minute thrill ride between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner — and my sportswriter brain immediately wants to try to put it into some sort of perspective, immediately wants to search for some grand words that can rise to meet the moment.

And my sports fan heart says: “Come on, man, let me breathe for a minute.”

So, while I give my heart that moment to recover, here are a few numbers to ponder:

That is the final score of the match. I don’t know that you need to know much more. Jannik Sinner won the first two sets. Carlos Alcaraz won the next two sets. Alcaraz broke early in the fifth set and had a chance to serve it out. Sinner broke at the very last moment (hitting multiple ridiculous shots) and forced the final tiebreak.

That’s how many minutes the match lasted. It is now the longest French Open final on record. The previous long was the final match between Mats Wilander and Guillermo Vilas in 1982. There’s no comparison, though. I watched that match. And with no disrespect to those great players, it was like watching a four-hour, 47-minute game of pong. Tennis was different then; it had to be different then because the rackets were different, the balls were different. You look back, it looks like those matches were played underwater.

Don’t believe me. Watch just one point — skip to 17:30 on this video. One point. I’ll wait.

Yeah. That took a lot longer than you thought it would, didn’t it? Heck, the screen even goes green in the middle.

Don’t believe me? Listen to what the 17-year-old in that video, Mats Wilander, said after Sunday’s match:

“Nothing comes close to this to me,” he said. “I thought, ‘this is not possible! They’re playing at a pace that is not human.’ … I’m not speechless often, but what a wonderful day.”

That is the number of match points Jannik Sinner had in the fourth set. Alcaraz was serving down 3-5, 0-40.

On the first match point, they had a ridiculous exchange of ferocious shots and then Alcaraz ripped a titanic forehand into the deuce corner. Sinner ran it down but hit his shot inches long.

On the second, the crowd chanted “Carlos! Carlos!” and he hit his first serve about 10 feet long. His second serve was a sitter, exactly the sort of high-hopping serve that Sinner detonates. But this time Sinner was overanxious — hey, the French Open was on the line! — and he cracked it way long.

On the third, Sinner destroyed the return, forcing Alcaraz to hit an off-balance shot off his back foot. Sinner pounced and ripped the ball into the deuce corner, but Alcaraz ran it down and hit one of those crazy shots that might not look like much to the casual fan, but to anyone who plays tennis, it was a miracle: It was a high-kicking topspin forehand off the back-line. Sinner could only put it into the net.

Alcaraz then hit an ace and ripped another absurd forehand to take the game.

Then he broke Sinner to force the match on.

Those are the total points won. Sinner won 193 points. Alcaraz won 192.

Jannik Sinner is 23 years old, and he has won three Grand Slam titles, including the last two before this one. Carlos Alcaraz is 22 years old, and he has now won five. That’s eight Grand Slams between them, and they’re just getting going.

For the record, that’s the same number of majors that Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic had combined at the same ages.

What else to say? The heart is still beating too fast to find perspective. Words like "greatest," and "best," and "unparalleled," and "ultimate" seem almost cheap. We’ve been throwing those words around tennis for two decades now, ever since Roger Federer emerged on the scene, and then Nadal, and then Djokovic. The Big Three — along with a few special guest stars — took tennis to previously unseen summits; every big match they played set some new record and took the game higher.

These guys, Alcaraz and Sinner, grew up in that world. The Fed-Raf-Djok tennis was the only tennis they knew. And so they grew up dreaming of transcending it.

“¡Qué final de @rolandgarros tan increíble!” Rafa Nadal wrote on the socials.

“An epic match of cinematic proportions,” Billie Jean King added.

“The level of this whole match was insanity!!!!! What a day to be a fan of this beautiful sport,” wrote the No. 9 player in the world, Alex de Minaur.

And all that’s great. But it’s not like Matthew McConaughey weighed in.

Oh, wait:

“Thank you for the absolute elite mano y mano competition,” Matthew McConaughey said.

I think about that fifth set. That crazy fifth set. People often call tennis “bloodless boxing.” I thought about that in the fifth set. It was like the final rounds of Ali-Frazier in Manila. They were both someplace beyond exhaustion. And yet, they each kept doing impossible things. Alcaraz would run off-screen and hit a screaming winner. Sinner would pound three-four-five shots in a row off the line. Alcaraz would hit such delicate drop shots that the ball would crack when it hit the clay, like an egg. Sinner would break the wrong way and look off balance and then somehow contort his body and blast a cannot shot that even Alcaraz could not reach.

Sinner seemed done. How do you recover from losing three match points?

Alcaraz seemed done. When he failed to serve out the match, you could feel his frustration.

But they went on and on, until Alcaraz caught fire in the tiebreak, and Sinner couldn’t find one more comeback.

My sportswriter brain still wants to place this match in history, but I think I’ll let the heart talk. I played tennis Sunday morning with the usual foursome. We hit some good shots, made some comical errors, and moved at our usual middle-aged folk pace. At one point, Linda hit a shot that ticked off my frame and popped into my face. At another, Maddy hit an angled shot that sent Richard flying into the net that separates the courts. It was a pretty typical Sunday.

And then I got back and watched the match — this incredible match. I watched Jannik Sinner play his preposterous machine-gun tennis. I watched Carlos Alcaraz run down shots no one else would even try for. They were so good. And they were also so human.

My watch alerted me of an elevated heart rate.

My brain kept saying, No one has ever played tennis like this before.

And this crazy thought echoed:

“Hey, I play this sport! No, I don’t play it like them … but I do play it!”

And I felt oddly proud.

That’s how good this match was.

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