Carlos Alcaraz was fielding some questions last week ahead of the Laver Cup about, well, what else — his hair.
The world’s most famous buzzcut since Demi Moore cut her locks for “G.I. Jane” is silver, not blonde. He wanted to make that clear.
Alexander Zverev, his Team Europe teammate and friend was standing a few feet away talking tennis. But he couldn’t help himself.
“I am amazed how much attention your hair gets,” snapped Zverev, who rocks a signature man-bun with his dirty-blond locks, as he shook his head.
Alcaraz flashed a grin at Zverev. He flared his eyebrows at the big German he beat in the five sets at the French Open final last year in what might have been Zverev’s last best shot at winning an elusive Grand Slam title.
Sorry Sasha, Alcaraz appeared to be telling him, this is my world now.
Indeed it has been all week at the Laver Cup in Alcaraz’s first trip to San Francisco. Alcaraz was plenty popular before he reclaimed the world No. 1 ranking from Jannik Sinner after two years of looking up, first at Novak Djokovic and then for the preceding 14 months at Sinner.
He played golf with Roger Federer at the Olympic Golf Club, the city’s famed U.S. Open venue. He and Federer beat Zverev and Casper Ruud, who is actually Team Europe’s best golfer and one of the best in tennis.
He took a tour of Alcatraz, former federal penitentiary on his almost-namesake island. He even briefly took the wheel of the ferry from the city to the big rock in the middle of the bay.
Without even realizing it, he executed a perfect flex on a region that does not lack for self-importance. Asked during a news conference last week whether he was meeting with any tech leaders in Silicon Valley and if had tried the flashy new glasses from Meta and Ray-Ban, Alcaraz was completely lost for several moments.
He said he had no idea what Silicon Valley was and no clue about any new glasses. This is the world according to Carlos Alcaraz. He’s bigger than Silicon Valley.
He played four matches for Team Europe over three days — one on each of the first two nights and then two on Sunday. He was the only player on either team to play twice on the decisive day, when each match is worth three points compared with one on the first day and two on the second. That was part of the reason nearly 18,000 people were packed into the Chase Center by noon to watch a doubles match.
Alas, Team Europe needed him to play one more. With Team Europe needing three more points to tie Team World and force a set of doubles to decide the winner, Taylor Fritz beat Zverev 6-3, 7(7)-6(4) to win back the Laver Cup for the underdogs.
Alcaraz was ready to take the court for a third time.
“If the team needs me I will be there for sure,” Alcaraz announced to the crowd after his second win Sunday. The roars rose up from a crowd that had been rooting hard against the Europeans for the better part of three days — except when Alcaraz was on the court.
Maybe Fritz, the Californian, had a little more support when he played Alcaraz on Saturday night. But just a little, and it was pretty clear why.
Even on a court where he had trouble acclimating to the gritty, hard but slow surface, he decorated the court with a panoply of jaw-dropping winners. Take your pick of your favorite, but the most absurd had to have been the drop volley that essentially clinched the doubles duel Sunday.
He dropshotted Alex Michelsen when Michelsen was standing at the net. He cut the ball so fine he basically landed it about eight inches from the net. Michelsen was standing just a few feet away, but he never had a chance.
It has to be seen to believed 🤯@carlosalcaraz | #LaverCup pic.twitter.com/XvIY9dzlZf
— Laver Cup (@LaverCup) September 21, 2025
The shot gave Alcaraz and Ruud a 4-0 lead in the second set, after they’d already won the first. It secured lifeline to Team Europe, which was down 9-3 heading into the final day and needed to win three of the four matches to have any hope of keeping the Laver Cup with a win in a deciding doubles match.
A game later, Michelsen was still talking about the shot as he headed to the bench for the changeover — and so was everybody else on the team.
“That shot was so good,” he said as soon as he and his partner, Reilly Opelka, arrived on the sideline.
They were down 0-5 in the set by then, but could not stop talking about — all of them, for just about the entire changeover.
About a half-hour later, Alcaraz was in the player gym, cooling down while trying to stay warm, since he had another match to play against Francisco Cerúndolo. Federer walked in and flicked his right wrist as though he was holding a racket and hitting a drop shot.
Like everyone, he was blown away by the absurdity of what he had seen.
“Carlos is really on an amazing level,” Federer said. “He finds the inspiration and everything to play that kind of a shot. … That type of confidence and inspiration is what obviously I admire with Carlos, that he’s able to take shots on that many, many other players would never dare to do, because they know they could maybe look silly or whatever, but he doesn’t care about that fact, you know.”
Alcaraz’s take on the drop shot? It was his best option.
“There was nothing easier than that,” he said.
In the gym, Alcaraz took the opportunity to ask Federer about his watch, a white gold Rolex apparently valued at about $1.5 million. He held it close to his face. Like Federer, he is a Rolex ambassador. Perhaps he will get a watch like that one day, too.
Federer was also courtside when Alcaraz played Fritz on Saturday night. No matter where Alcaraz plays, big stars find there way to the edge of the court. Stephen Curry, the Golden State Warriors star and a big tennis fan, was on hand as well.
It had been a rare off night for Alcaraz, who hadn’t gotten as much time as he wanted to practice singles on the slow hard court. Also, he said, his team had already lost two matches on the day and fallen behind.
As the world No. 1, he’s the leader of the team. It was time to do what he was supposed to do.
“I feel like I had to win the points, because the way that the day is going,” he said. “So with the two losses, I feel like, okay, I had to win my match. It was a little bit of extra pressure, because of the way that the day was going on.”
He said his ranking should not have added pressure. It’s just a number after all. It doesn’t mean you will win every match.
“It’s just, ‘OK, I’m there,’ but you have to still do the things that you were doing before,” he said.
Federer said he thought Alcaraz had overplayed, pulling the trigger a little too soon. When that happens, the errors can flow.
It was Alcaraz’s lone loss on the weekend, and he more than made up for it Sunday, putting on a tennis spectacle in the doubles. Then, in an elimination match for Team Europe, he blew away Cerundolo playing the scintillating tennis that overpowered everyone at the U.S. Open, including Sinner.
When that was over, Alcaraz headed back to Spain for a little rest and celebration. He didn’t touch his rackets for four days, then slowly got back into feeling the ball.
Meanwhile, the internet became obsessed with his hair, which he said he actually kind of liked.
“Feeling good actually,” he said in an interview last week. “Surprised myself that I look, I mean, I look good. I didn’t know. I expected that I was going to look, you know, worse. So it’s good.”
He said he was thinking about doing it for a while. He really wanted to do something different but thought it might distract him and everyone else from the work he needed to do on the court.
Then his brother had a mishap with the razor while cutting his hair ahead of the U.S. Open and he ended up with a shaved head. But then he won the U.S. Open and it was time to reward himself.
“I went to a professional,” he said,
He said being silver-haired has not changed his life very much. Just a lot of people talking about his hair that he never knew cared about such things. All these pictures of him next to other sliver-haired celebrities.
He is off to Asia now for a part of the season where he has often struggled as he battles to find the energy to push for the end of the season. Tokyo will be first.
In mid-October he he will play in a six-player exhibition in Saudi Arabia with $13.5 million on the line. After that, possibly the Paris Masters and then the ATP Tour Finals in Turin.
How he performs will likely determine whether he finishes the year as the world No. 1, or whether Sinner can find a way to edge him out. If the past weeks are any indication, it appears to be Alcaraz’s world at the moment, no matter what color his hair is.
(Photo: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images for Laver Cup)