MADRID – “Come on, come down and let’s shoot a few hoops.” On the night of 16 August 2024 in Cincinnati, Carlos Alcaraz received a call from his older brother, Álvaro. The tennis player was mentally shattered: in recent weeks he had won his first Roland Garros, defended his Wimbledon title and fallen just short of Olympic gold in Paris 2024. His head could take no more. And that, on that sweltering Cincinnati night, was already public, as images of Alcaraz smashing a racket against the court were spreading around the world.
Far from home, locked in a hotel room, his mind overheating after an exhausting northern summer and overwhelmed by the reaction to seeing him destroy a racket, Alcaraz needed to breathe. And there was his brother Álvaro to help him.
“That day he snapped, he exploded, with a lot of anger, a lot of anxiety. He was in a really bad place. I called him to see if we could shoot a few hoops together,” Álvaro himself admitted in the Netflix documentary My Way. “He came down and we spent some time together as brothers. It wasn’t good for him to stay locked away thinking or staring at his phone.”
It is simply an anecdote between brothers, but it explains very clearly why the world number one wants Álvaro close by. Because in a team where everyone is older than him, in a world where everyone is an adult, Álvaro is the closest thing he has to a friend.
Because in a sport where the demands are relentless whether you are 30 or 20, where you are expected to win day after day and are almost always thousands of kilometres from home, Álvaro is his grounding wire, the one who connects him to his family, to where he comes from.
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“He is a very important person in both my personal and professional life. In the end, he brings me so many positive things that I need in order to perform better. And now, given the situation, he is going to take on a bit more prominence alongside Samu,” Alcaraz himself said a few days before conquering the Australian Open, explaining why Álvaro is set to gain greater weight within the team structure after the split with Juan Carlos Ferrero.
Samuel López was promoted to head coach and Álvaro ceased to be merely the hitting partner. Although, in reality, Álvaro was never just a sparring partner. His role goes far beyond that.
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“He’s been travelling for a long time, he knows how we operate, he knows how the tour works and, obviously, he’s played tennis all his life, so he knows a great deal as well. Sometimes Álvaro has opinions and a way of seeing things that also contribute a lot, both for Samu and for me,” Alcaraz added. A few days after saying those words, he would go on to lift the title at Melbourne Park and become the youngest player in history to complete the career Grand Slam.
The ‘Blessed Hands Method’
Carlos and Álvaro Alcaraz, who have two younger brothers, Sergio and Jaime, have always been inseparable. They shared a bedroom, a group of friends and countless tournaments. Because Álvaro also grew up with a racket in his hand. In fact, he reached a fairly decent level and faced players such as Alejandro Davidovich at the Spanish club championships. Later, at 17, he lost to his younger brother for the first time and began to glimpse the future. If he was going to build a career in tennis, it would have to be alongside Carlos.
When Alcaraz first broke onto the tour, his brother only travelled to a handful of tournaments on occasion. Over time, however, those trips became more frequent, and both Alcaraz and his father decided to make room for him within the team. Álvaro has also carved out a name for himself on social media, where he has been nicknamed “blessed hands”. The “Blessed Hands Method”, M.B.H., as they call it since Álvaro shaved Alcaraz’s head during the US Open 2025 — the tournament the Spaniard went on to win.
Those blessed hands, that method, have flooded social media in recent days. There is something Álvaro has in his hands. And Alcaraz also knows a thing or two about giving the crowd what it wants: after beating De Minaur in the quarter-finals, he wrote M.B.H. on the camera, and this Sunday, after the final, he hugged his brother and sang at the top of his lungs, “Blessed Hands Method”.
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