Alcaraz's First Match Back From Wrist Injury: Mixed Doubles, With Serena Williams

NEW YORK, N.Y. — The U.S. Open mixed doubles championship begins today, and the field looks like someone pointed a slot machine at the tennis rankings and pulled the handle: Carlos Alcaraz, making his first competitive appearance in four months after a wrist injury, is playing with Serena Williams, the 23-time Grand Slam champion who, by the tour’s own marketing, is “the GOAT herself.”

Alcaraz, who has missed the last two Grand Slams with the wrist injury and is returning to the tour at the U.S. Open, announced the pairing on X on Sunday with the single line, “Let’s gooooo! 🔥” His first match back from injury will therefore not be a singles qualifier or a warm-up exhibition. It will be a best-of-three, no-ad, four-game-set match against a player 21 years his senior, on the same day the rest of the tour is trying to remember which end of the racket holds the strings.

The pairing is the latest evidence of a trend that tennis purists are still digesting. In 2025, the USTA moved mixed doubles — historically a third-week consolation event for players who had not received singles invitations, held, in the words of one retired coach, “where the cameras went to nap” — to Fan Week and offered the winners $1 million. Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori took it home. The figure, $1 million for two days of work, has since been cited by one confused accountant as “higher than the NBA.” The event drew 78,000 fans, sold out Arthur Ashe Stadium on both nights, and set a single-day YouTube record of 12.8 million views, which is roughly the population of a mid-sized country, all watching two people hit a ball to two other people.

The 2026 field, as reported by Yahoo Sports, is unprecedented: seven of the top ten women and six of the top ten men, with a total prize pool of $108 million, up 20 percent from last year — an increase the USTA announced, in a statement that did not hide its reasoning, to “quell speculation that superstars would boycott if prize money didn’t reflect their value.”

The other pairings read like a casting call. Aryna Sabalenka, the defending singles champion, makes her mixed doubles debut with Novak Djokovic, the 24-time Grand Slam winner with whom she is, per the tour’s description, “close off-court friends.” Jessica Pegula and Taylor Fritz form the all-American pair. Leylah Fernandez and Frances Tiafoe are the fan favorites, both in Lululemon. Elina Svitolina and Gaël Monfils are the husband-and-wife team, with the match billed as Monfils’ final Grand Slam before retirement. Emma Navarro and Tommy Paul, both currently ranked in the 20s, have described the pairing as “a chance to regain our form, together.”

Brendan McIntyre, the Open’s head of communications and content, said the goal was to “give as many fans as possible the opportunity to experience the excitement,” and that “the players also embraced it, and the star power in the field was evidence of that.” A retired tennis coach with a master’s degree in history, asked to put the event in context, said, “I have a master’s degree in history, and I can tell you this has never happened before. Not even in 1986.”

At press time, the USTA was reportedly exploring a second edition, “Mixed Doubles II: Wedlocked,” a draw in which both players must be married to each other or to their own equipment, and Gaël Monfils’ agent was asked whether “final Grand Slam before retirement” is a theme or a warning. The agent declined to comment and asked that the question not be attributed to the question.