Rafael Jódar’s tennis rise and the teenage kicks of a new template for Spain in the sport

MADRID — On Sunday night at the Caja Mágica tennis complex, there were so many moments when Rafael Jódar could have patted himself on the back for an job well done and called it a tournament at the Madrid Open.

He was down two break points in his first service game against João Fonseca of Brazil, who has deservedly occupied the hot-young-thing chair in men’s tennis for over a year. Instead, Jódar won that game, and then the first set — in a tiebreak. But in the second, Fonseca started to sprint away from him, taking over this battle of two 19-year-olds who may have a lot to say about the direction of the sport in the coming years.

Jódar kept hammering. Fonseca went up 40-15 on his own serve at 0-1 in the third set, but made a few careless errors to lose five points in a row and hand Jódar a break for 2-0. The Brazilian smashed his racket. It was basically over, but Jódar was not finished, blasting his way to another break and then the match in front of his hometown fans, who exploded for him from the moment he walked onto the court in the Manolo Santana Stadium.

Along the way, Jódar showed the tennis world that the old archetype of the Spanish men’s tennis player, the grinder who turns his opponents’ legs to goo over the course of an endless afternoon, may be dead and gone forever.

Rafael Nadal, the king of clay, started digging that stereotype’s grave with his evolutions to the sport. Carlos Alcaraz has been reading its last rites for the better part of the last five years. Jaume Munar, who entered 2025 transformed into a more aggressive, front-foot player, did his part to prepare the wake.

It’s Jódar who appears on the verge of driving a stake through it.

“We are a bit blinded by the fact that the way Rafa played is the only way you can play on clay, but it’s not,” said Casper Ruud, a two-time French Open finalist, referring to his hero, the 14-time champion at Roland Garros.

Ruud, and everyone else in men’s tennis, has had an eye on Jódar of late. He’s been hard to miss. He raised some eyebrows when beat Learner Tien, who spent last season flying up the rankings, in his first match at last year’s Next Gen ATP Finals, the end-of-season tournament for players under 20.

Jódar was still enrolled as the star of University of Virginia’s college tennis program, but he had won three ATP Challenger Tour events — the rung below the main tour — during the season. That was enough to qualify him for the Next Gen event, and just before the start of 2026, he announced that he was hitting the pro tour full-time.

He hasn’t looked back since. He qualified for the Australian Open and then won his first Grand Slam main-draw match, in five sets. He won two main-draw matches at the Miami Open, before picking up his first full ATP Tour title in Marrakech, Morocco in early April. Back on home clay, he’s plowed his way into the fourth round of a Masters 1000 for the first time with three consecutive wins, including a second-round defeat of Alex de Minaur, the world No. 8.

Jódar has lifted the tournament in a way only a local could. As he began his walk-on Sunday night for the Fonseca match, the public address announcer gave him the full Nadal treatment, stretching out the final sounds of “Rafael” and letting the packed crowd on Court Manolo Santana take it from there. There is nothing quite like a teenager named Rafa sprinting across red clay to make the hearts of fans in the Spanish capital go pitter-patter and dream of future glory.

And yet, to get caught up in what Jódar might one day be would risk missing the show that this unseasoned version of him is putting on. With the first match on the schedule Sunday night stretching to three sets and nearly two and a half hours, the Spaniards had to wait until close to 11 p.m. Sunday night for Jódar and Fonseca to get under way.

That is less of a big deal in Madrid than elsewhere. This is the land of the midnight supper. The hometown faithful waited, and the overwhelming majority of them were there for the end of the 7-6(4), 4-6, 6-1 win just before 1 a.m.

Across more than two hours, Fonseca and Jódar delivered something far from the sort of red-clay chess match seasoned fans might have expected from a Brazilian and a Spaniard. Instead, they got a teenage flurry of winners, mistakes, tactical naivety, shouts and sulks: a battle between two players looking for the first chance to whack the ball past the other guy, largely because they haven’t yet developed the tools to stop that happening on a regular basis.

They took turns rushing each other’s second serves, jumping into the returns and trying to stuff the ball into the corner. Jódar was even more dynamic than his opponent, lunging and throwing his body into every backhand return he could. His groundstrokes rip through the court, but the power all comes from timing and the kinetic chain, rather than muscling or heaving the ball.

Then came the highlights, which linger longer in the memory than the out-of-position misses and slaps. Why hit a defensive lob from six feet behind the baseline, when it’s possible to swat a running forehand to the postage stamp that will get a roar from the crowd?

Jódar is so raw and plays so fast that he is occasionally readying himself to blast a serve while the ball kids are still rolling the balls to one another or running back into position. Against Fonseca, the chair umpire had to ask him to wait. He flung his arms and jawed with anyone who would listen.

The Brazilian, who is known for having one of the biggest forehands in the game, was the more experienced player Sunday night, a new situation that he said afterward made him nervous. He averaged 78 mph on his forehand, down slightly from his average of 81 mph, despite unleashing the occasional bomb that flew through the court. His spin rate on the shot averaged just under 2,800 revolutions per minute.

Usually, he’s just above 3,000. He mixed in more slices and offspeed balls than he might do usually, trying to inhabit the role of the more experienced player.

That was well behind Jódar, whose forehand averaged 85 mph and nearly 3,200 RPMs.

“Very tough,” Jódar said when it was over. “These matches are decided by very small details and very small points. I think I did a great job in those points, trying to play my game.”

According to Brian Rasmussen, the assistant coach for the men’s team at Virginia, doing things his own way has been central to Jódar’s success. It’s a trait that Rasmussen believes he inherited from his father, also Rafael, a women’s basketball coach, physiotherapist and now a largely self-taught tennis coach, who has guided his son to the edge of the top 40. A year ago, he was world No. 687.

So far, the elder Jódar appears to be playing against type as well. While his son battled against Fonseca Sunday night, his father sat stoic and alone — no hometown entourage in sight — in the courtside players’ box. Even when the match tightened, he was mostly still and silent.

“He wants Rafa to have adversity,” Rasmussen said. “He wants his son to work through these things.”

Jódar didn’t enter the sport trying to copy the Spanish archetype. He can chase balls down and defend in the corners, but his default setting is to crowd the baseline, using first-strike aggression that can take his opponent’s racket out of their hand.

“Rafa is so humble he is going to grab things from every player, said Rasmussen, who accompanied Jódar to Australia in January. “Anything I ever asked him to do in practice, he would do that and he does it full intensity. He’s super humble and super hungry.”

Rasmussen and Andres Pedroso, the head coach of UVA, came to know Jódar about a year before his breakout win at the U.S. Open junior tournament in 2024. Jódar was outside the top 100 in the world junior rankings then. But they liked his work ethic and the way he got along with the team on his recruiting visit. UVA announced his recruitment on social media in November 2023, next to another young player: Fonseca.

He did a training block at Virginia in the summer of 2024, did well at an event in Maryland, then went to New York and won the junior title. At that point, plenty of juniors would have decided to skip a stint in college. Fonseca did, and never played for UVA. Jódar didn’t.

He joined the team in January of 2025, went 19-3, became an All-American and was voted Rookie of the Year for all sports. He also made the Atlantic Coast Conference’s academic honor roll and was named one of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association’s scholar athletes.

Once he started to pile up wins on the ATP Challenger Tour, it was time to move on.

“Playing against lots of players of a high level, I believe, is letting me improve my own level,” he said in Spanish after pummeling de Minaur, 6-3, 6-1 on Friday. “When you play against this type of player, the best players in the world, you are really going to increase your level.”

That dynamic changes Tuesday, when he faces Vít Kopřiva of the Czech Republic for a spot in the quarterfinals. Jódar is now ranked higher than Kopřiva.

All the new Rafa fans should be out in force. They may be surprised by what they see.

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