Serena Williams and Carlos Alcaraz brought the crowd at Arthur Ashe Stadium to its feet in their mixed doubles debut Tuesday, then fell in the quarterfinals when Alcaraz and Williams lost to Belinda Bencic and Flavio Cobolli 5-4 (4), 4-1, ending what had been one of the more electric two-match runs in recent US Open memory.
The pair won their first-round match against Erin Routliffe and Lloyd Glasspool 5-3, 4-1 in front of a crowd that was loudly and visibly on their side. Williams said afterward she never expected to be back on that court at Flushing Meadows and never thought it would happen.
Alcaraz said he double-faulted on the very first point of the tournament, acknowledged he was extremely nervous and said the four-month absence from competition made him almost forget how competing feels. The 23-year-old defending men’s singles champion was returning from a right wrist injury that kept him out of the French Open and Wimbledon. He wore a sleeve on his wrist throughout the matches.
How it ended
The quarterfinal against Bencic and Cobolli saw Williams and Alcaraz let a first-set tiebreaker slip away and get dominated in the second. Cobolli had called their opponents the queen of tennis and the king of now before the match, acknowledging he was tight having them on the other side of the net.
Bencic described facing both of them as surreal, saying she sometimes found herself standing at the net wondering how she ended up in that situation and calling the experience a huge honor. She said you can feel the aura of both players across the net. She also playfully recounted a moment of attempted gamesmanship from Williams, who told her she speaks Italian better.
Williams on the court
Williams is 44 and competing in tennis again after a four-year absence. She is not playing singles in New York. She won the mixed doubles here in 1998 with Max Mirnyi and has eight US Open singles championships in total. Against Routliffe and Glasspool, she hit shots that fans recognized from her prime years, carrying Alcaraz through a slow start with the kind of clean ball-striking she built her career on.
Whether she will now enter the women’s doubles with her sister Venus remains to be seen. The two have won the US Open doubles title twice among their 14 Grand Slam doubles championships together.
The tournament continues
The semifinals feature Bencic and Cobolli alongside Elina Svitolina and Gael Monfils, Mirra Andreeva and Andrey Rublev, and Karolina Muchova and Jakub Mensik. The final Wednesday night will be played in traditional sets-to-six-games format, with the winning pair splitting the $1 million prize.
Alcaraz returns to competitive action after four months away with match play under his belt and a crowd behind him, which is the best possible preparation for a singles defense that begins later in the week.
For her, the two matches represent something different. She came back to Flushing Meadows, heard her name chanted again, hit the shots she knows how to hit, and reminded the tennis world why the crowd never stops chanting her name when she walks onto the court.
