A Pure Tennis Boy

MELBOURNE — “I just want him to be a pure tennis boy,” the journalist behind me said to their neighbor as we waited for Carlos Alcaraz to come to the main interview room. They were saying how they hoped well-paying exhibitions wouldn’t distract the world No. 1 from his main job, his ATP Tour gig. Alcaraz had just arrived from South Korea, where he’d played a hit-and-giggle with Jannik Sinner that paid out at $2 million, and he’d gone to Saudi Arabia for the lucrative Six Kings Slam in 2024 and 2025, but I took the point. Alcaraz is such a smiley champion that it’s more fun to think of him grinning on the practice court than cashing large checks in petrostates.

He lacked his usual happiness when he walked into the room, though, wearing an oversized Nike baseball shirt and a cap pulled over his eyes. He’d abruptly split with longtime coach Juan Carlos Ferrero the previous month, after the best season of his career so far. Ferrero had given his side of the story, and various reports had blamed friction between Alcaraz’s family and coach, or Ferrero’s desire to travel less, but we were yet to hear from Alcaraz beyond an Instagram post. Why had a seemingly summery partnership met its end? It was time to find out.

I tried to make my question as blunt as possible, inevitably clumsy phrasing notwithstanding: “There's been a lot of reporting about what happened with Juan Carlos. I think a lot of people are still kind of confused about what happened. I would love to ask you: What happened?” He ducked the question, saying the split was a mutual internal decision—the many interviews Ferrero has done in the past month were much more specific—and that they still had a good relationship. He didn’t expand much in other answers. A representative soundbite: “As I said, I have the same team that I had last year. Just one member missing.”