MADRID – It is 8:43 a.m. on a Wednesday morning when Jon Rahm tries to calm the nerves of an employee of the DP World Tour, the European golf circuit. She is nervous because the Spanish Open Pro-Am tournament should have started a minute ago, but the three men who are going to share the round with Rahm have not yet appeared at the tee of the first hole.
In golf, unlike other sports, punctuality is so sacred that arriving a minute late to the tee results in a penalty. ‘Don’t worry, these are athletes, they’re fast,’ says Rahm with his usual humour, trying to ease the tension a little.
Just then, the star of the day at the Club de Campo emerges. Dressed in a camel-coloured sweatshirt and long trousers – as dictated by the cool autumn mornings in Madrid – Carlos Alcaraz appears on the scene with a smile. ‘Come on, come on,’ urge the organisers to the Murcia native, who arrives accompanied by Feliciano López and Borja Plácido, a friend. ‘What tension!’ says Alcaraz as soon as he hits the driver on the 1st tee. The ball has gone off the fairway, under an oak tree.
Was he wrong to choose tennis? 😂 pic.twitter.com/Kx5ZCYGgAS
— Clay (@_claymagazine) October 8, 2025
After winning his eighth title of the season in Beijing at the end of September, Alcaraz withdrew from the Shanghai Masters 1000 due to physical exhaustion and returned to Spain to rest and prepare for the indoor tour that closes the season in Europe. On Tuesday, however, he put his racket aside and travelled from Murcia to Madrid to do one of those things that recharges his batteries. He received an invitation to play in the Pro-Am, an exhibition tournament prior to the Spanish Open golf tournament in which professionals compete alongside amateurs, and he couldn’t refuse.
Accompanied by a small group of journalists, including CLAY, Juan Carlos Ferrero’s protégé completed the first nine holes with Rahm and closed the last nine alongside Shane Lowry, the hero of the Ryder Cup that Europe just won in New York. It was an unbeatable opportunity to see Carlitos playing golf, one of his great passions outside the tennis courts. Carefree, smiling, enjoying himself, showing off an elegant and polished swing. He has a handicap of 11.5. ‘But I’m better than him!’ says Edorta Rahm with a smile, following his son’s progress during the first holes of the day.
Upon arrival at the 6th tee, Rahm warns his three companions: ‘This is the most difficult hole on this course.’ But Alcaraz, true to his tennis style, wants nothing to do with speculation and tries to hit the ball more than 200 metres, just past a dry river. ‘To get over it, you have to be Schwarzenegger,’ says. And ¡bang!, he swings his driver. A few minutes later, no one can find Alcaraz’s ball. Until Rahm sees it stuck in the riverbank. ‘What a shot, mate,’ laughs the tennis player. And then he makes his best shot of the day: from about 170 metres, the Murcian hits the ball onto the green and leaves it a couple of metres from the hole. Even Jon Rahm is amazed: ‘What an iron shot!’
Shane Lowry, his partner on the last nine holes, also surrenders to the number one tennis player. ‘When you see what he’s doing in sport at his age… it’s tremendous. His golf isn’t incredible, but it’s certainly much better than my tennis. We had a great time,’ says the Irishman.
On the 10th hole, the Murcian masterfully emerges from a bunker to land within a metre. ‘Spanish hands,’ says the Irishman, an expression widely used in the English-speaking world to praise the class of Spaniards around the green. Three holes later, Carlitos almost sinks it from the bunker. He falls a couple of centimetres short.
‘This guy does well at anything he sets his mind to. He’s good at tennis, golf… whatever he wants,’ Feliciano López tells CLAY after completing 18 holes alongside the ATP number one. “I’ve seen him play very well, he has a very nice swing and I see a lot of potential in him. At the end of the day, you have to take into account that he has only been playing for a few years and that he doesn’t have much time to play as a professional tennis player,‘ adds the director of the Madrid Masters 100, who has a handicap of 21. ’That’s my official handicap, but I play better than that,” he says with a smile.
López and Alcaraz are among the long list of tennis players who have “switched” to golf. They are joined by Rafael Nadal (‘He’s even more competitive than on a tennis court,’ said Casper Ruud to CLAY), Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic and even Roger Federer. Alcaraz is one of the most recent cases: he started playing golf in 2020 thanks to Juan Carlos Ferrero. His coach introduced him to the greens so that the tennis player would have a healthy, fun and competitive outlet. And Carlitos was immediately fascinated.
‘I saw myself improving and that hooked me even more. I feel at peace when I go out to play golf on the course and I try to learn from the players I play with,’ the Spaniard acknowledged a few weeks ago in New York during the US Open. “It’s just you, playing with your team, with some friends or with whoever. You have all your attention focused solely on making the best shot possible. Then, when you walk to the next hole, you forget everything else and just enjoy the moment, and because I love feeling that way, I try to play as much as I can.”
His love of golf even led him to celebrate all his victories at the US Open with a swing dedicated to Sergio García and David Puig, with whom he played during some of his days off at the last Grand Slam of the season. In fact, one of the first photos taken of the tennis player after lifting the cup at Flushing Meadows was with the two golfers.
“Carlos needs to be happy, relaxed, full of energy, and feel free. Golf helps him achieve that, it helps him disconnect. It’s like tennis helps me disconnect from golf,” Sergio García told CLAY in New York. And golf, more than a hobby, is his refuge. Because when Alcaraz disconnects, when he feels at peace, when he plays again just for pleasure… that’s when the rest should start to worry.
