Here is the plain text result:
Having just arrived home after a disappointing second-round loss at the Australian Open in January, world No. 5 Casper Ruud needed a pick-me-up. As he so often does, he turned to golf. It was far too cold to play outside in the Norwegian winter, so he went to a simulator and felt better after hitting some balls that were small, hard and white rather than fuzzy and yellow.
This week, golf will again take precedence. Ruud is skipping this week’s ATP 500 Rio de Janeiro Open — which is played on clay, his preferred surface — to play in the Mexican Open, which begins on hard courts in Acapulco Monday, Feb. 24. Before going to Acapulco, he’s headed to Vallarta for another Mexican Open, this time in golf, where he will play a pro-am event Wednesday, Feb. 18 ahead of the PGA Tour’s fully fledged tournament there.
Acapulco is more than 1,000 kilometres (621 miles) away from Vallarta, but Ruud played an Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) exhibition event in nearby Guadalajara last week and has been practising on the tennis court as well as the golf course in Vallarta. Earlier in February, Ruud reached the final of the Dallas Open. He played a few rounds of golf before and after that event, too, bringing his clubs with him for the February and March stretch of the tennis season, which is played mostly on hard courts in north and central America. Ruud, a tennis professional but golf obsessive, is in his element.
I’ll try to remain calm, but I’m just a really curious golfer, so whoever I get to play with they will have to be prepared for me asking tons of questions about golf, said Ruud in a recent phone interview. So I feel a little bit bad for them. The pros in question will be America’s Taylor Moore for nine holes and Ruud’s fellow Norwegian Kristoffer Ventura for the other nine. His tee time is 8:58 a.m. local time Wednesday.
Ruud is widely considered to be the best golfer on the ATP Tour and competes with his dad and coach, Christian, once ranked No. 39 in tennis, and a good friend to shoot the best total score on the golf course through each year. Ruud edged his friend by just five shots in 2024. It just shows – every shot matters during the year, he says.
Ruud, a 26-year-old three-time Grand Slam finalist, is part of a long line of ATP and WTA players past and present who switch happily between tennis and golf. On the contemporary men’s tour, four-time Grand Slam champion Carlos Alcaraz is sharpening up his skills and becoming increasingly interested; fellow top-10 player Alex de Minaur is part of a group of Aussies who like to play competitively together, and men’s world No. 1 Jannik Sinner is trying – and largely failing on available evidence – to improve his swing.
Golf maps onto tennis in numerous ways, from the skills required to the low risk of injury that players look for in a downtime activity that keeps them moving. It fulfils the need for competition but is less adversarial than their main sport, sharing a course for 18 holes being very different to engaging in quasi-gladiatorial combat from the other side of a net. It’s also biomechanically complex in a way that tennis players are familiar with, even if these two sports of swings share little else in common.
Eight-time Grand Slam champion Ivan Lendl tried to make it as a golf professional after retiring from tennis in 1994. He once admitted to playing 250 rounds in a single year in order to play “scratch,” off a zero handicap. Lendl tried to qualify for the U.S. Open on five occasions and played five top-class professional events, twice on the European tour and three times on the Nationwide. Yevgeny Kafelnikov, the former world No. 1 and two-time singles Grand Slam champion, would request day-session matches at the Australian Open so he could go and play an afternoon’s round of golf.
Source link
