Esports

EMMA RADUCANU AND Carlos Alcaraz sit side-by-side, in separate chairs, two armrests forming a barrier between them. It’s mid-June, and US Open organizers have asked the former singles champions — now doubles partners — to help promote the tournament’s new mixed doubles event by making a social media video. They face a producer sitting off-camera.

First question: What will they pick in the coin toss for their US Open match? The producer counts down the time: 3, 2, 1. In those three seconds, Carlos, dressed in black shorts and a black sweatshirt, gives Emma a coy and nervous look. He then looks down at his clasped hands. Emma, wearing a royal blue sweatshirt with her straight dark hair pulled into a ponytail, unwaveringly stares at the camera.

“Tails,” Raducanu says. At the same time, Carlos calls “heads.” They double over and burst into laughter.

The USTA, hoping to stir interest in mixed doubles, moved the event to a week before the main tournament and invited the top singles players to sign up. At stake: A Grand Slam trophy and $1 million in prize money. Carlos texted Emma moments after his agents got word of the new format and asked her to be his partner. Emma took a couple of days before saying yes. “Got to keep ’em on their toes,” she said. And now, days later, here they are, making a video together.

“I got a question,” Carlos says. “What would you pick if we win the coin toss?”

Emma glances at him. Smiles.

“I’ll let you pick.”

Carlos returns her gaze and grins.

“All the pressure is on me?” he says.

Emma smiles. Her eyes crinkle.

The video has 3.2 million views on Instagram. Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu, both 22 and both Grand Slam champions, are two of tennis’ biggest stars. Emma, who was born in Canada to a Chinese mother and Romanian father before moving to the United Kingdom, won her first — and so far only — Grand Slam championship in 2021 at the US Open when she was 18. Carlos, a Spaniard who combines a creative game with an affable personality, won his first major title at the 2022 US Open when he was 19 and has collected four more since. They have always said they’re just friends, but a growing community wants to believe there’s something more.

“Okay when’s the wedding,” one comment on the video reads.

“Is Carlos’s smile bigger than normal?”

And then my favorite: “We all know, we all see it, we all feel it. Love is in the court.”

Welcome to the world of shipping, where passionate fans play matchmaker to their favorite characters as well as unsuspecting celebrities. Tennis is their latest stage.

Alcaraz and Raducanu are at the heart of the movement as fans break down every shared look, word and giggle. Fans have flooded Reddit with thousands of posts and comments. According to Google Trends, the query “Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu” increased 2,250% in worldwide search interest over the past 90 days, peaking when she showed up to watch him play at Wimbledon on July 6.

All this interest sparked a quest for answers: Why does the world get so invested in celebrity relationships? What is it about Carlos and Emma that makes fans root for their union? And does it matter if it’s real or imagined?

Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu, who are slated to play mixed doubles at the US Open this week, have sparked the interest of shippers worldwide. ESPN Illustration

THE TERM SHIP, which comes from the word relationship, first appeared in internet fandom parlance in the late 1990s. It is used to express a desire that two fictional, or real-life people, enter a romantic relationship. Soon, the phrase “one true pairing,” better known as OTP, caught on.

But even before the internet, magazines provided a means for readers to consume news about celebrities and their love interests. Cover photos with a big heart around two famous actors on, say, People Magazine sparked readers’ imaginations and conversations in their friend groups.

Think John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. Fans of the “forbidden fruit” trope looked for clues in every interaction between the two. Rumors of a scandalous affair between the stunning actress and America’s 35th president hit their peak after Monroe performed “Happy Birthday Mr. President” on May 19, 1962, at Madison Square Garden for his 45th birthday.

In the tennis world, decades before Emma and Carlos became a popular OTP, fans widely shipped American stars Chris Evert and Jimmy Connors, as early as 1972, when they were dating in secret. Then, in 1974, after they were engaged, fans rejoiced. It came to a sad end — for the couple and fans — when they broke off their engagement weeks before their wedding that same year.

About that same time, fans of “The Brady Bunch” speculated about Barry Williams (Greg Brady) and Maureen McCormick (Marcia Brady). Later, fans rooted for Anthony Geary and Genie Francis (Luke and Laura in “General Hospital”) and Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta (Sandy and Danny in “Grease”) to carry their on-screen romances into real life.

In the 1990s, the World Wide Web became a haven for shippers. Fans no longer had to wait for a party or a convention to speak about their favorite ships. There was a collective space, open around the clock, for fans across the globe to discuss and dissect their favorite pairs and their every move. Websites such as Six Degrees and LiveJournal gave them a platform to connect.

For many shippers, declaring an OTP wasn’t enough. They doctored photos. They edited videos. Sometimes, the pairings were so powerful, they sparked book-length stories. Enter fan fiction.

Fan fiction isn’t a new phenomenon. Some 5,200 years before Emma and Carlos were born, humans loved extending stories — retelling them with embellishments and sometimes even subverting them. Homer’s “The Iliad,” an oral poem featuring Greek deities, inspired Virgil’s “Aeneid,” which connected Roman and Greek myth. Shakespeare drew inspiration from real-life heroes to write his historic plays.

Modern-day fanfic can be traced to “Star Trek.” Fans began extending the lives and relationships of characters such as Captain Kirk and Spock, publishing texts and pieces of art that drew inspiration from the original content. In 1967, fans published “Spockanalia,” a fanzine that contained the first modern iteration of fan fiction. They mailed the zine to other fans and sold it at science fiction conventions.

Even into the 1990s and 2000s, the fanfic community largely focused on fictional characters. Discussions and name-mashing around Harry Potter thrived. Some Potterheads saw the possibilities in a Harry and Draco Malfoy ship, and dubbed it “Drarry.” Emma Watson (Hermione) and Tom Felton (Draco) sent fans down rabbit holes with their crackling onscreen chemistry. The “Dramione” ship was reinvigorated when Watson admitted to having a huge crush on Felton in a 2011 interview. At one point, both actors called each other their “soulmates.” (They’ve never dated, much to the chagrin of many Potterheads.) Both ships sparked reams of thought-provoking narratives.

“It might not be that J.K. Rowling or anybody even meant for those characters to have this romantic or sexual tension, and attraction between them,” says Abigail De Kosnik, a UC Berkeley associate professor whose expertise lies in popular and fandom culture.

“The characters themselves came out in such a way on the page, or on the screen, or the actors playing the characters just had so much natural chemistry that the fans are noticing subtext underneath the dialogue.”

The same applied to real-life celebrities. In 2013, Anna Todd wrote a notable early piece of fanfiction called “After.” Based on the boy band One Direction and published on Wattpad, a website dedicated to publishing fanfic, “After” secured not just a book but also a movie deal.

Today, websites such as Wattpad, AO3 and Celebrity Story Library thrive on fanfic writers publishing periodic content.

AO3 has 3,825 published works under its tennis fandom. On Wattpad, fanfic on Carlos and Emma has tens of thousands of readers. Sometimes, writers ship them together. Sometimes, they’re shipped with another tennis player. Sometimes the object of their desire is a name with meaning only to the writer.

Bad boy Jimmy Connors and “girl next door” Chris Evert were a beloved tennis couple in the 1970s. AP Photo

CHRIS EVERT IS laughing.

I’ve asked her — in many ways — how she handled being in the public light in the 1970s during the height of her fame. How she handled the media speculating about her love affair with Jimmy Connors. How she handled fans being in love with her love affair with Jimmy Connors. How she handled the media wanting to learn every detail about their breakup.

It has been more than 50 years and she hasn’t thought about it in a long time, she says. And, the questions make her smile.

“We were No. 1, we were young, we were up and coming,” Evert says. “The world was fascinated with that.”

It was more than that. The media painted Evert as “the girl next door.” Connors, on the other hand, was the bad boy. Newspapers and magazines called her a “sweet little rich girl.” He was a “street fighter,” a “punk.”

Even then, decades before the girl-next-door-meets-big-bad-wolf trope became a staple of fanfic writers, it was too good for the public to ignore.

Both generational talents, both ambitious, both young. They dated in secret in 1972, wanting to avoid the press. Then, in 1973, they made their relationship public and participated in mixed doubles Grand Slam events together. The speculations became true. When they competed — even reaching the semifinals of the US Open mixed doubles championships in 1973 — media attention ramped up. The next year, they both won Wimbledon singles titles, and the media dubbed the achievement the “Love Double.”

It ended all too soon.

A news story headlined “No Love Game,” published in the Lexington Herald on July 4, 1975, provided the painful details. In it, Evert revealed, moments after her loss to Billie Jean King in the final of Wimbledon, that she and Connors called off their engagement. Connors, according to the story, attended her match with actress Susan George. He later showed up to his semifinal match with red lipstick smeared on his cheek. He brushed off questions about a new relationship with George, calling them good friends. Meanwhile, Evert, when asked about Connors’ new relationship, said, “I had no idea Jim was dating her. But since we have broken our engagement, he is entitled to go out with whoever he likes.”

Had their relationship played out in 2025, shippers and fan fiction writers would have had lots to say. But this was before the internet democratized the fandom culture. She didn’t have fan feedback in the way that current players do. For that, she is thankful.

Do you see any parallels between you and Jimmy and Emma and Carlos?

“No, because they’re not having a relationship,” she says.

I chuckle. I try to explain to her that to shippers, it doesn’t matter. What matters is they want it to happen.

“I’m so glad I came up in the ’70s, not in this day and age,” she says. “Because, I mean, jeez, you’re controversial and talked about no matter what you do.”

Raducanu rose to stardom after making one of the most surprising runs in tennis history at the 2021 US Open. Paul Zimmer/Imago/Icon Sportswire

TODAY, MUCH OF the ship talking takes place on forums such as Tumblr and Reddit. I created accounts on multiple sites to learn more about the community. In between ships of Wednesday Addams and Enid Sinclair in “Wednesday” and Conrad and Belly in “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” I found an Emma Raducanu forum that had more than 13,000 members and high engagement on any post that included Carlos and Emma, which was about three-fourths of them.

I waded in. “Why are you interested in Carlos Alcaraz and Emma Raducanu?” I titled my posts. I detailed my inquiry underneath it. What is it about their potential relationship that piques your curiosity?

In two hours, responses poured in. Some called me a loser for chasing a nonstory and dubbed me a gossip journalist. One fan asked to report the story with me and promised to stake out Emma’s and Carlos’ hotels to get to the bottom of the rumors. Another fan posted a photo of Carlos’ face superimposed on Emma’s body (in her Wimbledon outfit, visor and all) as though the two fused. Yet another fan made a painstaking illustration of Emma and Carlos looking at each other and photoshopped a tennis ball shaped like a heart between them.

I amended my posts:

“To make it perfectly clear, I am not here to prove the validity of these rumors. I am here to understand why we, as a society, are interested in shipping certain celebrities together, regardless of the truth of the claim. To understand our culture, our times, our psyche.”

The comments kept coming in, but the wavelength changed. One stood out to me.

“With everything going on in the world, everyone is rooting for a good love story,” the fan wrote. “They have parallel stories both winning at a young age and continuing to keep up with the momentum can be tough. They seem very similar as far as both being charismatic and are able to get the crowd on their side when playing their matches. It would be nice to see 2 people who have a lot in common find their way to each other. They could be the next [Roger] Federer and Mirka [Federer] or [Andre] Agassi and [Steffi] Graf.”

I reached out to the moderator of the Raducanu subreddit, Cain Allen, a British man who has followed Emma and Carlos since their 2021 US Open runs, and asked him for Reddit trends he has noticed with their “relationship.” A third of the traffic on any Alcaranu post, he says, comes from Spain and Asia. He says he notices double the comments on their posts.

“Everybody seems to have an opinion of some sort, either they’re like, ‘Oh, this is a load of bull,’ or ‘I am so excited for this relationship,'” Allen says.

Why them? Why not, say, Iga Swiatek and Casper Ruud? Or Ben Shelton and Taylor Townsend, who are also teaming up for the US Open mixed doubles?

Allen says he suspects it’s a combination of their perceived personalities: She’s smart, sassy and attractive; he is honest and earnest and a gentleman.

Another big reason, he says: multiculturalism.

“Emma is from all over — born in Canada, raised in the UK. Chinese and Romanian parents — she can go from perfect Mandarin to Romanian, and she gained fans from all different types of cultures,” Allen says.

Alcaraz, he notes, is a Spaniard with a charming game and an endearing desire to learn English. It makes them relatable and likeable to fans, he says.

As I scrolled on social media after our call, I came upon a fan’s comment on a US Open post about Emma and Carlos.

“I want this ship so bad,” it says. “They will make a good couple.”

With flashy shot selection and strong defense, Alcaraz won his first major title at the 2022 US Open and has since collected four more. Dylan Buell/Getty Images

CHELSEA CHEYANNE, A 34-year-old superfan of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” tells me she has written 223 fan fictions — and what she estimates to be more than 675,000 words across 65 fandoms — since 2008. Cheyanne couldn’t stomach that Buffy doesn’t end up with Spike, her one true pairing. So, she began writing thousands of words in her gold-colored journal, coming up with scenes of how they’d reconnect, what they’d say to each other and how they’d end up together. Her friends invited her to join Fanfiction.net and she fell in love with the community. She wrote original work and posted it on the website. Slowly, she migrated her work to AO3, got into the superhero fandom and now voraciously reads fanfic based on superhero ships.

“Shipping is my primary end goal with fanfiction writing,” Cheyanne says. “It’s like mashing your dolls together to make them kiss.”

Cheyanne’s motivation to write fanfic comes from a lack of resolution to romance in the original works.

“I just needed more,” she says. “I needed to know what happened next, and if no one was going to tell me what happened next, I could write it.”

There’s a similar urge for RPF (real people fiction) writers. Even though social media has increased the visibility of celebrities, there are only so many pieces of information publicly available. So, it’s only natural for fans to fill in the blanks with their own narrative fiction.

“They write fan fiction because reality is just not delivering,” De Kosnik says. “In the absence of the storyline actually progressing in the way that they wish it would progress, fans create the narrative and share that with each other, and read each other’s narratives.”

Like many fan fiction writers, Cheyanne’s stories are driven by “tropes,” a plot pattern made comforting and exciting by the inclusion of beloved characters.

Cheyanne’s favorites: slow burn (but with a resolution and time for the couple to do “mundane things together, but then there will also be kissing”). Time travel is another one of her rich tropes. She loves sending her favorite ships to the past and future looking for their romantic partners.

My personal favorite? The “golden retriever/black cat” trope, where one person in the relationship is the earnest and eager one chasing the cold and aloof one.

Xeno, a 27-year-old fanfic writer and reader who shared only her first name, says her one true pairing is KuroKen, a ship name for volleyball players Kuroo and Kenma in the “Haikyu!!” series. The anime doesn’t have couples in the series, but Kuroo (a middle blocker) and Kenma (the setter) exhibit such soulmate energy that fans have spent decades shipping them and writing thousands of fanfics on them.

The trope Xeno is reacting to: best friends to lovers. They understand each other deeply on and off the court, usually without having to convey their thoughts to each other.

It reminds me of Emma and Carlos, who met when they were teens and have been friends ever since. I asked Xeno, who is not a part of the tennis fandom, if she would read a fanfic on Alcaranu.

“That does sound appealing to me,” Xeno says.

It was a shipper’s delight when Alcaraz and Raducanu announced they would team up at the US Open mixed doubles event. Max Cisotti/Dave Benett/Getty Images

THE ENCHANTMENT WAS palpable. Now, I needed to test the science. I reached out to a psychologist.

Is shipping a kind of parasocial relationship? Why are we prone to it as a society? What happens to our brain when we ship two people? And, finally, why Carlos and Emma?

Human beings have a collective fascination with the “will they/won’t they” concept, says Northwestern University’s psychologist and parasocial relationship expert Alexandra Beth Solomon. Genres of TV shows and movies have been made exploring it. Ted and Robin in “How I Met Your Mother,” Luke and Lorelai in “Gilmore Girls,” Ross and Rachel in “Friends,” Eve and Villanelle in “Killing Eve,” Harry and Sally in “When Harry Met Sally,” Jesse and Celine in the “Before Sunset” series.

“There is a collective fascination in trying to crack the code of what makes relationships work,” Solomon says. “What makes two people be drawn together?”

Solomon read about Carlos and Emma before our call, but she wants me to give her an overview of what I observe about them — and what I think fans react to. A two-minute elevator pitch of their appeal, she says.

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Carlos Alcaraz is a charming Spaniard, I begin. He rose to the No. 1 ranking in the world in 2022, wowing fans with his incredible shot selection. In conversations with him, I’ve found him to be earnest and kind. When play was stopped during his first-round Wimbledon match because a fan had fallen ill in the heat, Carlos ran over with a bottle of water to help. He said in an interview that he would give “boss” duties to Emma during their partnership.

On the other hand, Emma Raducanu had a fairytale US Open championship in 2021. Fans find her a little aloof. It’s hard to tell what she’s thinking, and that makes her mysterious, I say. As a couple, there is something about Carlos’ earnestness and Emma’s aloofness that fans are drawn to. Their youth, their rise to fame, their cultural cache in the world play into it all, I believe. I finish.

Solomon’s eyes bulge as I speak. She sits up straighter, nodding vigorously.

“As you told me the story, I could feel the shift in my body — it feels exciting,” Solomon says. “There is a neurophysiological, chemical reaction to the experience of falling in love. So, our collective fascination is us drafting off of that. It’s a way of vicariously getting that neurophysiological hit of what that might be like.”

I mention some of the comments I’ve noticed online.

“My heart just skipped a beat.”

“Just kiss already.”

To Solomon, there is a strong sense of “pure escapism.”

The world is divisive. The political climate is combative. The internet is a cesspool where people yell at each other. It feels like we’re losing our ability to empathize and hear each other out. Against that backdrop, there is something pure about rooting for two people to get together. Particularly, two people who break through the bleakness. The young, multicultural, global power couple.

“When you have an earnest, confident man who’s saying to you, ‘You’re going to be the boss of me, you are in charge here,’ that spikes female desire,” Solomon says.

So is shipping a form of parasocial relationship, I ask her toward the end of our conversation.

Sort of, Solomon says.

“I feel drawn to and invested in the happenings of a public figure’s life and my knowledge of their world connects me to them,” Solomon says.

And if, eventually, Emma and Carlos find their way to each other romantically, fans feel a heightened sense of helper’s high, she says. Like they knew something even before the two figured it out for themselves.

THE FUN CAN be in the figuring. Some fans go from wanting something to be true to trying to prove something is true. They become online sleuths.

“Fans feel really smart when they pick up on subtext — they feel like they’re in on something so secret and special, and something they’re not meant to find out,” De Kosnik says.

Videos get replayed. Photos get viewed and magnified. Social media posts get analyzed and parsed. Shippers draw conclusions.

“He definitely has a crush on her,” one fan posted. “I would say it’s so obvious.”

“They’re destined for each other,” another wrote.

One fanfic writer couldn’t resist a video where Carlos explains how he texted Emma and asked her to be his mixed doubles partner. “I have actively tried to avoid shipping them DESPITE all the crumbs over the years but they keep pulling me in with antics like this. Stopppp! let me put my ao3 days behind me.”

De Kosnik believes Emma and Carlos know what their “antics” are doing. Emma was asked in a news conference about the internet’s fascination with Alcaranu. “I’m glad the internet is having fun and we’re providing some entertainment for everyone,” she said. It struck De Kosnik as a savvy response.

“That’s a great answer because it’s very meta and it doesn’t admit or deny,” De Kosnik says. “She’s laughing, like, ‘I’m going to treat it like an inside joke between us’ and that makes the fans feel like she’s almost in on the conspiracy theory with them, you know?”

But not all the interest shown toward Emma has been on the internet or innocuous. In February this year at the Dubai Tennis Championships, she walked over to the chair umpire midway through her second-round match and seemed to be holding onto the railings for support. She had noticed a man in the stands who had been exhibiting “fixated behavior” toward her by approaching her twice in Dubai and following her to tournaments in Doha, Singapore and Abu Dhabi in the previous weeks. The man was ejected, detained by police and later issued a restraining order. I asked De Kosnik if there is a continuum from a shipper to a fanfic writer to a stalker. Can one lead to the other?

“Shipping and stalking [are] quite different even though it’s unfortunately true that some stalkers choose to stalk celebrities,” De Kosnik says. “[It’s not a] ‘progression’ in that mentally healthy people can be made into stalkers by too much time on the internet.”

Anna Nasset, an international speaker, author and stalking survivor, underscores the differences in intent.

“A fan fiction artist or author is somebody who enjoys celebrating the celebrity and making up interesting stories in another universe about them,” she says. “A stalker is somebody who is motivated to create fear, intimidate, harass, or harm.”

After years of studying the fandom culture, De Kosnik believes fans use shipping and fan fiction as a meaningful way to engage with celebrities. When fans “met” Carlos and Emma, they figuratively downloaded a low-res image onto their brains. Then, every fact they learned about the two fine-tuned their understanding until it became a high-quality image. That one high-quality image turned into a whole album. The need to share and compare albums is human nature. The progression, she says, is healthy.

“So instead of trying to force a romance between two actual people, it’s really beautiful that fans play with the little dolls they have made of the people,” De Kosnik says. “And then they do this little puppet show for each other, and then they like to watch each other’s puppet shows, you know?”

The ship on “Alcaranu” had already sailed when Raducanu showed up to watch Alcaraz’s match at Queen’s Club. Julian Finney/Getty Images

SHE SAT IN the balcony. He rolled on the court. Days after the US Open announced its glamorous mixed doubles partnership, Raducanu attended Alcaraz’s semifinal at the Queen’s Club Championship in London.

“Just glad that she came to support, to watch my match,” Alcaraz said after winning the 250th Tour-level match of his career. “It was great having her in the stands.”

He added that he watches her matches on TV every time he can.

In one interview, Raducanu explained that her history with Alcaraz paved the way to their present.

“When you become a bit more known or a bit more successful, you just find yourself reverting back to people you knew from a young age and because that’s a real genuine connection because it becomes very busy and you have a lot more friends — but the ones that you’ve known for a long time mean a lot more to you.”

Weeks later, she returned to watch him play. This time at Wimbledon.

Ever since, Raducanu has been in the United States, playing hardcourt tournaments in the lead-up to the US Open. Now, Alcaraz has crossed the Atlantic, too.

I reached out to his manager to see if I could ask him my one burning question. He told me he’d love to help, but Alcaraz would not be doing interviews during the hardcourt season.

I reached out to the WTA to see if I could pose just one question to Raducanu. “Maybe tomorrow,” they said at first. “Maybe next week,” they said later. Now, they’ve gone silent.

Tennis’ most pressing romantic storyline remains unresolved. Raducanu and Alcaraz are scheduled to take the court together for the first time Tuesday and turn Flushing Meadows into a shipper’s paradise. But last week Alcaraz advanced to the final at the Cincinnati Open, and weather pushed back his match against Jannik Sinner until Monday afternoon. Can he make it to New York in time for the mixed doubles? Will they or won’t they play together? Are they or aren’t they a couple? The drama crescendos.

“Before the Music Begins”

Wearing a long black sleeveless summer dress, sports journalist Luna Rhodes cups her cucumber mint mocktail as she makes her way to the VIP suite at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. It’s days before the US Open mixed doubles championship and she’s on assignment at a Coldplay concert. Her dress has a pocket; inside is her trusty recorder. She has been assigned to find out more about a celebrity couple: Carlos and Emma.

During the pre-tournament news conference earlier that day, Emma mentioned her plan to take the evening off. Luna got a tip that Carlos wanted to catch a concert. She made a calculated guess and bought a ticket to that evening’s Coldplay concert.

The suite leads to a VVIP section. Her ticket doesn’t give her access to the area, but she has never been one to follow the rules. She swipes the curtain open. She gasps.

Carlos Alcaraz is sitting on a love cushion. He’s wearing a white dress shirt. Next to him, in a stunning red dress, is Emma Raducanu.

Carlos practically jumps up. Emma stays where she is. Carlos recognizes Luna from her years of covering his career and walks over. “Luna,” he says. “How did you know I was here?”

Luna answers his question with one of her own. “So… what’s going on here?” she asks. Carlos turns and looks at Emma. He shakes his head and chuckles.

“Busted,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.

Emma raises an eyebrow and sighs. She walks over to Carlos and playfully slaps his arm. “Oh Carlos, ever the jokester,” she says. “Let’s go find our seats.”

They stroll off, together, toward a door on the far end of the suite.

Luna takes one last sip of her mocktail. She sets it down, turns, and hurries out the way she came. She has a story to write.

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