Antonio López doesn’t play so much these days—he spends more time coaching than competing now—but when he does enter tennis tournaments in Murcia, in southern Spain, people will half recognize him: “Are you the guy who once beat Carlitos 6–0, 6–0?” La bici, they call the “double bagel” in Spain, as the two zeros in the scoreline look a bit like the wheels of a bike.
The most one-sided defeat of Carlos Alcaraz’s life—a loss the tennis champion is now able to laugh about—was in a junior tournament in Totana, a town in Murcia about a 40-minute drive from his village of El Palmar. López was 12 at the time, two years older than Alcaraz, which is a significant age advantage in junior tennis. That advantage was even greater because, as López recalls, Alcaraz was short for his age.
López, the No. 1 junior in Murcia for many years, was faultless that day against 10-year-old Carlos. Nine years after that wipeout in Totana, in 2013, Alcaraz would win his first Grand Slam title at the 2022 U.S. Open, becoming the youngest world No. 1 in the history of men’s tennis. He’s since won four more majors and has ambitions of outperforming the golden trio of Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer.
When researching my new book, Being Carlos Alcaraz—published this week, ahead of this year’s U.S. Open, which begins tomorrow—I was intrigued by the story of López’s crushing a future tennis great 6–0, 6–0.
The day has become an amusing memory for Carlos and Antonio. “I had actually forgotten some of the details of that match. Carlitos remembers the match very well, though,” López told me.
“Carlitos and I were talking one day, after he was playing on the tour, and he said to me, ‘Do you remember that time you beat me 6–0, 6–0?’ That was so funny. Then Carlitos was playing an A.T.P. tournament in Argentina, and he told the story of our match in an interview, calling me cabrón, which is kind of like a jokey insult between friends.” (It roughly translates as “bastard.”) In my conversations with López, I realized that there was more to this than the scoreline. The pair have stayed friends.
In all, Alcaraz and López played each other 16 times as juniors. López won the first 14 matches of their series, losing only a couple of times, when he was 17 years old and Alcaraz was 15. “Carlitos had grown up by then,” López says.
These days, Alcaraz and López meet up every two months or so in Murcia. Between his own coaching commitments and working on a second degree, López also occasionally travels to support Alcaraz at tournaments around the world. If López is thinking about going to a tournament, he messages Alcaraz, who is usually able to get him some tickets. When López goes on those trips, he mostly travels with a group of old tennis friends from Murcia, and they try to be so vocal with their support for Alcaraz that he will be able to hear their cries of “Vamos, Carlitos!” above all the other crowd noise.
There’s another reason why López is an important figure in Alcaraz’s story. As Alcaraz once remarked to López: “You taught me how to play the drop shot.” Perhaps Alcaraz was half joking when he said that. But maybe not. Their junior matches contained so many drop shots—on at least one occasion, they must have hit more than 50 between them—that it would likely have encouraged Alcaraz to continue developing the shot he has since become known for playing, as well as heralding a renaissance of in the sport at large.
Today, it’s almost impossible for Alcaraz’s opponents on the men’s-tennis tour to read what he’s about to do. But there’s one very interested spectator who has a good idea. Maybe it’s because he has played against Alcaraz so many times, and known him for so many years, but when López is in the crowd or watching a match on television, he can usually predict when Alcaraz is going to hit a drop shot.
Supporting Alcaraz in the Rotterdam final earlier this year, López was playing a game in the crowd with his cousin. López would say “drop shot” if he thought Alcaraz was about to play one. He was almost always right.
Mark Hodgkinson’s biography of Novak Djokovic, Searching for Novak, won the 2025 International Sports Book of the Year Award
