Photo: YouTube/usopen

If you happened to be idling by the U.S. Open practice courts on Monday, you might have overheard the collective gasp when world No. 2 Carlos Alcaraz emerged for his practice session looking like a slimmed-down Private Pyle. Or maybe the idea was Furiosa of Mad Max. Or David Beckham circa Y2K. Whichever way you spin it, tennis’s boy wonder had chopped off all his hair. And while actual matches were taking place all over the grounds of the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, it seemed, for a brief moment, that all anyone could talk about was the 22-year-old’s unfortunate buzz cut, a shave almost as close as his landmark French Open final against Jannik Sinner this past June.

The U.S. Open press corps, always eager to gin up story lines that have nothing to do with tennis itself, went on to solicit comments from a number of Alcaraz’s peers. “I don’t know who told him to do that,” said Frances Tiafoe, “but it’s terrible.” John McEnroe agreed. Meanwhile, Emma Raducanu, the Spaniard’s partner in last week’s revamped mixed-doubles event, was considerably more charitable. “I think he pulls it off,” she said in her press conference following her opening-round win. “If you own a haircut like that, then it can work.” And Sinner, whose fierce rivalry with Alcaraz appears far more amiable than the ones that dominated the sport’s previous eras, kept things diplomatic. “Honestly, I think everything suits him,” said the Italian, though he clarified he had no plans to shave off his own red curls.

In the information vacuum, the rabid community of keyboard warriors better known as “Tennis Twitter” was left to make assumptions. The Alca-buzz, they thought, must have been the work of “Victor Barber,” né Victor Martínez, a minor celebrity best known for fashioning Alcaraz’s hair into any number of unflattering shapes and styles. “Victor barber deserves jail time for the crimes he commits,” wrote one X user in reaction to Alcaraz’s mid-tournament fade at Roland Garros earlier this year. This time, Barber was quick to clear his name, explaining that he had nothing to do with the buzz cut when asked for comment. “I’m hallucinating …” he told the tennis writer Ben Rothenberg, sending along a face-palm emoji to more emphatically express his displeasure with his world-famous client.

So how, exactly, did this happen? As it turned out, it’s a classic tale of brotherly mischief. Following his first-round win against Reilly Opelka, Alcaraz told reporters he thought the flight from Spain to New York was too far to enlist Barber’s services, so he turned instead to his brother Alvaro. “He misunderstood with the machine,” said the 2022 U.S. Open winner plainly. “Then, the only way to fix it was just to shave it off.”

You could choose to see the tale of Alcaraz’s haircut as a silly distraction, the kind of human-interest story that gets casual tennis fans more invested in the quiet and congested early days of a Slam. Or, perhaps, it’s better viewed as a testament to the health of a sport that left one golden era — defined by global icons like Roger Federer and Serena Williams — and fortuitously entered another, one in which the questionable but ultimately endearing aesthetic choices of a future all-time great managed to sustain the attention of fans, reporters, and even players for the first few days of the year’s final major. You could sense it around the practice courts, as fans squinted to get a closer look, turning to one another to confirm that the man in the muscle tank was, indeed, Carlos Alcaraz, looking the part of a prizefighter. Tennis has no shortage of star power.

The haircut is also an indication of Alcaraz’s swagger, confidence, and willingness to get playful. It’s the last quality that makes for a nice contrast with Sinner, his much more stolid rival, and their immediate predecessors. (It is difficult to imagine Federer or Rafael Nadal debuting a botched haircut on the first Monday of a major, much less Novak Djokovic, who still finds himself jockeying for fans’ affection in the twilight of his career.) But when Alcaraz winkingly polled the Arthur Ashe crowd about his new ’do after his first-round win, he knew they’d roar for him, and roar they did.

And besides, the buzz-cut saga appears to have had little effect on the Spaniard’s tennis. He has managed to cruise through his first three matches, losing only six games in his third-round match against Luciano Darderi and only four games in the round before that. For a third straight Slam, all roads are pointing to a final featuring Alcaraz and Sinner. And given the fast clip at which the Spaniard’s hair seems to grow, one imagines the buzz cut won’t look quite so dire by next Sunday.

From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed