When I first heard I’d have the alternative to see Jon Rahm at the U.S. Open tennis match, I figured we’d be kindred spirits.
Rahm, in spite of everything, is a golf man — identical to me — and one among the first guidelines of being a golf man is that golf have to be your chosen country-club sport.
Much as you may get pleasure from racquetball, squash or pickleball, these sports activities can by no means outweigh your ardour for golf. This is doubly true for golf’s longtime archrival, tennis. You should resist the urge to listen to the white-clothed siren track of neon-green ball and clay court docket blaring from simply past the first fairway. For tennis is yin and golf is yang, and to interrupt that holy steadiness could be to throw off the entirety of the country-club universe.
I figured I might arrive at Arthur Ashe Stadium to seek out Rahm, in New York for a day as a part of his partnership with Maestro Dobel Tequila, largely detached to the proceedings of the court docket earlier than us. We’d supply our perfunctory reward of tennis — “wow, can you believe how hard they hit it?” and “sheesh, I could NEVER do that” — after which simply as shortly flip our consideration to the actual matter at hand: golf.
As it turned out, I figured mistaken. I arrived in Forest Hills to seek out Rahm virtually chomping at the bit to see a spherical of 64 match between two gamers I’d by no means heard of. We chatted for a couple of minutes about tennis and it shortly grew to become obvious that he had forgotten extra about the sport than I ever knew.
Before our interview began, he groaned as he confessed to me that his departing flight would go away earlier than that night’s primetime match. Had he simply checked out the schedule, he informed me, he would have caught round to see his second-favorite participant — Carlos Alcaraz — start his U.S. Open title protection in earnest.
“Obviously. I have to root for Carlos,” he mentioned with a smile. “I’ve got to pull for home court in Spain. It’s incredible what he’s done. My fault that I didn’t know much about him until he popped up at a U.S. Open and now all of the sudden he’s number 1 in the world.”
Rahm’s love for Carlos begins with their residence nation. Though their upbringings got here in decidedly completely different iterations of Spanish tradition (Alcaraz is from the central province of Murcia, whereas Rahm is from Basque nation in the north), there’s a shared bond that comes with worldwide sports activities stardom underneath the Spanish flag.
“I’m a big Rafa fan, like many others, but he inspired a big generation of people to love tennis in Spain, and I think we’re seeing the dividends of that with Carlos coming out,” Rahm mentioned. “Any time you’re breaking any records that Novak [Djokovic], Roger [Federer] and Rafa [Nadal] weren’t able to do, you know you’re doing something very special.”
Rahm was embarrassed to confess he had by no means met Alcaraz, the 20-year-old sensation whose sport runs notably counter to Rahm’s brute-force bludgeoning. If the reigning Masters champ is a heavyweight prizefighter; Alcaraz is one-half Energizer Bunny, one-half expert murderer.
Some of this range in skill helps to elucidate Rahm’s love for tennis, which runs deep however comes with a decidedly much less tidy clarification.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you why,” he mentioned. “Not one individual in my household has set foot on the tennis court docket ever, however I’ve at all times cherished to observe it…
I respect the sport a lot and I like a lot what they do, as I do with other sports activities however with tennis particularly,” Rahm mentioned. “They’re arguably the best athletes out there, right? You have to have agility, speed, cardio, hand-eye coordination, everything.”
Maybe it helps too, Rahm admits, that two of the greatest tennis gamers of the final three many years simply so occurred to come back from his shared heritage.
“When you get the accolades that Djokovic gave Carlos in Wimbledon, it’s even more special, I can’t even put it into words,” Rahm mentioned. “When you have the three greatest of all-time talking about you the way they are, you know you’re something special.”
Rahm would know.
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