“It hasn’t been amazing for me, let’s agree to that. It has not been amazing.”

This was Stefanos Tsitsipas, the Greek tennis star, a few days back, thinking out loud about where he has been in his career and where he hopes he is going. He is 25 years old. Not old, but not young either, not in tennis terms anyway.

It wasn’t long ago when the sport was supposed to get handed over to him. In 2019, at 21, he won the ATP Finals. He broke into the top five for the first time that year. Two years later he was two sets up on Novak Djokovic and cruising in the French Open final, only to have Djokovic wrest it back. Last year he made the final of the Australian Open. Maybe this was his time? He lost to Djokovic again. 

Since then, he’s been skidding backward, losing to players he once handled without much trouble, getting caught and passed by a younger crew with little interest in waiting its turn. And now he was in Indian Wells, adjusting to a lesser tennis existence than he had, plotting a reboot and trying to find his confidence at a moment in his life where that didn’t figure to be his narrative.

“I really need good wins against top players to regain that mentality of ‘I have a big game and I can really go out there show the world that I can execute it,’” he said. 

Tsitsipas is not the only one who arrived at the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells on something of a reclamation mission, and on Sunday, he didn’t have to look very far to see the other leading members of that crew. Frances Tiafoe, not many months removed from being the biggest star in American tennis but mired in a slump, was on the other side of the net. 

And just after they were through, with Tsitsipas winning 6-3, 6-3, Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz, at 20, already a former world No 1 and without a tournament title since Wimbledon, went up against Felix Auger-Aliassime of Canada. Like Tsitsipas, Auger-Aliassime was another once fast-rising star. He barely won more matches than he lost last year and was seeded 31st here.

This is one of the things that happens at Indian Wells, which falls in a kind of Goldilocks slot on the calendar – not too early, not too late – that can provide a restart for players who stumbled during the Australian summer in January and didn’t find their stride during February’s less high-profile tournaments. Big-time tennis lands in North America for the first time. The tennis season feels new again. 

Maybe it’s the crisp air and vast desert landscape, the rare super-important tournament far removed from the bustle of a big city. Indian Wells offers the chance at rebirth, for the struggling elite. 

“Difficult months for me,” Alcaraz said Sunday, admitting to a drop in his confidence following recent losses in South America that followed a defeat in the quarterfinals of the Australian Open. “I have been struggling during the practice every day. I try to keep my confidence high, or as high as I can. Trying to be myself every day.”

(Joe Scarnici/Getty Images)

Alcaraz took a helicopter tour of the Grand Canyon last week to get his mind off tennis. Still, the defending champion had a rough start to his title defense, searching initially to find the command that took him to the top of the game as he dropped the first set on Friday night to Italy’s Matteo Arnaldi, never quite knowing where the next attempt at a laser forehand would land. But he quickly righted himself and won 12 of the next 13 games, and on Sunday, for a second consecutive match, Alcaraz looked more like the Alcaraz that he and everyone else had begun to get used to. “Playing a little better,” is how he  put it, driving balls deep into the court and floating up to the net to finish points when he needed to.

Unfortunately for Auger-Aliassime, Alcaraz’s reclamation came at his expense. A year ago he was facing off against Alcaraz in the quarterfinals, still figuring in a conversation about someone who might pose a threat to Alcaraz over the next decade. In some ways, that felt like a different life on Sunday for Auger-Aliassime.

He won just three matches from mid-April to mid-October in 2023, a year during which he received stem cell treatments for an injured ligament in his left knee.

“Same thing every week,” Auger-Aliassime said Sunday, after Alcaraz used him to get himself closer to back on track, pushing him around the court to beat him in straight sets, 6-2, 6-3. “I’m not able to put like a long streak of wins in a row. Even in training, I’m not able to find consistency.”

(Joe Scarnici/Getty Images)

Tiafoe kept his feelings to himself on Sunday. He took a slow walk off the court, tossed a few wristbands into the crowd as headed to the stadium exit, and left the grounds without any post-mortems. Following his run to the semifinals in the U.S.Open in 2022, a stretch that turned him into a celebrity, transformed his matches into events that pack stadiums, and exploded his endorsement portfolio, he has made the second week of just one Grand Slam. He is 10-9 since a quarterfinal loss to Ben Shelton at the 2023 U.S. Open. 

He recently told Sky Sports that he believed tennis was the “hardest sport in the world,” because the ball is so small and the combination of hand-eye coordination, movement and endurance it requires, plus the isolation that comes with being all alone on the court.”

It was an odd statement for someone his fellow players often describe as one of the most natural talents in the game.

“He plays looser than any other player on the tour,” Tsitsipas said of Tiafoe. 

Too loose on Sunday. Despite the usual flashes – a silky drop-volley, a curling passing shot down a tiny corridor –  Tiafoe sent a backhand long and forehand wide to let Tsitsipas break his serve at love early in the second set and never got particularly close again. He made the semifinals here last year, which means his ranking, which cracked the top 10 for the first time in the middle of last year but now stands at 18, is about to tumble again. 

(Michael Owens/Getty Images)

If there is a common-thread for Alcaraz, Auger-Aliassime, Tsitsipas, and Tiafoe, it’s that the best versions of their tennis selves come with big, aggressive games that carry high levels of risk. Mostly, they need to play big to play well, and the bigger and more powerful the game, the higher the likelihood that it can go off the rails, and the bigger the effort to regain the confidence that the big game will be there in the critical moments once again. 

Can this foursome turn things around and get back to where they once were? Even Alcaraz, who no one believes will be without a title for much longer, said he has had his moments of wondering what comes next. 

He has struggled to find the intensity that was there for every practice and match during his first two seasons, when everything was heading upwards. Also, like most people his age, he spends a lot of time on his phone checking to see what comments other people make about him. 

“Most of them are really good ones, but a few of them is the bad ones,” he said Sunday. “It’s difficult to deal with it.”

Tsitsipas said he first began to experience doubts early last year. He felt as though he wasn’t progressing, that he might need a coach other than his father, who has guided his development since he was a small boy and was courtside on Sunday, clapping him along and barking instruction and encouragement between points. Mark Philippoussis came on board for a stint. In retrospect, he feels like he lost several weeks of the season searching for other voices and directions. 

In tournaments where he did make a semifinal or even a final, he didn’t step onto the court with the same clear head and intensity with which he had started the week. Then he lost and sometimes carried that baggage into the next tournament and suffered an upset. A few too many of those and he was outside the top 10.

Now he’s low enough that he can end up playing a top player far earlier in a tournament. He knows he needs to go on the court confident that the prospect of facing him can cause discomfort, because he’s proven he can hold his own among the elite.

“It’s just that it hasn’t worked out recently, and I’m not in the best sort of tennis shape that I’ve been in terms of the last months,” he lamented on Sunday. 

He has every intention of regaining that form, though. Same goes for Auger-Aliassime, who also has the advantage of doing it once already. It just might take a bit of time, and even more effort and energy than the first climb took, a test of his character unlike anything he has previously experienced. The competition gets better every year, or at least it feels that way. 

“You wish you could snap your fingers and be back there, but you can’t,” he said. “You have to build it up all over again.”

(Frey/TPN/Getty Images)