What Carlos Alcaraz’s ‘My Way’ Netflix docuseries says about his tennis present and future

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The latest offering in the genre of tennis documentary comes from none other than Carlos Alcaraz, one of two men’s players most likely to own tennis during the next decade. At its heart, it questions how his future will be fulfilled.

Will he do it? Can he become the greatest player in history? Is he willing to make the necessary sacrifices? Can he do it on his own terms? Those are the questions Alcaraz and his multi-headed team of handlers have put forward in this three-episode offering from Netflix.

“Carlos Alcaraz: My Way”, and nearly all the sports films like it, are not documentaries in the true sense of the word. The stars have both creative control over them and financial stakes in them. More than anything, they are feature-length commercials for the people they focus on, presenting to the world the character the stars and their teams want presented.

A generation ago, Alcaraz would have collected a fat paycheck for penning a quick autobiography, as Rafael Nadal did after he won Wimbledon for the first time when he was 22. The stars of today make movies about themselves. Roger Federer has done it; Novak Djokovic is on the way to doing it.

That doesn’t mean they are without worth, especially for someone like Alcaraz, who rarely gives any access to his private life and speaks to the world largely while sitting in a press conference answering questions after a match. The series brings viewers into his family home, and has some sweet scenes of him sharing meals with his family and interviews with his parents. Other than Alcaraz, his mother, Virginia Garfia Escandon, comes off as the hero of the story, one of the few people who prioritizes his sanity and happiness above all else.

Beyond those glimpses, these sorts of films also have some value because they reveal things their subjects may not quite realize they are revealing, or do so in a way that comes off differently than they might intend. They also clarify exactly how a star like Alcaraz and his team around him want the world to see him.

That version may be far from the complete truth, but the creation of that persona has value in itself. Near the end of the final episode, Alcaraz asks himself whether he has the mindset necessary to become the greatest of all time.

“Right now, I don’t know,” he says. “I would prefer to put happiness before any kind of accomplishment, because happiness is an accomplishment.”

Does he believe that? Who knows? But we know he and his team want the world to believe he believes that.

Alcaraz likes to win, but wants the world to know he needs to have fun to do it

In the binary world at the top of men’s tennis, it’s impossible to watch this packaging of Alcaraz and not think of him being set up in contrast to his top rival of his generation, Jannik Sinner, the world No. 1.

Stylistically, Alcaraz and Sinner are not quite tennis opposites, but they are very different.

Sinner is an aggressive human backboard with a vastly improved serve and groundstrokes that he can crack past opponents like a whip from almost anywhere. For now though, he’s mainly a baseline player who rarely varies from his strategy.

Alcaraz is a tennis magician who pulls off shots that not even he knows he has in his bag when he tries them. He improvises his way through points. He has arguably the best drop shot in the game. He can come in and win from the net.

Personality-wise, he wears his heart on his sleeve, screaming “vamos” and pumping his fist and playing to the crowd; a passionate player from a country that prizes passion. Sinner grew up in a region of Italy that is culturally more aligned with Austria. German is his first language and he plays with the controlled and composed mien of the Teutonic archetype.

Sinner tried to present his wild side earlier this year when he founded a YouTube channel. It showed him driving a golf cart around the Australian Open parking lot at a rate of knots. In his documentary, Alcaraz talks about wanting to get “wasted” in Ibiza for a week after the 2023 French Open and then going on to win Queen’s, the prestigious Wimbledon warm-up, before winning Wimbledon itself — having played six grass-court matches in his career. He went back this year for more of the same, against the wishes of his team including his coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero. He won Wimbledon again.

It’s not clear if this was genuinely a major confrontation or something that got played up for dramatic purposes, but Team Alcaraz wants the world to know he’s the fun guy in this rivalry, the one you should want to have a beer with.

Time will tell how this plays with Alcaraz’s rivals. It’s one thing to win the French Open, party in Ibiza, and win Wimbledon two weeks later. It’s another thing to make a movie about it.

Did his team really want him to play hurt or injured?

A major chunk of the first episode focuses on Alcaraz’s forearm injury in the spring of 2024.

Alcaraz won Indian Wells that March, but within weeks he began feeling pain shooting up his right forearm. The series shows him receiving lengthy treatments from his physiotherapist and includes the opinion of his doctor.

The main message is that he is indeed hurt, but the main impact of the injury is mental: even when it is largely healed, the psychological impact leaves him reluctant to hit his forehand at full power; one of his shortfalls is that he needs to feel completely healthy in order to play well. Ferrero and others speak to this as a kind of weakness, that great players learn how to play well enough to win when they aren’t feeling their best. After his 2024 French Open win, Alcaraz said that it was finding “joy in the suffering” that took him to the title.

That may be true, but this is one of those moments of a possible accidental reveal that seems to come across in a way they may not have intended or realized. One interpretation is that there are a lot of people around Alcaraz, all with a vested financial interest in him playing as much as possible, who appear to be telling him to play and hit out on his forehand through pain.

Alcaraz said as much at Roland Garros — that his team was trying to convince him that the pain he felt did not put him in danger. He spoke of trying to adjust his brain to trusting them and the health of his arm. This speaks to one of the series’ main themes — to what extent sacrifice and suffering are inevitable in becoming the best in a discipline — but in this instance, it’s possible that it revealed too much.

Not yet the philosopher king the series wants him to be

These series all have their heavy-handed moments. The heaviest in “My Way” come toward the end.

It makes clear that Alcaraz needs to take breaks from the sport, lest he begin to feel suffocated. He’s so good he can take those breaks, get drunk for a week and still win Wimbledon. It makes clear that he can’t be serious and meticulous about his craft all the time. He needs to go home and spend time with his friends instead of a bunch of middle-aged guys.

For most of three episodes those characters have been saying that he has yet to embrace some essential sacrifices if he wants to be the greatest player ever, as he claims.

Carlos Alcaraz’s joyful aspect is put into contrast with the sacrifices required to stay at the top of tennis. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)

By the end, though, most of them — Ferrero is the exception — speak about how Alcaraz has begun to shift their approach to life. They speak of feeling lighter and less stressed out when they are around him. They are starting to understand the benefits of Alcaraz’s approach to life and tennis.

In other words, not only is Alcaraz the most sublime player of his generation, he’s also, at 21, a kind of life guru. Maybe he is? Still, it’s just, well, a lot. He is not the first all-time great to combine winning with fun. Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, who both appear as talking heads, spent plenty of time at Studio 54 in New York and at other hot spots across the globe in their heyday.

Boris Becker did his share of carousing. Craig Tiley, the head of Tennis Australia, tells a pretty good story about Djokovic and his Serbian mates partying until 5 a.m. after he won his first Grand Slam title in Melbourne in 2007.

One major difference between Federer, Djokovic, Nadal and Alcaraz is that the Big Three all fell in love with their future wives in the first years of their tennis careers. Nadal and Djokovic have been with their spouses since they were teenagers.

So far there is no regular companion in Alcaraz’s box. Eventually there probably will be. Perhaps he will spend less time partying in Ibiza when that happens.

Moments of vulnerability that are revealing — but not too revealing

Alcaraz shows his vulnerability throughout, and talks a lot about having moments where he thinks about quitting tennis. Lots of it is very raw and so people get to see a side of him that has only come out in glimpses to date.

But much of that vulnerability is managed by the documentary, leaning on official highlights and interviews for the sharpest moments of pain. After losing to Djokovic in the Olympic final, perhaps the most painful moment of the time period which the documentary spans, it leans on a tearful interview with the Spanish ex-player Alex Corretja that most of the world has already seen.

By contrast, the moments of joy — particularly after 2024’s French Open title — are less stage-managed, with Alcaraz and his brother revelling in a car on the way to celebrate. He gets wound up watching Spain during Euro 2024 while he is trying to win Wimbledon at the same time, and enjoys ribbing his entourage about their varied levels of golf proficiency while he’s trying to relax.

Taken together, all these decisions explain the value of the sports documentary to someone like Alcaraz. The less insight he offers into his personal life outside of his own media, the more valuable that insight becomes, and the more people will want to look through the window he offers into his personality, however tinted it may be. His documentary is titled “My Way” in service to his journey to being, he hopes, the greatest tennis player in history — but it’s also a clue to how players like Alcaraz want to manage their fame and relationship with the world at large.

(Top photo: Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)

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