In 2024, writer Giri Nathan set out to chronicle the exhilarating explosion of a new rivalry atop the men’s tennis tour, chronicling the rise of both Carlos Alcaraz, the flashy showman who possessed heart-pulsing speed and a deft touch, and Jannik Sinner, who quietly and methodically pulverized the ball and his opponents.
Nathan’s timing was almost perfect. In 2022, Alcaraz had become the game’s youngest No. 1 at 19 years old after winning the U.S. Open, including an epic 5-hour and 15-minute slugfest over Sinner that foretold the sport’s future. The following year, Sinner reached his first Grand Slam semifinal before turning 22 and the finals of the elite ATP Finals, climbing to fourth in the world.
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In 2024, as Nathan chronicles in “Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis,” the two fulfilled the promise of that 2022 match: Sinner won the Australian Open, then Alcaraz captured the French Open and Wimbledon, and then Sinner won the U.S. Open and finished the year at No. 1.
(For added drama, at the end of the year, Sinner was ensnared in a doping controversy – he was largely cleared, but when he was suspended for just three months, between Grand Slams, less than other athletes, his reputation took a blow among his peers.)
With Roger Federer long retired, Rafael Nadal stepping down and Novak Djokovic finally fading, tennis had miraculously replaced the Big Three era with equally exciting stars. The only thing missing last year was a Grand Slam finals showdown between these two phenoms. But this year they happily obliged, with a 5-hour, 29-minute French Open battle royale that Alcaraz won and a Wimbledon final that swung Sinner’s way. (Sinner also won the Australian Open.)
Nathan’s writing is dynamic and dramatic: Writing about that 2022 U.S. Open match, he says, “Reality got lazy with its metaphors: My pen ran out of ink… it was forced to document every highlight, tactic, scoreline, atmospheric detail, and cathartic expletive … The pen surrendered its innards and sputtered into retirement.”
Later, he describes how when the ball approaches Sinner, “all that ambient floppiness is aligned into one sublimely synchronized chain, from foot to hip to wrist, as he readies his full-body slingshot groundstrookes … the sound is like someone hucking a billiard ball against a garage door.”
With the U.S. Open offering the chance for yet another finals showdown, Nathan, a staff writer at Defector.com, discussed these two icons-in-the-making and his own writing via video. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. The Big Three often talked about how the other two forced them to improve over time. Is that already happening with Alcaraz and Sinner?
Carlos helps keep Jannick on his toes, and Jannick’s coaches talk about how they’re always trying to improve because they can see how fast Carlos is improving – Jannick has worked to improve his feel and he’s trying to get to the net more.
Carlos has cited Jannick’s steadiness from point to point as one of the things that he envies. And at Wimbledon, the mics picked up Carlos barking at his coaches, “He’s better than me from the baseline, what am I supposed to do?” So I think he has developed an awareness that his patterns that beat 99.9 percent of opponents won’t work against Jannik, and he’s going to have to come up with something new. He’ll have to mix in forehands down the line more.
That’s the best thing about rivalries – you can’t be complacent.
Q. You write about Alcaraz faking out Sinner by switching his grip and going from a drop shot to a deep slice, and also about how he tweaked his backhand form without even consulting his coach. As a seeker of joy and a showman, is he more important to the sport, or does Sinner’s methodical approach provide a balance?
His process is really intriguing. Live play and that improvisation is what really brings him joy, not drilling the same shot 2000 times in a row until it’s perfect, which he does. There’s no one I’ve seen who has his repertoire of shots and can improvise on the fly while making it look easy. He might even be more advanced at this age than Federer. And I loved the contrast with Jannik, who’s more deliberate, and most of the changes he makes are done by consensus. His team is thinking critically about how to add things in and how to do it.
Q. You talk about the “illustrious history of elaborate excuses” when it comes to doping in tennis. What do you think of Sinner’s explanation about a physiotherapist with a cut on his hand using an over-the-counter medication and then massaging Sinner?
While a couple of points sounded lawyered up, I think the excuse was actually fairly plausible, and they had receipts for the product and pictures of the guy with the cut on his finger contemporaneous to the incident. So I do buy it, but in terms of how it was handled, now other players have been chilly towards him. At the Australian Open, he said he was getting weird vibes in the locker room. He’s never going to win in the court of public opinion.
Q. As a writer, are you more of an Alcaraz or a Sinner?
I try to combine both – you want some spectacular moments on the sentence level here and there, but that can get overwhelming or you can misfire and take the reader out of it. So I want to balance that with calmer, more precise sentences. Early on, I want a bit of Carlos, but to keep the story moving along, a little Jannik is nice to have.
Q. Is it challenging to describe such vibrant and visceral play in words?
Describing the visual tableau of a tennis match is one of my favorite parts of writing about the sport.
In this age where highlights are one of the main formats for fans consuming sports, there’s value to process it more slowly through language, providing context in different parts of a point where you can slow it down and give the reader more time to digest it and hopefully appreciate the sport more.
I always tried to write about points that were illustrative of some broader idea about the player’s style or temperament or how the two different styles matched up or the changing in the guard and how the game was transitioning in some way.
Q. How do you approach this part of the writing?
I keep really detailed notebooks during the tournaments – you’re never going to get that first impression back, so I try to lock in the moment with as many metaphors or adjectives that can bring me back to that initial moment of excitement before I really knew how the match was going to play out.
I also like to read outside of the topic I’m writing about to cross-pollinate. I was reading really good writing about nature by Annie Dillard and art by John Berger. Those writers are trying to make the natural world or a painting come alive to a reader via text. So I think drawing on that energy was really useful. It takes your mindset out of sports for a minute and allows you to find that vivid detail that can make my writing come alive to someone who doesn’t even really know what a tennis point looks like.