In the end, it was comfortable. With an ace that curved away from a despairing Ethan Quinn, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina won the Mallorca Championships final on his first championship point.At first the Spaniard barely reacted, walking to the net with no emotion and congratulating Quinn, the 22-year-old American, on a good match.But after shaking hands with the umpire, and tossing his racket gently to the grass, Davidovich Fokina leant back and let a guttural roar escape into the blue sky over the Balearic Islands, a release of the emotion of five lost finals, of five lost championship points in those finals, and of finally winning an ATP Tour title that had looked both inevitable and impossible.With a 7-6(4), 6-3 win over Quinn, the 27-year-old Spaniard, got the monkey off his back, in his sixth tour final. He also shed another, stranger piece of tennis lore: He is no longer the player with the most career prize money — by far the most, at $11.7 million — to never hold a winner’s check.
“Today was a very tough battle. He played amazing. I was lucky, a little bit, in the tiebreak. I was pushing myself until the end — I knew that this one has to be mine, in Spain, the first one … It should be mine. I pushed a lot, the crowd was amazing today.“I don’t have any words to describe this feeling right now.”Davidovich Fokina could have been forgiven for feeling that he was due a bit of that luck. In the 2025 Delray Beach Open final against Miomir Kecmanović, he smacked a match-winning forehand. Or so he thought — it landed just outside the line. Davidovich Fokina led 5-2 in the third set at that point, but after missing one more opportunity to win the title, he lost the match 3-6, 6-1, 7-5.Against Alex de Minaur during that year’s D.C. Open final, he had three championship points. On the third, he sent a forehand approach into de Minaur’s backhand corner, and the Australian lofted a hopeful defensive shot into the air. It could have gone wide. It could have gone long. Instead, it landed plumb on the sideline. De Minaur recovered the point, and the match. In his first three finals, Davidovich Fokina had never gotten to championship point. In those two, he held five and converted zero.Against Quinn, he said, he was able to lean on that knowledge of how to play a final, however painful it may have been at the time.“I knew I had more experience in these kinds of finals, but at the end … In grass everything can happen.“Today I knew that I needed to be there … It doesn’t matter the result, I needed to be there every point. I don’t know how to speak, I am very tired.”Davidovich Fokina will need to find some energy for Wimbledon Monday, where he is the No. 22 seed and opens against Argentina’s Juan Manuel Cerúndolo, who upset Jannik Sinner at the French Open.Jun 27, 2026Connections: Sports EditionSpot the pattern. Connect the termsFind the hidden link between sports terms
