By Richard Pagliaro | Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Photo credit: Antoine Couvercelle/ROLEX
NEW YORK—When Carlos Alcaraz views the ATP crammed calendar he sees potential agony and injury.
The seven-time Grand Slam champion, who is playing his first tournament in four-and-a-half months after injuring his right wrist in Barcelona, said on lesson he’s learned from his injury-induced layoff is placing a priority on breaks to prevent injury.
Calling the pro calendar “impossible”, the reigning US Open champion said pressing pause on play will be his future pain-killer.
“Seeing how tight is the calendar, obviously I don’t want to have this break because an injury. But in the future, I’m going to take some breaks, some long breaks,” Alcaraz told the media after defeating Jaime Faria 4-6, 6-0, 6-3, 6-2. “Maybe not four months, but one month, two months, missing some tournaments, because it’s impossible to play them all.
“I think they adding more important tournaments. You know, in a way they making us to play. You can say, no. You can keep one or two.”
Alcaraz, who defeated Grand Slam king Novak Djokovic in the Australian Open final to make history as the youngest man to complete the career Grand Slam, said unless players schedule their own breaks, “we will see even more [injuries] in the future.”
“You can decide your calendar, but there are some Masters 1000s, some Grand Slams, and we’ve been out playing 40 weeks if we got to play every mandatory tournament that the ATP, you know, required us to play,” Alcaraz said. “So it’s impossible, and we are seeing a lot of players getting injured, a lot of players getting tired. If they don’t don’t do anything about it, we will see even more in the future.”
Of course the congested calendar has been a hot button topic among players dating back to the 1970s. Back then, many stars skipped the Australian Open to create a longer offseason and because the AO did not offer as much prize money as other Grand Slams at that time.
Acaraz said managing his schedule shrewdly is vital to longevity.
“But for me, you know, taking this break because an injury, it wasn’t that good, but you know, what I’m going to say is I’m going to take some breaks and missing some tournaments in the future for sure,” Alcaraz said.
I so agree with him and said in my last comment that I think it might be a good idea to revise the 3 out of 5 matches for the men. As an aging tennis player with two knee replacements and a possible shoulder one too, I can’t imagine what a pro player’s body endures.
What makes a grand slam grand. It’s that it’s three sets out of five that gives somebody who starts out poorly a chance to win case in point: Alcaraz. I can’t imagine why people say five sets is boring the whole issue is to get to see more tennis and to see the brilliant ones at it
As a woman I believe that we should get equal pay for equal work but the women don’t do equal work. I think for the Women it should be three out of four so if it goes to 2: 2 play tiebreaker
What we do need less of is all the yackety-yack from the mouth McEnroe and his buddy Jim Courier. as a watcher on TV I like to hear the atmosphere so I don’t hate having to turn the mute on when the two of them just go rambling. I mean one time I was talking about something that was completely not TENNIS related. What arrogance. In addition to which it’s stupid for them to talk right after the points played in the audience is plotting and yelling you can’t understand what they’re saying anyway.