{"id":367619,"date":"2025-08-23T16:12:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T16:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/367619\/"},"modified":"2025-08-23T16:12:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T16:12:10","slug":"being-carlos-alcaraz-author-mark-hodgkinson-on-his-legendary-loss-to-antonio-lopez","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/367619\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Being Carlos Alcaraz&#8221; Author Mark Hodgkinson on His Legendary Loss to Antonio L\u00f3pez"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Antonio L\u00f3pez doesn\u2019t play so much these days\u2014he spends more time coaching than competing now\u2014but when he does enter tennis tournaments in Murcia, in southern Spain, people will half recognize him: \u201cAre you the guy who once beat Carlitos 6\u20130, 6\u20130?\u201d La bici, they call the \u201cdouble bagel\u201d in Spain, as the two zeros in the scoreline look a bit like the wheels of a bike.<\/p>\n<p>The most one-sided defeat of Carlos Alcaraz\u2019s life\u2014a loss the tennis champion is now able to laugh about\u2014was in a junior tournament in Totana, a town in Murcia about a 40-minute drive from his village of El Palmar. L\u00f3pez 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 L\u00f3pez recalls, Alcaraz was short for his age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antonio L\u00f3pez doesn\u2019t play so much these days\u2014he spends more time coaching than competing now\u2014but when he does&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4105],"tags":[128707,14930,3444,6359,128708,128709,104,79,1068,128710,16,15,5067],"class_list":{"0":"post-367619","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-antonio-lopez","9":"tag-athletes","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-carlos-alcaraz","12":"tag-drop-shots","13":"tag-mark-hodgkinson","14":"tag-spain","15":"tag-sports","16":"tag-tennis","17":"tag-the-man-behind-the-smile","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-us-open"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115078964432424134","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}