What does it mean to be almost great? Alex de Minaur has spent a career answering that question one sprint at a time. There is a restaurant on George Street in Sydney that no longer exists. It was Italian, run by a Uruguayan man named Anibal who had fallen in love with a Spanish woman named Esther after she walked in looking for work as a waitress. They built a life around it, the two of them, in one of the busiest parts of one of the most alive cities on earth.<\/p>\n
Then a financial crisis arrived from across the world, as they tend to do, and the family moved to Alicante, and then back to Sydney, and the restaurant eventually closed, and the car wash businesses opened in Spain, and life became the complicated, improvised, borderless thing it usually is for people who were never from just one place to begin with.<\/span><\/p>\n The boy they raised through all of this, born in Sydney, raised in Alicante, schooled in two languages, carrying two passports, picked up a tennis racket when he was three years old. He would cry when it rained, and training was cancelled. He would watch Lleyton Hewitt on television and imitate the forehand shot-for-shot. By the time he was twelve, living back in Sydney and training at the NSW Tennis Centre in Homebush, his day looked like this: two hours on court in the morning, an hour in the gym, thirty minutes for lunch, two hours of schoolwork, then back on court, then back in the gym. He said it was not tough because he was doing something he loved. He was twelve.<\/span><\/p>\n This is the shape of Alex de Minaur before he became The Demon. A boy of somewhere and everywhere, formed by scarcity and movement and a family that kept remaking itself in different countries, held together by a sport he loved too much to stop playing and a coach named Adolfo Gutierrez who, when the money ran out in 2011 and the family could no longer afford the fees, refused to take payment rather than let the talent go to waste. Some careers are built on academies, sponsorships and wildcard pathways. This one was built on a coach who worked for free and a boy who cried when it rained.<\/span><\/p>\n By 2018, de Minaur was Australia’s highest-ranked tennis player. He was nineteen. He had gone from the Davis Cup squad’s water carrier in January to a certified contender by December, and the tennis world reacted the way it always does when someone young and quick appears with excellent footwork and an obvious engine: it projected. It looked at the legs and the hustle and the relentless retrieval and saw someone who could be anything. In Australia, where men’s tennis had been starving since the Hewitt years, the projections ran particularly warm. Here was the next one. Here was the heir.<\/span><\/p>\n What followed was, depending on how you measure these things, either a decade of steady excellence or a decade of managed disappointment. Possibly both. Probably both. De Minaur won his first title in Sydney in 2019, becoming the youngest champion there since his idol Hewitt in 2001. He won in Atlanta. He won in Zhuhai. He kept winning small, kept moving up, kept running things down that nobody else would bother chasing. He became, over many years and many kilometres of baseline sprinting, one of the most consistent and honest professionals on the tour. He also, if we are being direct, failed to win the things that would have changed the conversation entirely.<\/span><\/p>\n Eleven ATP titles at the time of writing. A career high of number six in the world in the summer of 2024. The first Australian man in the top ten since Lleyton Hewitt in 2006, which is a genuine honour and also a reminder of how long Australia had been waiting. Seven Grand Slam quarterfinals without a single semifinal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In July 2024, de Minaur reached the quarterfinals of Wimbledon for the first time. He was twenty-five. The grass at the All England Club is his favourite surface, as the conditions best suit the way he moves and strikes. He had beaten Arthur Fils in a fourth-round match that cost him something in the final moments: a loud crack in his hip, a cartilage tear, a scan that confirmed the worst. His scheduled opponent in the quarterfinals was Novak Djokovic on Centre Court.<\/span><\/p>\n He held a press conference the morning of the match. The camera caught him before he composed himself into the professional face, and what it caught was not a man discussing a setback. It was a person in genuine grief. He said that at this stage of his career, it was the biggest match of his career.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n He said he had hoped to wake up and feel some kind of miracle. Additionally, he said he knew the risk of stepping out there, that one bad move could turn a three-to-six-week injury into a four-month one.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Ultimately, he withdrew.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What de Minaur said in that press conference, and particularly the way he said it, told you something about who he is that no number of match statistics could. Here was a man who had spent his whole professional life building toward a moment, who had arrived at the door of it, and who then, because the body had other plans and because his sense of the sport’s dignity would not permit him to take the court in a condition that dishonoured the occasion, walked away from it. Someone would have limped out there anyway and been celebrated for it. De Minaur chose not to. He was right not to. He was also devastated, and he showed it, and that mattered.<\/span><\/p>\n There is one number that follows de Minaur through every serious conversation about his career, and it is not a ranking or a title count or a prize money figure. It is thirteen. As in, the number of times he has played Jannik Sinner. As in, the number of times he has lost. Thirteen matches, thirteen defeats, across hard courts and indoor surfaces and every conceivable tournament context from Davis Cup to the ATP Finals. He has won exactly two sets in those twelve encounters. Only two.<\/span><\/p>\n De Minaur knows this. He has said publicly that Sinner is probably his worst matchup on tour, as the head-to-head does not lie. There is something admirable about that honesty, and something heartbreaking about it too. The best player of his generation happens to be stylistically the worst possible problem for the game de Minaur plays. Sinner’s combination of heavy ball-striking, impeccable timing, and physical dimensions that allow him to neutralise pace and redirect it dismantles de Minaur’s counterpunching almost systematically. It is not that de Minaur is bad against Sinner. It is that their games interact the way a lock interacts with the wrong key.<\/span><\/p>\n The Alcaraz matchup is less one-sided, less statistically damning, and de Minaur has had his moments in those encounters. But Sinner is number two in the world, Alcaraz is number one, and the road through any major in the modern era runs through at least one of them. Which means the road through a major runs through something de Minaur has not yet worked out how to solve.<\/span><\/p>\n Here is what the question about Alex de Minaur really is, stripped of sentiment: is this a great career?<\/span><\/p>\n The honest answer is that it depends entirely on the definition you choose, and that the choice of definition reveals something about you as much as it does about him. If a great career means Grand Slams and top-three rankings, then de Minaur has not had one and probably will not have one. He is twenty-seven. His ceiling, physically, is around where it currently is. The game’s landscape, with two players so far above the rest that the distinction almost reads as categorical rather than degree, does not leave a great deal of room for someone whose best asset is making you pay for your mistakes rather than eliminating you with his own weapons.<\/span><\/p>\n But if a great career means something more human and harder to quantify, the picture looks different. It means a Uruguayan-Spanish-Australian boy who cried when it rained, whose family ran out of money at the worst possible moment, and whose coach refused payment so the dream could continue. It means a player who has given everything available to him with everything he has, every single week, for a decade, without complaint and without drama and without the self-destruction that so many of his generation have found irresistible. It means someone who looked at Sinner’s thirteen-zero dominance, said so publicly, and kept turning up and trying to solve the problem anyway. He\u2019s the first Australian man in the world’s top ten in nearly twenty years. He won eleven titles, honestly, not gifted.<\/span><\/p>\n It also means something off the court, which is where the person lives rather than the player. A relationship that started with an early-morning coffee in a Melbourne hotel lobby, with a woman who walked in looking for the person she had heard was a good, humble guy. A relationship that survived the loneliness of a professional tennis schedule, two players chasing their own results across the same circuit, kept alive through FaceTime. It was conducted mostly in different hotels in different countries for years before finally becoming the engagement announced on Instagram in December 2024. He has said that her companionship was something he had been looking for, that it gave him a sense of peace. For someone who has spent most of his life moving between countries and time zones and sporting identities, peace seems like the right word for what he has been building.<\/span><\/p>\n The clay season is underway, which has never been de Minaur’s natural habitat. Roland Garros will come, and the draw will be unkind or kind according to its usual indifference, and at some point, on some court, Sinner or Alcaraz will probably be waiting, and the question everyone asks will get asked again. Can he make a semifinal? Can he at last do the thing that would change the nature of the conversation?<\/span><\/p>\n Perhaps. The honest answer is perhaps. He is playing the best tennis of his life in pockets of 2025 and 2026. The Washington title last year, saved three match points, is the version of de Minaur that makes you reconsider the ceiling. The Monte Carlo quarterfinal this week, in which Vacherot beat him in three competitive sets, is the version that reminds you the ceiling is real.<\/span><\/p>\n At twenty-seven, in a sport that tends to have already decided what you are by now, de Minaur occupies the most interesting possible position. Too good to dismiss, not quite good enough to transform the argument. A player who will be remembered easily as the best Australian man of his generation, and with more difficulty as someone who arrived at the door of the very top and never quite got it open. Both things can be true. Both things are true.<\/span><\/p>\n The boy who cried when it rained got pretty far, all things considered. The restaurant on George Street is gone. The coach who worked for free produced a top-ten player. The family that kept moving between countries produced a man who plays for one of them with everything he has, every time, and who is marrying a woman he met in the morning over a coffee in a Melbourne hotel, and who has Demon for a nickname and a completely human story underneath it.<\/span><\/p>\n Whether or not he wins a Grand Slam, that story is already something worth reading.<\/span><\/p>\n Main photo credit: Mike Frey-Imagn Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What does it mean to be almost great? Alex de Minaur has spent a career answering that question one sprint at a time. There is a restaurant on George Street in Sydney that no longer exists. It was Italian, run by a Uruguayan man named Anibal who had fallen in love with a Spanish woman […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5393,"featured_media":96652,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"no","_lmt_disable":"","sfio_featured_image":false,"sfio_embed_code":"","_ef_editorial_meta_date_first-draft-date":"","_ef_editorial_meta_paragraph_assignment":"","_ef_editorial_meta_checkbox_needs-photo":"","_ef_editorial_meta_number_word-count":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15913],"tags":[564,5729,5862,22],"class_list":["post-102137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atp","category-opinion","tag-alex-de-minaur","tag-carlos-alcaraz","tag-jannik-sinner","tag-novak-djokovic"],"modified_by":"Jim Smith","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5393"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102137"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102156,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102137\/revisions\/102156"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/96652"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lastwordonsports.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}What does greatness mean for Alex de Minaur?<\/h2>\n
What He Became<\/b><\/h4>\n
The Wimbledon Morning<\/b><\/h4>\n
The Sinner Problem<\/b><\/h4>\n
The Question of Enough<\/b><\/h4>\n
What Remains<\/b><\/h4>\n