@Kieran makes a good point, though. As I've said elsewhere, our expectations are collectively ruined by the Big Three who have set the bar for greatness at an unreasonable level. The chances of a player, whether Alcaraz or Rune or some five-year old picking up a racket for the first time, matching the career resumes of the Big Three are exceedingly slim. Maybe someday, but my point is that we should put them out of our minds in terms of expectations. Not only is it unfair to those young players, but it sets us up for disappointment and gives us a skewed view of what tennis greatness actually means.
Alcaraz made a stir for being the first teenager to win a Slam since Rafa and, despite being greatly assisted by ATP regulatory wonkiness, also became the youngest ever #1 player. But as Kieran implied, teenagers winning Slams really runs the gamut from Michael Chang to Rafael Nadal and Bjorn Borg. There's a lot of possible outcomes between those poles. For instance, Boris Becker and Mats Wilander.
Oh, and there's nothing wrong with Michael Chang or Lleyton Hewitt for that matter, both of whom had excellent careers and are among the top 25 players or so of the Open Era.
That said, if Alcaraz ends up as another Chang, it is reasonable to be disappointed. For one, that's a lot of Slam-less years ahead, but more so, he's just a more dangerous player than Chang was. I was only a casual fan of tennis in Hewitt's prime, but my sense is that his reign was really a combination of him being just good enough--and pesky enough--to making playing him difficult, and peaking during that weak period between Pete's fall and Roger's ascendency. Alcaraz is playing at a similar time, but with no clear Roger/Rafa on the horizon. And really, he's as good a candidate to be the Next Guy as anyone, with Rune being the only other guy who seems likely destined for some flavor of greatness (this isn't to right others off, just that the likelihood of anyone else currently playing is probably less than even that they'll end up as true ATGs...but who knows, maybe Medvedev has a dominant run that gets him to 5+ Slams, or maybe FAA puts it altogether, etc).
But my point being, we shouldn't expect Alcaraz (or Rune) to be Roger and Rafa, simply because that's what our recent expected standard of greatness entails.
I sometimes like to ask the question: Who among active players will have the best career from this point onward? To me the answer is Alcaraz, followed closely by Rune, then a cluster of Medvedev, Tsitsipas, and maybe Djokovic (as far as Slam count is concerned, at least), then guys like Sinner and FAA. But I'd still put the over/under on career Slams for Alcaraz (and Rune) somewhere around 3-4, the other guys I mentioned, maybe 1-2. This isn't because I don't think they won't win 6+ Slams, just that until they get to 2 or 3, my expectations are somewhat restrained.
Meaning, there's a great funneling in terms of Slams, that separates the almost-greats from the true greats. We can see this with Slam counts of the Open Era:
20+ Slams: 3 players
10-19 Slams: 2 players
5-9 Slams: 9 players
2-4 Slams: 16 players
1 Slam: 28 players
Or to make a chart (how could I resist?):
Nothing fancy, just a "five minute chart." But what I like about it is that it illustrates two things:
1.
The rarity of 10+ Slams, let alone 20+. Only
five players have won double-digit Slams in the Open Era, and only
three 20+. If we go back before the Open Era and consider all "majors"--including pro Slams and ILTF majors, we only add one player to the 20+ club--Ken Rosewall--and a handful of others to the double-digits club: Rod Laver, Roy Emerson, Pancho Gonzales, Don Budge, Bill Tilden, and Henri Cochet. Meaning, on 100+ years of professional tennis (and 140ish years of tennis overall) there are only
10 men who have won double-digit majors.
2.
Most Slam winners exist on gradual curve. The chart shows the gradual curve from 1 to 8, then the big jump to 11, then 14, then 20+. Meaning, it shows us how the Big Three, but really also Borg and Sampras, dominated Slams in a way that simply disrupted the normal curve.
The point being, in terms of young talent coming up and assessing whether they join the ranks of 58 Open Era Slam winners, we should really only be considering where they might end up on the 1-8 spectrum. If and when someone reaches, say, 5 Slams before turning 25, then I think it becomes reasonable whether they can join the exclusive "Double-Digit Slam Club."
