The US Open men's final 4 provides the ultimate test of mettle |
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Félix Auger-Aliassime has only been here once before. The 25-year-old Canadian made it to the U.S. Open semifinals in 2021, falling to Daniil Medvedev, who went on to take the trophy with a victory over Novak Djokovic. It was Auger-Aliassime's first time making it that far, and until this week, it looked like it might be his last. An unusually young member of the ATP tour at just 18 years old, he's spent the past several years figuring out that the higher levels of the sport require more than the talent, fitness, and discipline he clearly has; up here, a savagery of the soul is often what distinguishes the very best of prospects from those who win enough to make history. If Auger-Aliassime has that kind of animal in him, we certainly haven't seen it yet.
In the final four of New York's 2025 bracket, Auger-Aliassime is the wild card in this regard, a fresh mystery with shards of hope sharing company with a trio of already bejeweled killers. Djokovic is here again and seemingly forever—starting in 2007, he's made it this far 13 times, winning four U.S. Open championships—and he's perhaps the sharpest of all tennis spirits, ever. His showing in Tuesday night's quarter-finals victory over American hopeful Taylor Fritz was a stark reminder of this. Any other 38-year-old would have been overwhelmed by the physicality of facing a top-five player in the world, 11 years his junior, playing the best tennis of his rising career. Even Djokovic, himself, looked like he may have just too little of his prime athletic life left, in the match. He gasped and panted throughout, leaned over glumly, and stalled between longer rallies.
A factor as marginal as the time of the match might have been enough to tip the scales in Fritz's favor; should Djokovic have had to endure the glaring late summer sun, in addition to his opponent's vitality, it could have been too much to survive. But he knew exactly how much he needed from his aging body, scraping by in four long sets and walking away with the win just when it seemed like he might expire. Outplayed through much of the night, Djokovic's nerve held firmer during decisive points, and he drew Fritz into mental standoffs, baiting the young man who has never beaten him into mental marathons and unpassable tests of mettle.
It will take much more nuclear head games if Djokovic is to unsettle Carlos Alcaraz. His competitor in Friday's semifinal showdown has been the best player in New York, winning every set he's played in, while holding serve on 68 of 69 games. Typically known as a magnetically joyous master of tennis disaster who superheroes his way to dramatic glory, this tournament has displayed a more business-driven Alcaraz, replete with a freshly buzzed head. Perhaps no one can derail the machine Alcaraz looks to have turned himself into—but if anyone can, it's Djokovic.
After losing the Wimbledon final to Alcaraz in both 2023 and 2024, it appeared that the Serbian legend might never take a grand slam victory over his emerging Spanish foil again. But Djokovic loves to defy: he then defeated Alcaraz in the gold medal match of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, and again in the quarter-finals of this past January's Australian Open. That Melbourne win was especially jarring, with Djokovic recovering from a first set loss to take the next three, finding previously unseen weakness in Alcaraz's serve and backhand. Djokovic, as he so often has in his late stage, took long injury timeouts so full of anguished grimaces that fans wondered if he could even keep playing—only to come out on top.
The only other person on the planet capable of beating a locked-in Alcaraz is the man who Auger-Aliassime has the misfortune of playing in the other half of the bracket: Jannik Sinner. He makes his foes into his Jannik Dinner, chopping up their games with something much bigger than whatever you use to slice your vegetables. No one has ever launched the ball as hard and simultaneously precisely as Sinner, a man who performs his tennis surgery with a scalpel that's also a bazooka. On the Wimbledon grass, this July, he perfected his groundstroke marriage between velocity and accuracy, and the result was too much for even Alcaraz. Sinner took his fourth grand slam title, and his third trophy over the past four major tournaments.
Hard courts like the ones in New York are Sinner's favorite, but it's the grass that most turns the sport into target practice, and most clearly rewards his thunderous marksmanship. On that surface, Alcaraz couldn't run, leap, and generally imagineer his way past his mistakes—the English green is too slippery for that much movement, and the ball dies too quickly. It'll bounce a bit higher and longer, in America, and off of terrain with better shoe traction, allowing for more showcases of creative agility. Who knows what any of this really means, though: Sinner and Alcaraz are the two clashing elements in an ongoing physics experiment at the frontier of the game, and they haven't fought on a grand slam hard court since 2022's U.S. Open, when their mind-bending twilight marathon begat their rivalry's arc toward a brand new tennis apex.
Should Alcaraz and Sinner meet again, it will be the third time in a row that they've faced off in a grand slam final, and a fitting rubber match for the past few months of tennis—three matches, three surfaces, one champion of 2025. It would also mean two straight years of the Alcaraz/Sinner duopoly at majors; it's been since the 2023 U.S. Open that anyone else won a grand slam title. That winner was Djokovic. Should he—or, gasp, Auger-Aliassime—prevent Sinner vs. Alcaraz, Round 3, his career will have a new cherry on top of it, worthy of its own documentary. Really, there are no bad outcomes for this upcoming weekend of tennis. All outcomes are a brand of spectacular. There will either be another chapter of the greatest modern rivalry in sports, or something so shocking that it reorients the field.
