PARIS — Earlier than there was Carlos, there was Félix.
It’s not really easy to recall now, by way of the haze of the pandemic and the aftershocks of Carlos Alcaraz’s meteoric affect on tennis of late. However there was a time, starting in roughly 2015, that the tennis cognoscenti raved a few younger Canadian named Félix Auger-Aliassime, calling him a possible inheritor to Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.
After a high quality begin to the yr however a rocky late winter and spring for Auger-Aliassime, that idea by no means felt farther away than throughout his first two units of the French Open on Sunday. Auger-Aliassime got here out flat and wild for the primary males’s match on the primary stadium courtroom. For 88 minutes he was misplaced towards little-known Juan Pablo Varillas of Peru, 25, who’s ranked 122nd and had his opponent complaining to himself and anybody else who would pay attention.
Then, with a number of flicks of his forehand, a number of blasted serves and a few deft drop pictures, Auger-Aliassime was again, displaying his distinctive mixture of energy, precision, contact and pace. He prevailed, 2-6, 2-6, 6-1, 6-3, 6-3, in a 3-hour-14-minute scare that made for a really Félix-like afternoon.
Auger-Aliassime made the ultimate of the Roland Garros junior match in 2016, at age 15, after which received the U.S. Open boys’ title later that yr. He was 6 ft 2 inches (on his option to 6-4), with lengthy arms and quick ft. He may swap instructions like a large receiver. He had broad shoulders that left loads of room for his torso to fill out and add much more energy.
He was additionally well mannered and courtly, approaching the sport with a humility that coaches mentioned drove him to coach exhausting each day. Watching him play a match in his teenage years, Gastão Elias, a longtime Portuguese professional, mentioned Auger-Aliassime “has been an grownup since he was 12.”
Auger-Aliassime could at some point fulfill all of the promise of his teenage years. He’s simply 21, ranked ninth on this planet and the youngest member of the highest 10 not named Alcaraz. But when he does, the journey may have concerned loads of suits and begins, together with losses in his first eight finals and different moments when he appeared about to take off solely to fall flat.
And now, as he strives to achieve the extent of the Huge Three — together with Stefanos Tsitsipas, Alexander Zverev and so many others — there may be Alcaraz to take care of, a 19-year-old charging from the rear, piling up trophies and wins towards the sport’s greats and making that final, hardest step look straightforward. In mere months, Alcaraz has modified the calculus for all of the 20-somethings, although Auger-Aliassime’s greater downside of late is inconsistency, not Alcaraz.
“Earlier than, it was simply Nadal and Federer and Djokovic,” mentioned Louis Borfiga, a longtime French tennis instructor and the architect of Canada’s fashionable tennis improvement machine. “Now there may be an unimaginable participant coming. He has to work very exhausting, and he has to remain constructive, to imagine in himself and his sport.”
Auger-Aliassime has no illusions in regards to the problem of the subsequent step.
“The hardest half is at all times what’s forward of you, isn’t it?” he mentioned one afternoon final month in Portugal, earlier than being upset in a quarterfinal at a small match wherein he was the highest seed. “What you haven’t completed earlier than.”
If he can take the ultimate step, Auger-Aliassime might be the game’s good movie star, a multiracial star with roots on three continents. He grew up within the largely French-speaking province of Quebec, the son of an immigrant from Togo, the place he donates a whole bunch of hundreds of {dollars} every year to youngsters’s causes.
He has since moved to Monaco and spends loads of time in France and Spain, making him a brand new favourite in Europe.
“Allez Félix!” the followers yelled on Sunday as he tried to return again in his match.
And the proximity of his childhood to New York, amongst his different attributes, has endeared him to the U.S. Open crowd, incomes him an invite to final yr’s Met Gala, the place he wore a white dinner jacket on the purple carpet.
“We nonetheless have borders, however I think about myself a citizen of the world,” he mentioned.
Auger-Aliassime was pretty much as good as anybody on this planet within the first six weeks of the yr, main Canada to the championship of the ATP Cup, attending to match level towards Daniil Medvedev (the eventual finalist) within the Australian Open quarters, then seemingly breaking by way of by profitable the Rotterdam Open, his first title.
Nadal and Federer are invested in his success. Auger-Aliassime often trains at Nadal’s academy in Majorca, working with Nadal’s uncle and former coach, Toni Nadal. Federer texted Auger-Aliassime in February when he lastly received his first match. “I’m blissful for you, properly completed,” Federer wrote.
However extra downs than ups have adopted, with early losses on hardcourts, that are presupposed to be his finest floor, after which on clay in Marrakesh, Monte Carlo and Estoril, Portugal, the place he was the highest seed.
“After January, we didn’t count on the losses, however we all know consistency could be very troublesome,” mentioned Frédéric Fontang, Auger-Aliassime’s coach since 2017. “He does have a capability to soak up and continue learning and at all times do his finest, and that’s the first expertise {that a} high participant will need to have.”
That is the way in which it has at all times been for Auger-Aliassime, ever since his father, Sam Aliassime, a tennis coach in Quebec, launched him to the game when he was a boy. Aliassime coached his son till he was 13. Auger-Aliassime then moved to Montreal to coach with Canada’s all of a sudden vibrant improvement program.
Borfiga first noticed Auger-Aliassime play as a 6-year-old, but it surely was 4 years later that his potential turned obvious. Borfiga mentioned he already had a “heavy ball,” a time period tennis coaches and gamers use to explain somebody whose strokes naturally produce pictures that blend energy and spin in a manner that makes them troublesome to return.
Auger-Aliassime mentioned he started to understand how good he may at some point be when he received a world junior match in Auray, France, when he was 11.
“From then on, the assumption was there,” he mentioned.
His success and private attraction have attracted loads of blue-chip endorsements, together with a partnership with BNP Paribas, the worldwide financial institution that’s among the many greatest sponsors in tennis. For each level Auger-Aliassime wins on tour this yr, the financial institution donates $15 and Auger-Aliassime donates $5 to youngsters’s schooling in Togo.
“He represents the youth,” Jean-Yves Fillion, the chief govt of BNP Paribas USA, mentioned of Auger-Aliassime.
And but there are these vexing defeats — coughing up a two-set result in the Russian qualifier Aslan Karatsev on the 2021 Australian Open; an early loss to Max Purcell, the A hundred and ninetieth-ranked participant, on the Tokyo Olympics; and a second-round loss on the 2021 Nationwide Financial institution Open on residence soil in Toronto to Dusan Lajovic of Serbia. After which there was Sunday’s nervy escape throughout his first look on Philippe Chatrier Court docket.
Auger-Aliassime’s staff, led by Fontang, constructed his schedule in 2022 round alternatives for victories, together with extra smaller tournaments. If he can begin profitable these, then perhaps profitable will grow to be a behavior.
Fontang mentioned gamers with an aggressive fashion like Auger-Aliassime’s may take longer to achieve their full potential as a result of they have been extra susceptible to errors, although few gamers are extra aggressive than Alcaraz. He mentioned Auger-Aliassime’s bodily items made his success almost inevitable in his thoughts. However Fontang needs Auger-Aliassime to be much more aggressive, to reap the benefits of his energy and dimension by coming to the online extra and ending factors, although that might hasten additional inconsistency.
“In fact, the longer term we can not know, however he simply can’t be static,” Fontang mentioned. “What you see with the most effective gamers is that there is no such thing as a half when they’re standing nonetheless.”
Auger-Aliassime has no intention of doing that, although he is aware of the trail to the highest retains getting narrower the upper he climbs. Tennis math, easy as it’s, is exceedingly merciless. There are solely 10 gamers within the high 10, and just one might be No. 1.
“The elite,” he mentioned with a shake of his head, “are simply so constant.”
