“This is so sad” – Tennis world shocked after viral claim about US Open fan not knowing who Carlos Alcaraz is despite attending his match
A spectator at the ongoing 2026 US Open attended Carlos Alcaraz’s third-round match against Wu Yibing but seemingly didn’t know who was playing. A picture of the moment went viral and numerous tennis fans were shocked that the spectator had to use an AI tool to figure out the names of the players, despite Alcaraz being a former No. 1, a career Grand Slam winner as well as the defending men’s singles champion in New York.
On the night of Friday, September 4, after Alcaraz’s emphatic 6-3, 6-4, 6-1 win over Wu, a tennis fan who attended the match as well as Venus and Serena Williams’ first-round doubles outing later, took to X (formerly Twitter) and shared a number of pictures. One of the pictures showed another spectator using Claude, the popular AI assistant, to search for the names of the players who were in action during Alcaraz and Wu’s clash at Arthur Ashe Stadium.
The post subsequently went viral, and at the time of writing, has garnered over 1.7 million views and 24,000 likes. Many other tennis fans were shocked that the spectator searching for Carlos Alcaraz and Wu Yibing’s names on Claude was not aware of the players’ names in the first place.
“This is so sad. tickets cost a kidney and an arm, they have the privilege of watching tennis in the biggest tennis stadium in the world and they still didn’t even bother googling who was playing. sigh. BIG SIGH,” one fan wrote.
“If they looked up from their phone they could probably figure it out by looking at the scoreboard,” commented another.
“That first image is one of the worst things I’ve ever seen,” another fan chimed in.
“People who can afford tickets aren’t smart enough to know how to use Google?” one questioned.
