This article is part of The Next Generation series. As the greats, such as Roger Federer, Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal, become the past and Carlos Alcaraz and Iga Swiatek handle the present, The Athletics explores the next generation: the rising stars who will be tasked with securing the future of tennis.
For more than a year now, his name has been on the tongues of all really well-known tennis players.
In this world, rookies like Jakub Mensik and Dino Prizmic — 18- and 19-year-old tour rookies unheard of by most who notched some early wins and scared the world with lightning-fast forehands and thighs as big as tree trunks — are already very old news.
Mirra Andreeva, 17 years old and in her second round in a Grand Slam, is thus 2023.
Music has snobs who scoff at anyone who tries to float the name of a band that actually released music with a label. Tennis has snobs who for months want to talk about little else than an American teenager trained in Spain named Darwin Blanch.
Yes, that Darwin Blanch – the one that a compromised Rafael Nadal took apart in 13 games in Madrid in April. The world’s No. 911.
GO DEEPER
Rafael Nadal keeps Darwin Blanch – and injury – at arm’s length in Madrid
He is the boy that Carlos Alcaraz sometimes runs into when they both train at the Juan Carlos Ferrero Tenis Academy in Alicante. He is the one for whom Rick Macci, the guy who helped form the Williams sisters, Jennifer Capriati and Andy Roddick, reserves the highest language.
He talks about programming Blanch with an ATP-style forehand as a toddler. “That left hand, it’s like magic in a bottle,” Macci said of Blanch one morning earlier this year at his training center in Boca Raton, Florida.
“He doesn’t hope to be great. He is waiting to be great.”
Blanch was surpassed by Nadal in Madrid. (Miguel Reis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Blanch’s father, Ernesto, has already raised two other sons who were top juniors but struggled to break through on the professional tour (Dali, current ranking 669; Ulises, current ranking 681), as well as a daughter, Krystal, who is. college player
He insists that Darwin is different.
“From the age of three, he never watched cartoons, only tennis,” Ernesto said of his youngest boy that morning in Florida, as Darwin watched Dali practice on one of Macci’s courts.
Lindsay Davenport, the former world No. 1 who coaches the US Billie Jean King Cup team, and her husband, former pro Jon Leach, have a tennis-playing son, Jagger, who is the same age as Blanch. She has known him for a while. Jagger and Blanch played the Junior Davis Cup together last year.
Davenport liked what she saw, and told her friend Mary Carillo about Blanch. The former pro and tennis commentator told his friends on the Tennis Podcast. Since then, Blanch has been there – as one of the special ones, even the special one.
“The next great American talent,” Macci said.
At the 2024 US Open however, Blanch is nowhere to be found.
wait ‘The next great American talent’? Wasn’t that Frances Tiafoe, or Taylor Fritz, two of the semi-finalists here in New York? What about Sebastian Korda? Is Ben Shelton, a US Open semi-finalist himself in 2023, done yet?
This is what tennis does, and never more so than now.
Thirty years ago, it was pretty clear where the standard for a phenomenon stood. Her name was Monica Seles. She won eight Grand Slam titles when she was 19. The sport was different then. Not as physical, not nearly as many countries producing elite players. However, this is a real phenomenon, the likes of which will not be seen again.
This is the age of TikTok and YouTube videos of the eight-year-old with the killer; of the 13-year-old who plays with two forehands that will change the sport; of searching for a future of a future that hasn’t even happened yet. Alcaraz, 21, and Jannik Sinner, 23, are Grand Slam champions and top of the world rankings, but still various distances away from their full bloom. Somehow, their destiny is already being talked about as having been achieved. Now we have to move on to… Next.
GO DEEPER
Tennis usually passes the torch. Carlos Alcaraz runs away with it
Sometimes, big predictions work. Nadal might have been a favorite to win the French Open in 2004, a year before his breakout triumph at 19, had injury not prevented him from playing in Paris. A decade-and-a-half later, there was no shortage of buzz about Alcaraz – “the next Rafa”.
Coco Gauff was so beyond her peers physically that she made the final of the US Open Juniors when she was 13. When she beat Venus Williams on Center Court at Wimbledon at 15 and the wider sporting public went bananas, the tennis pundits reacted with both exuberance and collective, “duh!”.
Sometimes, however, everything goes very sideways.
Donald Young, world junior No. 1, a lefty (so is Blanch), and the next big American talent not long ago, never got higher than No. 39 in the rankings. He lost 17 consecutive matches in 2012 and never recovered. He is still only 35 years old.
Young is at the US Open, playing what was supposed to be a ceremonial sort of mixed doubles exhibition, which also happens to be a competition, with Taylor Townsend. They reached the mixed doubles semifinals here in 2014. Young was a huge figure in American tennis behind the scenes, shaping the career of Chris Eubanks as well as Townsend himself, but never made the deep Grand Slam run that seemed part of his destiny. when he was just a child.
In a sweet ending to his playing career, he and Townsend made the final, but lost to Italians Sara Errani and Andrea Vavassori.
Young’s last major appearance was at the 2018 US Open, where he lost to Juan Martin del Potro in round one. (Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AFP via Getty Images)
Fortunately it’s too early to say where Blanch will fit into all of this, but one thing is clear. He, his father and the rest of his team decided that his junior career was over. His father said he won’t even play junior Grand Slam tournaments again after making the boys’ singles semifinals at Wimbledon last year.
“What will the young people add? Nothing,” said Ernesto. “What will the professionals add? A lot They attract his level. The youngsters, the first three or four rounds are nothing.”
He also does not play professional Grand Slams.
Tournaments at the second and third levels of the sport – Challengers and ITF events – dominate his schedule these days. He did get his first taste of the top level in March in Miami and the following month in Madrid. His management company, IMG, a sports and entertainment conglomerate, owns both of those tournaments. It gave Blanch one of his coveted wild card entries at each event.
He lost to Czech Tomas Machac, 6-4, 6-2, in Miami. Nadal beat him 6-1, 6-0 in Madrid. In each case, the visual matched the demographic math. This was a lean, 6ft 3in (190.5cm) high school student, still years away from reaching the five-hour mark, taking on full-figured men.
“To get to the professional level, this is what I have to go through,” he said after that hammering of Nadal.
The biggest lesson from the experience, he said, was the danger of some mental mistakes.
“You have to be there for every point,” he said. “If you leave for a second, the match is over.”
Forget any potential hoo-ha about favoring and managing wild cards if Blanch were given a wild card to Flushing Meadows. On the court it would be bad enough, and he knows it. He’s not ready to be there, and that’s okay.
Beyond his physical talents, being around tennis has been Blanch’s secret sauce since he could walk.
He may have even begun to absorb some lessons in the womb. Ernesto said his mother gave birth while watching her other son train in Florida.
Blanch knew little but tennis. Ernesto, a former collegiate skier, comes from an athletic family. He never had any doubts about raising his children to be athletes. An international businessman based in Thailand, he has worked for Coca-Cola and consumer goods corporation P&G, and has a software company in the US state of Washington. He also spent long stints in Florida and Argentina, where the opportunities for tennis development are much better than they are in greater Bangkok.
Although he is Spanish, and the mother of his children is from the Caribbean, all four were born in the United States or Puerto Rico, an American territory in the Caribbean. Darwin and Krystal mostly grew up with Ernesto and his current wife.
Blanch grew up watching her older siblings train. A natural lefty, he started hitting the ball himself when he was a toddler. He began receiving lessons from Macci, who trained his siblings, as well, at the age of six.
Macci usually gets kids when they’re a little older, after their first instructors let them go for a few years swinging a racket like a baseball bat and serving as if they were pitching in that same sport. Then he has to get them to unlearn all that, and instead master the swinging, semi-western grips and specific swing patterns that will allow them to compete at the high levels. Blanch, on the other hand, was trained with professional habits from the beginning.
“I’ve never spent more time with a young kid,” Macci said. His serve will be close to Shelton’s, suggested Macci, who also predicted that Blanch will have the deadliest inside forehand in the sport before too long.
If all this sounds dangerously effusive, it should, but Blanch was naturally competitive and passionate about tennis. He just loved being out on the court and always seemed so focused on getting better, and then winning.
“One hour on the court when he was three was like three hours for anyone else,” Ernesto said, still surprised by it all. “Never waste a second. He cried if it rained and he had to go home. It was really crazy.”
Maybe it’s a younger sibling thing, kids growing up wanting to outdo the older ones. Serena Williams is younger than sister Venus. Naomi Osaka is younger than Mari. Alexander Zverev is younger than Mischa. Then again, Patrick McEnroe is younger than John, so it’s not exactly science.
Blanch spent 2021 at the USTA training center in Orlando, Florida, but joined her older brothers at the Ferrero Academy in Spain the next year. That’s where the brothers are when they’re not playing tournaments.
Despite the talk, Blanch continues to grow in a family in which his achievements still have to surpass his brothers. They won trophies at the Orange Bowl, the prestigious junior tournament in Los Angeles, as did he. They reached as high as he did in the ITF rankings, and they made junior Grand Slam semifinals as well. His father doesn’t mind telling his extended family about Blanch’s latest exploits, because there’s a been-there-done-that quality to them.
Blanch will hope for success at the US Open, with a wild card. (Al Bello/Getty Images)
But he got to where they did at a much younger age. They didn’t do what he’s doing now: feeding himself to the wolves at 16 and hoping not to get eaten. “Challengers will be the next step for me,” he said in an interview after the loss to Nadal, which he described as a great learning experience.
He is 13-14 this year, and 4-6 since the Nadal loss. In July, he reached the final of a low third-tier ITF tournament in Monastir, Tunisia, losing to Eliakim Coulibaly of Ivory Coast 2–6, 2–6. “The result doesn’t matter now,” he said. “Just learn.”
Now the question is whether the sport will let him do it, or whether the demands of becoming another phenomenon end up harming him as they have harmed others before.
As his future becomes his past, it stays with him, as it does for everyone, and not always for the best.
“We all work in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity,” a fine writer named William Faulkner once observed.
He wasn’t really talking about tennis. Or was he?
(Top photo: Getty Images; Design: Ray Orr)
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