Why hasn’t Alexander Zverev’s time come?

Alexander Zverev has surprisingly smooth, precise groundstrokes for a 6’6” man with long limbs. He leads the tour in first-serve proficiency, finding the box in over seven of 10 deliveries. His game features great timing, but the same cannot be said for his career. He’s been so buffeted by bad timing, much of it outside his control, that he’s landed in a unique, almost surreal, role.

Zverev is the game’s greatest No-Slam Wonder. It isn’t even close. That fun barstool game of “Best Player Never to Win a Slam?”—it’s over, at least for now. Zverev spiked that football again last week, barreling to his seventh ATP Masters 1000 title in Paris. Among active players, only Novak Djokovic (and, technically, Rafael Nadal) has more.

You know, I have goals, for sure. I think the goals are quite obvious for everyone. Alexander Zverev

With the season-ending ATP Finals coming up next, Zverev will have a chance to build further on his curious reputation—but no chance to erase it. He is back up to No. 2 in the rankings. He’s an Olympic gold medalist. He has serve-bombed his way to 23 titles, including two previous tour championships. His serve rating (299.5) is a tour-best, as is his first-serve conversion rate.

Yet, still no Slam.

“You look at his resume and think, ‘heck of a career,’ and you forget that he’s still just 27 years old,” Brad Gilbert, coach of Grand Slam champions and an ESPN analyst, told me. “That’s the crazy part. But it’s part of his problem, too.”

The root of that problem is timing. Zverev, who exploded on the scene as a teenager in 2017, stepped into the direct line of fire pouring from the game’s vaunted Big Three. Who would have predicted it? It was Djokovic himself who said, after losing to Zverev in the final of the ATP Finals just a year later, “You are still quite young and have already had an amazing career, but there’s no doubt you will be one of the favorites in every Slam.”

That was 23 majors ago, but who can say Zverev let the game down? Only four men in the interim, and just three going into this year, interrupted the Big Three’s Grand Slam feeding frenzy. And then, with Roger Federer gone and Nadal with one foot out the door, tennis spawned Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner.

“It was like Zverev had to contend with the greatness of the Big Three,” Gilbert said, “Then someone hit fast forward for the other guys.”

Timing, once again.

It may seem that Zverev, once he was anointed the heir apparent, was happy treading water, convinced his day would soon come. There’s some truth to it, but he was also pushing hard to break into the elite. He was forcing the issue to such a degree that by late 2019, he found himself leading the tour with the most double faults (131) of any player in his 10 matches leading into the US Open. He had a case of the yips that would trail him to a fateful US Open in the Covid-ravaged year of 2020.

“I wanted it too much.” Zverev said in New York that year. “I was trying too hard in Grand Slams.”

Zverev survived to the final of the bizarre, fan-free (due to Covid protocols) 2020 US Open—his first Grand Slam final. There he met a friend also seeking his first major score, Dominic Thiem. Zverev rolled out to a big lead, but Thiem became the first man in 71 years to win the title after losing the first two sets. The match was a mess, featuring 15 breaks of serve, three break points and some epic gagging on both sides of the net before it ended on a backhand error by Zverev.

“You have a two-set lead on Dominic Thiem on a reasonably quick hard court (Thiem was far more successful on red-clay),” Jimmy Arias, the Director of Tennis at IMG Academies, told me during the last Paris Masters. “You should not lose that match. You have to get tight to lose that match. I think Zverev still hasn't found that little valve that can take the pressure off yourself, get rid of the sense that this match is the most important thing that ever happened to you.”

The most important thing that has happened to Zverev, on a tennis court if not in his life, is yet another example of bad timing. He suffered a catastrophic ankle injury in the midst of a pitched battle with Nadal in the semifinals of the 2022 French Open. Zverev rolled off the court in a wheelchair and underwent a complicated surgery, done for the year.

“No injury and maybe he beats Rafa in that match,” Gilbert said. “It was a big match and was playing well enough.”

Then this year, Zverev experienced another piece of bad luck at Roland Garros, this time in the championship match with Alcaraz. Early in the fifth set of that see-saw battle, a demonstrably incorrect overrule denied Zverev a match-leveling break of serve. Zverev chose not to make a fuss about the call (although he did circle the mark when changing ends) and ended up losing the final set, 6-2.

“Zverev has been unlucky,” Gilbert said, “but despite that he’s also been very consistent.”

Zverev has made at least the quarterfinals at Roland Garros in all but one year since 2018. He’s got a string of four semifinals, or better, since 2021. With Nadal out of the picture, Court Philippe Chatrier seems the most likely place for Zverev to punch through and win his first major. The tournament has played a large role in his career.

The French seem a little more forgiving than some other folks of Zverev. He’s often overlooked as a contender and fan favorite, snubbed because of some well-documented foibles that have turned people off. Zverev has been censured and fined, most notably after pitching a fit and demolishing a racquet on the umpire’s chair at the 2022 Mexican Open. He (along with many others) flagrantly violated Covid protocols during the pandemic. Most significantly, he’s been accused of domestic violence by two different women. Neither case arrived at a conviction or admission of guilt by Zverev. But the allegations were red meat to the hanging judges of Twitter.

None of the controversies have thrown Zverev off stride, but he professes to have learned from them. Fittingly, at Roland Garros, he declared that he has turned over a new leaf, telling reporters: “I told myself I want to become a different type of player and a different type of role model. I don't break racquets anymore. I barely get warnings. I kind of had this conversation with myself, and I realized that I don't do any good to myself and especially to people and kids watching.”

Zverev seems to have been good for his word, and it hasn’t hurt his results. He’s also come to grips with the reality of his situation. In Italy earlier this year, where Zverev won his first big title (Rome Masters) since blowing out his ankle, he conceded, “When I was young, I was extremely confident. I was thinking, ‘Okay, it's going to come at some point’ but it didn’t.’”

Over time, that confidence has been shaken. That layer of gold chains around his neck is all that’s left of his swagger.

These days, Zverev avoids explicitly revealing his Grand Slam ambitions. He talks around what has become the elephant in the room of his career. In Paris on Sunday he said of his future, “You know, I have goals, for sure. I think the goals are quite obvious for everyone.”

“Maybe he's a guy that just needs to do it once, and then he'll win four or five majors,” Arias said. “But you know things are going to get tougher because I do think [Jannik] Sinner is at another level. [Carlos] Alcaraz can still lose to people, so that's helpful. But when Alcaraz is playing his best, he's also at another level.”

It will take a lot for Zverev to finally win a major, but he’s capable—if the timing is right.