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rhodochrosite) wrote2026-01-14 03:10 pm
rhodochrosite) wrote2026-01-14 03:10 pm
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sincaraz hype moments and aura from changeover
highlight reel of quotes from changeover - giri nathan. this will not be my last post about this book.
Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Mostly, though, he worked. Cvjetkovic remembered Sinner as a child with an unusual capacity for work, and an unusual gift for simplifying that work. A technical detail that might take others six months to learn, he would handle in a week.
//
Everyone noticed the same thing about Sinner’s tennis then as they do now: the sound produced when he makes contact with the ball. I have listened to it up close. Depending on his effort level and the acoustics of the court, it has sounded to me like a firearm, a vehicle backfiring, or a hydraulic press. I can understand why that talent scout thought Sinner was a construction site.
//
To track a fast-approaching sphere, intuit its trajectory, and start a swing at just the right moment to strike it cleanly—this is known as timing. Sinner has perfect timing the way a singer might have perfect pitch. The impact of strings on ball is devastating and pure.
//
Sinner came to Turin a sphere of heat and light, the home favorite, lustily cheered by Italian crowds.
Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
Standing on the court afterward, he said with a coy smile that he wouldn’t be disclosing his tactics, because he hoped to play his elder again and again. He was that rare young player who genuinely craved more encounters with Novak Djokovic, like a sheep that had developed a taste for wolf.
//
And yet here was Sinner, a sedate counterexample. A new, clearer picture of the Italian began to unfurl. Someone who came late to tennis, was never cornered into it, was at little risk of burnout compared to his peers, and instead maintained a gluttonous appetite for improvement. Even with the trophy sitting in front of his face, he was talking about next steps. “It’s a great moment for me and my team,” he said. “But in the other way, we also know that we have to improve if we want to have another chance to hold a big trophy again.” Tennis was no longer the sport for gentlemen who liked a cigarette during changeovers; it belonged to single-minded ascetics.
//
This evolved Sinner was one of the tour’s most balanced players, in every sense of that word: on both forehand and backhand, serve and return, defense and offense. And yet, according to a certain reductive but pervasive fan perspective, the scoreboard was clear: one major title versus two major titles. Get to work, kid.
Of course, nobody was more amenable to that imperative than Jannik himself.
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
This should have ended the point. The ball was too far away from Sinner. But he ate up all that distance with hunched, loping strides, looking like a highly task-oriented antelope, and he did not merely put a racquet on the ball but somehow punched a proper backhand down-the-line, abruptly taking control of the point.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
Chapter 2: Cabeza, Corazón y Cojones
If you hadn’t paid attention all along, you might have been surprised to discover that the harbinger of tennis doom looked like such a cheerful adolescent doofus. But that was the feeling of early-career Carlos. So visibly happy to be there, so transparently living out a fantasy—a happiness that could infect any viewer, and a happiness that he channeled into his improvisational and blitzing style of tennis.
//
Imagine any discernible tennis skill. It doesn’t matter if you have the local jargon for it (“pace,” “footwork”) or just a general impression (“hits ball comically hard,” “runs around well”). You could look at Alcaraz and see that skill perfected.
//
Imagine the goalie on a foosball table, so explosive and responsive. Just that one little dude, gliding along a horizontal, ready to be spun at a furious pace with a light twist of a wrist. In his baseline exchanges Alcaraz stood on top of the line, never ceding more than an inch, waiting to meet the ball with lethal force, smooth in his movement but full of coiled rage. Then he reset instantly and did it again, melding caffeinated teen dynamism with a multi-major-winner’s point construction. There was a fluid, unrelenting quality to his play that I did not usually ascribe to animate objects, or anything that needs time to recover from physical exertion.
//
That’s the thing about Alcaraz—there are so many possible versions of him that in best-of-five, an opponent will eventually have to beat several. It was baffling how many distinct parts of tennis he had mastered, how they cohered into this figure of ruin. My initial mistake was trying to fit him into my general schema for understanding tennis players: as human beings whose technical and physical specs grant some gifts and take others off the table. Big servers tend to be too ungainly to return nimbly. The lightest and fastest players often lack punch. The slow-surface specialists panic when the ball bounces faster. But none of these trade-offs seemed to apply to Carlitos. He could simply have it all ways. This was why he evoked a sense of impossibility more than any other player in recent memory, because he combined so many traits that don’t belong together into a single psychedelic point.
//
That broad, sharky smile was a dark omen for the rest of the tour. If he was enjoying himself, his tennis was probably unplayable.
Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
This match epitomized the Alcaraz puzzle. His losses can look worse than the losses of other top players. He can be capable of stupefying ingenuity while playing against the best opponents, even in the most tense moments of a match. He can also, in more pedestrian moments, play squirrelly and confused tennis. He might get fixated on ideas that amuse him but do not win him points; he might start peacocking prematurely.
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
It was Alcaraz’s dynamic range, his command of both delicacy and brutality, that drove opponents into hopeless guessing games. In one rally, as Zverev struck three consecutive kill shots he expected to end the rally, and Alcaraz pulled off three increasingly preposterous retrievals, the kid started smiling.
//
The point captured Alcaraz’s blend of sloppiness and imagination. He gets himself into a bind, then works his way out of it, via some diabolical logic that no other player could follow.
Chapter 6: Triage Ward
He spent the days leading up to the tournament on the practice courts, with his right forearm mummified in tape, bunting his forehands gingerly, an adverb that typically would not come within a mile of the tennis of Carlos Alcaraz.
//
Perhaps it was reasonable to wonder if his body would survive his own violent and beautiful playing style.
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
With Alcaraz, you get the sense that if there were no crowd, there would be no point to all this. His trade is tennis, but it is also spectacle. He never looks happier than when working a stadium into a froth of awe and glee. His tennis alone does most of the work for the fans, but he likes to embellish his genius with small gestures. A finger pointed up to his ear, beckoning the crowd to roar, while the ball he’s struck for a winner is still bouncing past his hapless opponent. A bright sharky smile, like a child who has committed a naughty deed but knows he can charm his way out of punishment. A silent raised fist. A cocksure nod. A single bellowed “vamos,” his mouth open wide enough to eat the tennis ball. A nonverbal howl, the carotid artery pulsing like a garden hose on the side of his neck. Or his favorite: eyes narrowed and teeth fully bared—not a grin, more like a big cat reminding you of its fangs.
None of this seems affected. It is all expressive and improvised, just like his play. Sinner has said that he admires this aspect of his rival, his ability to enrapture the masses. As I’ve noted, the Italian’s own forays into crowd work are humbler: a fist pump, a compact nod, an ashen gaze into the middle distance.
//
It isn’t incuriosity, just a case of tacit bodily wisdom winning over explicit analytical fact. To tear around the court and hit balls at the speed Alcaraz does seems to require an uncluttered mind. Getting wrapped up in the minutiae of equipment or injury could only lead to overthinking, to the gestation of doubts. Alcaraz knew as much as he needed to know and would not be weighed down by a grain of superfluous information. In that, he was like so many other intuitive high performers: It was better to feel than to know.
//
“You have to find the joy in suffering,” said Alcaraz as he was interviewed on court minutes later. It was a perfect and subconscious homage to Rafa Nadal, who over his career spoke volumes about the masochism of tennis, his worldview still evidently looming over his tournament.
//
Harder to understand is how Alcaraz responds to pressure. For him, pressure seems clarifying. It forces him to stop temporizing. He stops surveying his various options on court and commits to the lucid, slashing style that made his name. It’s as if pressure snaps a lens into focus, revealing his own identity.
//
Alcaraz threw up the standard hand of apology, the usual etiquette when a player wins a point after his ball strikes the net cord—and then, when Zverev looked away, he cunningly curled his apology hand into a fist pump. No time for guilt. Some luck, sure, but also a glorious jolt of improvisation, the type of shot that explained why I’d overheard some French fans describe him as “pétillant”—sparkling, fizzy, like wine.
//
He concentrated his brilliance into a few critical doses and timed their delivery perfectly. That was enough. Carlos Alcaraz was capable of transcendence, but he was now also capable of winning a major title while far from transcendent, defeating many of his best contemporaries along the way.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
Alcaraz is an alarmingly efficient mechanism for turning matches into useful muscle memory and actionable wisdom, I thought at the time.
//
But even then, as Alcaraz lifted the golden cup, he was just 46 hours and 15 minutes into his grass-court career. He was flying on sheer feel and animal instincts. True prodigy gets to skip the trial-and-error phase.
//
And then he came clean: “And I put in videos of myself last year. I’m not gonna lie,” he laughed. “To see what I did, and how I did it.” From him, it wasn’t arrogant, just sensible. Tennis’s most brilliant pupil had decided he didn’t need a syllabus anymore; he had become his own assigned reading.
//
He banged big first serves and followed them with unanswerable drop shots, condensing into two shots the force-finesse mix that was his stamp on the modern game.
//
He’d been watching videos of himself. Why go elsewhere for knowledge? Plato once theorized that people have immortal souls, full of knowledge accrued from past lives, so learning is actually just rediscovering that forgotten knowledge buried inside. Perhaps this has only ever been true of Carlos Alcaraz. How quickly we’d arrived at the juncture where there was so little for him to learn from other people’s examples, where he was writing the future of the sport by himself, expanding its possibilities with every half-volley and high-pressure triumph. He was eating at the big table already, and ravenously.
Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
Alcaraz was the rare elite athlete who seemed to optimize his own pleasure at every moment on court. Sinner, too, spoke often about how treating tennis as a hobby was critical to his glacial cool in decisive moments, but the pleasure was less discernible on his face. With Alcaraz it was unmissable in that joyous, vacuous grin, making every passerby’s day. Here, as always, he looked adept at having fun.
//
To watch Carlitos pick up a new skill was one of tennis’s most reliable pleasures. Every coach he’d ever had was astonished by his capacity to integrate new information into his play.
//
“It’s going to be the best moment of my life, probably,” he said, referring to a high-pressure contest against a man who had spent the duration of Alcaraz’s conscious life siphoning his opponents’ joy with his tennis.
//
Carlitos learns so fast that it generates unintentional humor, best seen in his post-Wimbledon remarks. “I am totally different player than French Open. I grew up a lot since that moment,” he said, sincerely, about a match played five weeks before. He undergoes emotional and professional transformation in a span of time when most people his age might only fill a laundry hamper.
Chapter 11: Damage Control
But Carlitos is the consummate good boy. For an hour afterward I remained in shock, as if I’d witnessed some kind of natural disaster at a remove. My colleague Patrick Redford, watching at home, said it was like watching a puppy smoke a cigarette. With his four smashes, Alcaraz shattered an enduring image of professional happiness. As a kid, he’d had quite a temper, and while he’d managed it well enough to win four majors, perhaps he hadn’t exorcised it completely.
Chapter 12: Digestion and Indigestion
At an evening match, where the fans slurped down several of those under the bright stadium lights, the party ambiance intensified. It was an apt setting for Alcaraz, who was more or less a nightclub in the form of a tennis player.
Chapter 13: Changeover
He was the star pupil conjoined to the class clown.
//
Alcaraz had tried to sneak forward when there was no advantage to press—but instead of panicking, he simply created the advantage out of whole cloth, with an audacious volley from no-man’s-land. Then he kept creeping forward to the net. His talent overrode his error in judgment; the gambit paid off.
//
Here was another instance of him responding to scoreboard duress with his bravest tennis, living and dying by his reflexes and gut intuitions. Nobody was better when cornered.
//
He was a player for whom every single shot was physically possible, and when he lost, he tended to frame failure in emotional rather than physical terms. He might be a hunter always in search of a good feeling, capable of peerless play when he found it, but liable to sulk when he lost it.
Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Sometimes it seems that the trick of playing Alcaraz is to strip him of opportunities to remember how original he is. Sinner, somehow recovered from his trials, managed to pin Alcaraz to the back of the court, as a butterfly to a corkboard. He used his power to deprive Alcaraz of his usual creative resources: wide angles, ample time on the ball, openings for a drop shot.
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
Soon there were six points in a row that felt like a single hallucination, more vicious and vivid than the tennis we’d seen in the Big Three era. Alcaraz sprang a trap with a drop shot to lure Sinner in, hoping to hit a passing shot right by him, but Sinner, with his whole body still facing the back of the court, blocked a no-look volley into open space. I detected a new swagger in him—there he was, punishing another drop shot by slashing a slice hard crosscourt—as though Alcaraz were infecting him with his own way of life. Anyone who’d been watching tennis recently could tell they were doing something well beyond the usual patterns of the sport. They were inventing a new grammar all their own. Balls were struck hard at discombobulated elbow angles, immediate return winners were lashed off of big serves, sudden solutions were lobbed back at difficult questions. It was a matchup with no neutral shots, no peace talks. Attack or be attacked.
//
On court Alcaraz was asked about “how special a friend” Sinner is to him. “He means a lot to me,” he responded. “I always say that first thing is you have to be a good person, and athlete comes after that. And I think Jannik is the same.” The sun began to set over the mountains, in cotton-candy hues of pink and blue.
Recall that, mere minutes after the Indian Wells win, the sweat still damp on Carlitos’s brow, an interviewer stood on court and asked him about “how much Jannik means to you.” The question wasn’t completely unprompted—they had hung out during the rain delay that interrupted the match—but the almost romantic intensity of the phrasing made me laugh out loud in the moment. Imagine that you are friends with a colleague, but firmly in the water-cooler-buddy tier of acquaintance. A couple of inside jokes, some shared workplace gripes to fill any lulls in conversation. But then imagine that you are periodically interviewed, for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of fans, about how much that colleague means to you. I mean, he’s pretty nice, I guess?
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
When Alcaraz plays badly, he can look uncentered and full of bad ideas. When Sinner plays badly, he looks like a machine just slightly miscalibrated, erring but with the right intent.
//
The tennis seemed to come out of nowhere. Writing about a match like this is attempting to impose a legible narrative on what is, effectively, two people trying to devise increasingly sophisticated ways of murdering one another for four hours. They were experiencing all kinds of small-scale spiritual and physical ups and downs, some of which would later make it into their comments after the match, and some of which will remain forever unknown, hard to articulate even for them, certainly in a second or third language. Often the real tennis match—its problem-solving, its private pains, its triage—resists after-the-fact comprehension.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
At this stage of their careers, Alcaraz was more prone to burning out psychologically, and Sinner physically.
Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
Old archetypes were often applied to new superstars, and in those formulations, Alcaraz was most often seen as the love child of Federer and Nadal, blending the former’s extempore all-court play with the latter’s brawn and vigor. Sinner, meanwhile, was the one seen as a power-injected, neo-Djokovic.
Chapter 11: Damage Control
Djokovic was still recovering from his Olympic bliss and would not play the role of the chaperone at the teen dance making room for the Holy Spirit between the youthful duo.
//
Some gifted but lesser players seemed to have this reaction to Alcaraz. He invited them into stimulating, inventive exchanges that reminded them of their own capabilities. Sinner, on the other hand, might just remind them of how far they were from the mountaintop.
Chapter 13: Changeover
Every time Sinner and Alcaraz saw an opportunity to attack, they seized it. Gone were the cagey, slow-burning rallies of Djokovic versus Nadal, each man hunting for a momentary lapse in stamina or focus. For the new kids, the game plan was to attack first, attack second. There was little taste for playing in a safe, error-reduction mode, the kind that Djokovic mastered in tiebreaks. Instead, Sinner said in an interview with Sky Sports that his tiebreak philosophy was to consider all the various attacks he’d tried over the course of the set and commit to those he felt had worked best. Sinner and Alcaraz were pioneering an era of “point-and-shoot” tennis, as Clarke put it, evoking the visual grammar of a first-person-shooter video game. If the ball was there to be hit, it would be hit—and hard.
//
Between these rivals, I could see each one mapping out the other’s tendencies, and then figuring out how to exploit the map the other had made. Specifically, in that second set, I came to appreciate a new wrinkle in the Alcaraz attack. He would rear back to hit a forehand, switch his grip as if to massage a drop shot—any savvy opponent would see that grip change and start shifting his weight to run forward—only to drive a slice deep through the court instead. He used this trick in two mesmerizing rallies, and each time it startled Sinner, perhaps the most balanced player I’ve ever seen. Both times he lost his footing and the point. With this mischief, Alcaraz had grafted another limb onto the decision tree in Sinner’s mind. The next time he moved his racquet that way, Sinner would remember what had happened before and wonder whether he should sprint ahead or stay put. To burden your opponent with additional uncertainty is to win the mind war.
//
The absolute best tennis induces laughter in audiences. This rivalry induced laughter even in the participants.
//
They both played true to their reputations. Sinner maintained a cruising altitude from start to finish, a level of tennis thousands of miles above most opponents, but not this one. Alcaraz’s level dipped and bobbed, but ultimately surpassed his rival’s in critical moments.
//
One was mercurial; the other methodical. One was a master of compartmentalization; the other seemed to feel everything all at once. Together they had made the sport anew.
//
Each has something the other lacks and would like to infuse into his own game. Alcaraz praises Sinner for his capacity to play every point at “9/10 or 10/10” intensity; the unspoken addendum is that he himself can fluctuate between 2/10 and 12/10. Sinner needs to find more comfort in the unscripted moments of feel and daring that are Alcaraz’s native habitat; there is more to tennis than the routine.
//
But the future will surely be defined by these two, interlocked in a joyful and absorbing struggle. They’ll get bigger and stronger; they’ll get smarter; they’ll get hurt; they’ll hurt each other. They could become genuine friends. They could drift apart.
Chapter 1: Empire
In the beginning, there was Roger Federer.
//
Perhaps the most poignant way to understand the Big Three was to see the optimism steadily squeezed out of their contemporaries, as if by a juicer, a cup filled to the brim with hopes and dreams.
//
Broadly speaking, these valiant victims of the Big Three moved through recognizable phases of career grief. First in this sequence was Persistence; all it would take was some dedicated training, some tactical adjustments, perhaps a few more twists of good fortune, and an important match may well swing his way in the future. After said match definitively did not swing in his favor, nor the one after, nor the one after that, the player might admit to Cluelessness. At this phase, they would have no particular intuition about what they could have done to win, and would feel altogether lost on the court. There could be bright flashes of Anger or Despair en route, but in time, the player arrived at Resignation. Perhaps this was the reality of playing tennis in this era, as stark and immovable as the face of a cliff, and there was nothing else to be done. At the end of this path was Enlightenment, a lovely ego death. To play a game for a living, to travel the world, to be alive at all, was a privilege—what’s that about a major?—no, he was content to sniff the freshly cut grass, kick the clay out of his shoes, and feel gratitude.
//
[Djokovic's] thinking was sophisticated in some ways and regressive in others, a prominent example of what might be termed “jock epistemology,” where elite athletes accumulate some useful beliefs for good reasons, some useful beliefs for bad reasons, and some bad beliefs for bad reasons.
Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Then came the gatekeeper. It was an axiom in men’s tennis: If you do well enough in a meaningful tournament, there will come a time when you line up across the net from Novak Djokovic.
Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
When Djokovic is playing a best-of-five match, there’s often a luxurious lack of urgency to the affair. So what if he starts flat-footed? He is inevitability personified. He knows, as he gradually gets the blood pumping and the synovial fluids flowing, that he has a dozen higher gears of tennis at his disposal, and he’ll activate them as needed. He knows that his top gear can be matched by only a handful of people in the history of the sport. One of them was retired and probably eating fondue (Roger Federer), and another was busy rehabbing his hip (Rafael Nadal), and the youngest had just been upset the day before (Carlos Alcaraz).
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
And over the last two decades of the men’s tournament, one player has been its chief deity. Rafael Nadal has a higher success rate winning matches at Roland-Garros than I do at tying my own shoes. Heading into the 2024 tournament, he had won 112 of his 115 matches there. It is not merely one of the great feats in tennis, but one of the most consistent performances in any competitive human endeavor. Being that good at something must make it difficult to stop, as Nadal’s body now seemed to be urging him to do.
//
And yet Nadal has always played strange games with hope.
//
The old rites were all intact, even if the old tennis wasn’t.
//
On this court Nadal used to rigorously delete his opponents. A No. 1–ranked tennis player historically wins about 55 percent of points in a season; that much of an edge equates to a dominant performance. In his prime, Nadal had on several occasions won nearly 70 percent of the points in his matches at Roland-Garros. In his prime, it sometimes appeared he was landing eight haymakers in a row on an insensate corpse.
//
Then, while serving for the set, Nadal fell into a 0-40 hole he could not crawl out of. Watching him hit his signature shots, I started to see a ghostly overlay of the 2013 Nadal projected over the present-day reality. The 2024 down-the-line forehand pass that bonked into the middle of the net post would have instead arced savagely outside Zverev’s reach before dipping back into the corner of the court, following that infamous “banana” curve. It was possible to see the thrilling, crackling outlines of what Nadal once was, and occasionally the ghost and the present slid into serene alignment, before falling out of sync again. A slow and rickety recovery step, a belabored backhand falling a few feet before the service line, and the illusion dissipated.
//
Three years before, Musetti had taken a two-sets-to-none lead, only for Djokovic to leave the court, change his clothes, and wrest back control of the match, with the crushing inevitability of a bear trap. Musetti retired from that match while getting blown out 4-0 in the fifth set. He said he wasn’t actually injured but had simply realized “there was no chance that I could win a point.”
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
[Djokovic] summons some of his best ball when playing from a place of spite; he is most magnetic and authentic when playing the heel, too.
Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
My internal terminology for the best Djokovic-Nadal matchups is Wide Tennis. It takes two—and really, only these two—to produce Wide Tennis. When playing lesser opponents, its full parameters cannot be glimpsed. Nadal can spend most of a match perched near the center of the baseline, imposing his entire will on each ball, cracking one crosscourt forehand, then putting the next into the cavernous opening left behind. Djokovic can spend most of a match sitting directly on top of the baseline, taking the ball early, batting it to opposite corners until the end of time. When together, however, they are both hell-bent on hijacking the other from their seat of comfort. The result is a version of tennis that is as visually striking as it is physically baffling. The legal area of play for singles is fringed by two strips known as the doubles alley, which extend the court wider for two-on-two play. But Nadal and Djokovic sprint behind, through, and even beyond these alleys in their singles matches. They travel out to remote locales, then recover back to the center of the court just in time to begin their next far-flung foray. Thus their tennis took on different dimensions. It looked distorted, as if reality’s projectionist had made an error with the aspect ratio.
//
Each man hybridizes offense and defense in a way that commands constant vigilance from the other. Each ball is struck with a reasonable expectation that the next ball will be coming back over the net, perhaps even harder and more angled. Both men intimately understand how difficult it is to hit the ball somewhere that would bother the other. Watching this version of tennis is like reading a text stripped of punctuation marks. Where you’d expect a point to reach its natural conclusion, it simply refuses, instead flowing out into a sequence of shots and sprints and shots and sprints that leaves no room for breath or error.
//
There was a ragged yearning in Djokovic’s body language, but a crystalline refinement in his actual strokes.
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
I felt somewhat sad as this man [Auger-Aliassime], who had at one time been considered the future of the sport, was devoured by the actual, undeniable future of the sport.
Chapter 8: Meddy in the Middle
[Medvedev's] personality, too, has left casual fans convinced that he is some enemy of the game. Perhaps they are reading too much into the expansive plain of his forehead, those cunning beady eyes, the physiognomy of a supervillain plotting to take down the power grid.
//
And in the middle of this fretful moment—scrapping with the greats, wondering if he would ever be loved, announcing his disillusionment—he was dealt another devastating fate. Enter the biggest prodigy in decades, seven years Medvedev’s junior, permanently a-grin, and instantly beloved.
//
One boy wonder was a healthy challenge; two of them muddled the future. Long ago, Medvedev had declared that his dreams were dead. Now he observed that tennis no longer held any joy. What was this melancholic Russian novel of a career? He had timed his birth poorly. He should have planned that out better.
Chapter 2: Cabeza, Corazón y Cojones
Tennis is a terminally nostalgic sport, always trying to make sense of its future by using its past.
Chapter 6: Triage Ward
In this way the court takes a record of the tennis played on it. A divot over here where someone took a hard fall after a diving volley. A smear over there where a player slid to retrieve a drop shot. A small comma behind the baseline traced by the back foot while a player served. In the right light, the clay itself looks like soft velour and the footprints look like places it has been thumbed against the grain.
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
JANNIK SINNER
Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Mostly, though, he worked. Cvjetkovic remembered Sinner as a child with an unusual capacity for work, and an unusual gift for simplifying that work. A technical detail that might take others six months to learn, he would handle in a week.
//
Everyone noticed the same thing about Sinner’s tennis then as they do now: the sound produced when he makes contact with the ball. I have listened to it up close. Depending on his effort level and the acoustics of the court, it has sounded to me like a firearm, a vehicle backfiring, or a hydraulic press. I can understand why that talent scout thought Sinner was a construction site.
//
To track a fast-approaching sphere, intuit its trajectory, and start a swing at just the right moment to strike it cleanly—this is known as timing. Sinner has perfect timing the way a singer might have perfect pitch. The impact of strings on ball is devastating and pure.
//
Sinner came to Turin a sphere of heat and light, the home favorite, lustily cheered by Italian crowds.
Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
Standing on the court afterward, he said with a coy smile that he wouldn’t be disclosing his tactics, because he hoped to play his elder again and again. He was that rare young player who genuinely craved more encounters with Novak Djokovic, like a sheep that had developed a taste for wolf.
//
And yet here was Sinner, a sedate counterexample. A new, clearer picture of the Italian began to unfurl. Someone who came late to tennis, was never cornered into it, was at little risk of burnout compared to his peers, and instead maintained a gluttonous appetite for improvement. Even with the trophy sitting in front of his face, he was talking about next steps. “It’s a great moment for me and my team,” he said. “But in the other way, we also know that we have to improve if we want to have another chance to hold a big trophy again.” Tennis was no longer the sport for gentlemen who liked a cigarette during changeovers; it belonged to single-minded ascetics.
//
This evolved Sinner was one of the tour’s most balanced players, in every sense of that word: on both forehand and backhand, serve and return, defense and offense. And yet, according to a certain reductive but pervasive fan perspective, the scoreboard was clear: one major title versus two major titles. Get to work, kid.
Of course, nobody was more amenable to that imperative than Jannik himself.
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
This should have ended the point. The ball was too far away from Sinner. But he ate up all that distance with hunched, loping strides, looking like a highly task-oriented antelope, and he did not merely put a racquet on the ball but somehow punched a proper backhand down-the-line, abruptly taking control of the point.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
When I asked Berrettini what had changed most in Sinner since they had last played, since his vault to the top of the tour, he pointed to his softer touch with the racquet and his ability to “read the moments” in the match and detect when to deviate from the script. “I think he missed three balls in the whole match,” he said. “It didn’t give me that oxygen that sometimes you need.” Often Djokovic’s game was described with similarly stark images of oxygen deprivation. They both could suffocate an opponent by hitting ball after ball deep in the court.
Chapter 11: Damage Control
But in the second set, no matter how gingerly Sinner walked between points, once the ball was in play he was floating all over the court, smooth and wraithlike, whipping his racquet to a blur.
//
The art of winning a title like the Cincinnati Open was consistency, conserving energy on the good days, salvaging the bad days. Hazy serendipity had to be converted into a solid routine. The genius had to be repeatable.
That repeatability may be the central feature of Sinner’s tennis, and perhaps even of his spirit. In Cincinnati, as he’d acclimated himself to the surface, weather, tennis ball, and other particularities, he refined that capacity. Day by day he homed in on the pulse of the hard court itself, and once he’d locked into that beat, no one in the world could hang with his tennis. He made every moment uncannily like the last one, the next shot just as pure as the one last struck.
Chapter 12: Digestion and Indigestion
“But, no, I’m always quite relaxed. I’m someone who forgets quite fast something.” The gist: I don’t think about him at all.
//
Sinner’s best tennis feels both languid and violent; it can be difficult to connect the cause with the effect. In between shots his lank frame looks almost floppy, and as he skids and scrambles and makes his little adjustment steps around the court, you wonder if those feet will give out from underneath him. But right when the ball is approaching, all that ambient floppiness is aligned into one sublimely synchronized chain, from foot to hip to wrist, as he readies his full-body slingshot groundstrokes. A compact backswing, a snap, and the ball is gone. The visual is loose and jangly, but the sound is like someone hucking a billiard ball against a garage door. Real power in tennis comes from relaxation and timing, rather than pure muscular output. Sinner’s what you’d get if you made a whole tennis player out of that axiom.
//
Judging from that performance, it would be difficult to argue that anyone else on the planet was better at the simple, terrible task of placing a tennis ball heavy and deep into the opposing court, over and over.
//
Fritz had a chance to serve for the third set, but Sinner foreclosed on the comeback attempt. He moved through the endgame with a finality reminiscent of Djokovic, as if he’d done this a dozen times and would do it a dozen more.
//
After winning in straight sets, Sinner threw his hands in the air and left them there, in keeping with his low-impact style of celebration. Nothing frenzied, no loss of control—just a young man taking in the cold, clean air at the top of a mountain.
Chapter 13: Changeover
Not all players need that communal aspect. Jannik Sinner, for example, had a different orientation at a similarly tender age. His second skiing coach, Klaus Happacher, said that once Jannik really began to take the sport seriously, he requested that he leave his group lesson and train solo with the coach so he could better focus. Some people see more clearly where friendship and the pursuit of excellence diverge.
Chapter 11: Damage Control
But in the second set, no matter how gingerly Sinner walked between points, once the ball was in play he was floating all over the court, smooth and wraithlike, whipping his racquet to a blur.
//
The art of winning a title like the Cincinnati Open was consistency, conserving energy on the good days, salvaging the bad days. Hazy serendipity had to be converted into a solid routine. The genius had to be repeatable.
That repeatability may be the central feature of Sinner’s tennis, and perhaps even of his spirit. In Cincinnati, as he’d acclimated himself to the surface, weather, tennis ball, and other particularities, he refined that capacity. Day by day he homed in on the pulse of the hard court itself, and once he’d locked into that beat, no one in the world could hang with his tennis. He made every moment uncannily like the last one, the next shot just as pure as the one last struck.
Chapter 12: Digestion and Indigestion
“But, no, I’m always quite relaxed. I’m someone who forgets quite fast something.” The gist: I don’t think about him at all.
//
Sinner’s best tennis feels both languid and violent; it can be difficult to connect the cause with the effect. In between shots his lank frame looks almost floppy, and as he skids and scrambles and makes his little adjustment steps around the court, you wonder if those feet will give out from underneath him. But right when the ball is approaching, all that ambient floppiness is aligned into one sublimely synchronized chain, from foot to hip to wrist, as he readies his full-body slingshot groundstrokes. A compact backswing, a snap, and the ball is gone. The visual is loose and jangly, but the sound is like someone hucking a billiard ball against a garage door. Real power in tennis comes from relaxation and timing, rather than pure muscular output. Sinner’s what you’d get if you made a whole tennis player out of that axiom.
//
Judging from that performance, it would be difficult to argue that anyone else on the planet was better at the simple, terrible task of placing a tennis ball heavy and deep into the opposing court, over and over.
//
Fritz had a chance to serve for the third set, but Sinner foreclosed on the comeback attempt. He moved through the endgame with a finality reminiscent of Djokovic, as if he’d done this a dozen times and would do it a dozen more.
//
After winning in straight sets, Sinner threw his hands in the air and left them there, in keeping with his low-impact style of celebration. Nothing frenzied, no loss of control—just a young man taking in the cold, clean air at the top of a mountain.
Chapter 13: Changeover
Not all players need that communal aspect. Jannik Sinner, for example, had a different orientation at a similarly tender age. His second skiing coach, Klaus Happacher, said that once Jannik really began to take the sport seriously, he requested that he leave his group lesson and train solo with the coach so he could better focus. Some people see more clearly where friendship and the pursuit of excellence diverge.
CARLOS ALCARAZ
Chapter 2: Cabeza, Corazón y Cojones
If you hadn’t paid attention all along, you might have been surprised to discover that the harbinger of tennis doom looked like such a cheerful adolescent doofus. But that was the feeling of early-career Carlos. So visibly happy to be there, so transparently living out a fantasy—a happiness that could infect any viewer, and a happiness that he channeled into his improvisational and blitzing style of tennis.
//
Imagine any discernible tennis skill. It doesn’t matter if you have the local jargon for it (“pace,” “footwork”) or just a general impression (“hits ball comically hard,” “runs around well”). You could look at Alcaraz and see that skill perfected.
//
Imagine the goalie on a foosball table, so explosive and responsive. Just that one little dude, gliding along a horizontal, ready to be spun at a furious pace with a light twist of a wrist. In his baseline exchanges Alcaraz stood on top of the line, never ceding more than an inch, waiting to meet the ball with lethal force, smooth in his movement but full of coiled rage. Then he reset instantly and did it again, melding caffeinated teen dynamism with a multi-major-winner’s point construction. There was a fluid, unrelenting quality to his play that I did not usually ascribe to animate objects, or anything that needs time to recover from physical exertion.
//
That’s the thing about Alcaraz—there are so many possible versions of him that in best-of-five, an opponent will eventually have to beat several. It was baffling how many distinct parts of tennis he had mastered, how they cohered into this figure of ruin. My initial mistake was trying to fit him into my general schema for understanding tennis players: as human beings whose technical and physical specs grant some gifts and take others off the table. Big servers tend to be too ungainly to return nimbly. The lightest and fastest players often lack punch. The slow-surface specialists panic when the ball bounces faster. But none of these trade-offs seemed to apply to Carlitos. He could simply have it all ways. This was why he evoked a sense of impossibility more than any other player in recent memory, because he combined so many traits that don’t belong together into a single psychedelic point.
//
That broad, sharky smile was a dark omen for the rest of the tour. If he was enjoying himself, his tennis was probably unplayable.
Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
This match epitomized the Alcaraz puzzle. His losses can look worse than the losses of other top players. He can be capable of stupefying ingenuity while playing against the best opponents, even in the most tense moments of a match. He can also, in more pedestrian moments, play squirrelly and confused tennis. He might get fixated on ideas that amuse him but do not win him points; he might start peacocking prematurely.
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
It was Alcaraz’s dynamic range, his command of both delicacy and brutality, that drove opponents into hopeless guessing games. In one rally, as Zverev struck three consecutive kill shots he expected to end the rally, and Alcaraz pulled off three increasingly preposterous retrievals, the kid started smiling.
//
The point captured Alcaraz’s blend of sloppiness and imagination. He gets himself into a bind, then works his way out of it, via some diabolical logic that no other player could follow.
Chapter 6: Triage Ward
He spent the days leading up to the tournament on the practice courts, with his right forearm mummified in tape, bunting his forehands gingerly, an adverb that typically would not come within a mile of the tennis of Carlos Alcaraz.
//
Perhaps it was reasonable to wonder if his body would survive his own violent and beautiful playing style.
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
With Alcaraz, you get the sense that if there were no crowd, there would be no point to all this. His trade is tennis, but it is also spectacle. He never looks happier than when working a stadium into a froth of awe and glee. His tennis alone does most of the work for the fans, but he likes to embellish his genius with small gestures. A finger pointed up to his ear, beckoning the crowd to roar, while the ball he’s struck for a winner is still bouncing past his hapless opponent. A bright sharky smile, like a child who has committed a naughty deed but knows he can charm his way out of punishment. A silent raised fist. A cocksure nod. A single bellowed “vamos,” his mouth open wide enough to eat the tennis ball. A nonverbal howl, the carotid artery pulsing like a garden hose on the side of his neck. Or his favorite: eyes narrowed and teeth fully bared—not a grin, more like a big cat reminding you of its fangs.
None of this seems affected. It is all expressive and improvised, just like his play. Sinner has said that he admires this aspect of his rival, his ability to enrapture the masses. As I’ve noted, the Italian’s own forays into crowd work are humbler: a fist pump, a compact nod, an ashen gaze into the middle distance.
//
It isn’t incuriosity, just a case of tacit bodily wisdom winning over explicit analytical fact. To tear around the court and hit balls at the speed Alcaraz does seems to require an uncluttered mind. Getting wrapped up in the minutiae of equipment or injury could only lead to overthinking, to the gestation of doubts. Alcaraz knew as much as he needed to know and would not be weighed down by a grain of superfluous information. In that, he was like so many other intuitive high performers: It was better to feel than to know.
//
“You have to find the joy in suffering,” said Alcaraz as he was interviewed on court minutes later. It was a perfect and subconscious homage to Rafa Nadal, who over his career spoke volumes about the masochism of tennis, his worldview still evidently looming over his tournament.
//
Harder to understand is how Alcaraz responds to pressure. For him, pressure seems clarifying. It forces him to stop temporizing. He stops surveying his various options on court and commits to the lucid, slashing style that made his name. It’s as if pressure snaps a lens into focus, revealing his own identity.
//
Alcaraz threw up the standard hand of apology, the usual etiquette when a player wins a point after his ball strikes the net cord—and then, when Zverev looked away, he cunningly curled his apology hand into a fist pump. No time for guilt. Some luck, sure, but also a glorious jolt of improvisation, the type of shot that explained why I’d overheard some French fans describe him as “pétillant”—sparkling, fizzy, like wine.
//
He concentrated his brilliance into a few critical doses and timed their delivery perfectly. That was enough. Carlos Alcaraz was capable of transcendence, but he was now also capable of winning a major title while far from transcendent, defeating many of his best contemporaries along the way.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
Alcaraz is an alarmingly efficient mechanism for turning matches into useful muscle memory and actionable wisdom, I thought at the time.
//
But even then, as Alcaraz lifted the golden cup, he was just 46 hours and 15 minutes into his grass-court career. He was flying on sheer feel and animal instincts. True prodigy gets to skip the trial-and-error phase.
//
And then he came clean: “And I put in videos of myself last year. I’m not gonna lie,” he laughed. “To see what I did, and how I did it.” From him, it wasn’t arrogant, just sensible. Tennis’s most brilliant pupil had decided he didn’t need a syllabus anymore; he had become his own assigned reading.
//
He banged big first serves and followed them with unanswerable drop shots, condensing into two shots the force-finesse mix that was his stamp on the modern game.
//
He’d been watching videos of himself. Why go elsewhere for knowledge? Plato once theorized that people have immortal souls, full of knowledge accrued from past lives, so learning is actually just rediscovering that forgotten knowledge buried inside. Perhaps this has only ever been true of Carlos Alcaraz. How quickly we’d arrived at the juncture where there was so little for him to learn from other people’s examples, where he was writing the future of the sport by himself, expanding its possibilities with every half-volley and high-pressure triumph. He was eating at the big table already, and ravenously.
Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
Alcaraz was the rare elite athlete who seemed to optimize his own pleasure at every moment on court. Sinner, too, spoke often about how treating tennis as a hobby was critical to his glacial cool in decisive moments, but the pleasure was less discernible on his face. With Alcaraz it was unmissable in that joyous, vacuous grin, making every passerby’s day. Here, as always, he looked adept at having fun.
//
To watch Carlitos pick up a new skill was one of tennis’s most reliable pleasures. Every coach he’d ever had was astonished by his capacity to integrate new information into his play.
//
“It’s going to be the best moment of my life, probably,” he said, referring to a high-pressure contest against a man who had spent the duration of Alcaraz’s conscious life siphoning his opponents’ joy with his tennis.
//
Carlitos learns so fast that it generates unintentional humor, best seen in his post-Wimbledon remarks. “I am totally different player than French Open. I grew up a lot since that moment,” he said, sincerely, about a match played five weeks before. He undergoes emotional and professional transformation in a span of time when most people his age might only fill a laundry hamper.
Chapter 11: Damage Control
But Carlitos is the consummate good boy. For an hour afterward I remained in shock, as if I’d witnessed some kind of natural disaster at a remove. My colleague Patrick Redford, watching at home, said it was like watching a puppy smoke a cigarette. With his four smashes, Alcaraz shattered an enduring image of professional happiness. As a kid, he’d had quite a temper, and while he’d managed it well enough to win four majors, perhaps he hadn’t exorcised it completely.
Chapter 12: Digestion and Indigestion
At an evening match, where the fans slurped down several of those under the bright stadium lights, the party ambiance intensified. It was an apt setting for Alcaraz, who was more or less a nightclub in the form of a tennis player.
Chapter 13: Changeover
He was the star pupil conjoined to the class clown.
//
Alcaraz had tried to sneak forward when there was no advantage to press—but instead of panicking, he simply created the advantage out of whole cloth, with an audacious volley from no-man’s-land. Then he kept creeping forward to the net. His talent overrode his error in judgment; the gambit paid off.
//
Here was another instance of him responding to scoreboard duress with his bravest tennis, living and dying by his reflexes and gut intuitions. Nobody was better when cornered.
//
He was a player for whom every single shot was physically possible, and when he lost, he tended to frame failure in emotional rather than physical terms. He might be a hunter always in search of a good feeling, capable of peerless play when he found it, but liable to sulk when he lost it.
SINCARAZ
Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Sometimes it seems that the trick of playing Alcaraz is to strip him of opportunities to remember how original he is. Sinner, somehow recovered from his trials, managed to pin Alcaraz to the back of the court, as a butterfly to a corkboard. He used his power to deprive Alcaraz of his usual creative resources: wide angles, ample time on the ball, openings for a drop shot.
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
Soon there were six points in a row that felt like a single hallucination, more vicious and vivid than the tennis we’d seen in the Big Three era. Alcaraz sprang a trap with a drop shot to lure Sinner in, hoping to hit a passing shot right by him, but Sinner, with his whole body still facing the back of the court, blocked a no-look volley into open space. I detected a new swagger in him—there he was, punishing another drop shot by slashing a slice hard crosscourt—as though Alcaraz were infecting him with his own way of life. Anyone who’d been watching tennis recently could tell they were doing something well beyond the usual patterns of the sport. They were inventing a new grammar all their own. Balls were struck hard at discombobulated elbow angles, immediate return winners were lashed off of big serves, sudden solutions were lobbed back at difficult questions. It was a matchup with no neutral shots, no peace talks. Attack or be attacked.
//
On court Alcaraz was asked about “how special a friend” Sinner is to him. “He means a lot to me,” he responded. “I always say that first thing is you have to be a good person, and athlete comes after that. And I think Jannik is the same.” The sun began to set over the mountains, in cotton-candy hues of pink and blue.
- the cut to beautiful romantic sunset is insane work it's giving charamu reunion in mobile suit gundam zeta ep 14
Recall that, mere minutes after the Indian Wells win, the sweat still damp on Carlitos’s brow, an interviewer stood on court and asked him about “how much Jannik means to you.” The question wasn’t completely unprompted—they had hung out during the rain delay that interrupted the match—but the almost romantic intensity of the phrasing made me laugh out loud in the moment. Imagine that you are friends with a colleague, but firmly in the water-cooler-buddy tier of acquaintance. A couple of inside jokes, some shared workplace gripes to fill any lulls in conversation. But then imagine that you are periodically interviewed, for the entertainment of hundreds of thousands of fans, about how much that colleague means to you. I mean, he’s pretty nice, I guess?
- rip my beloved sincoworkaraz dynamic 2019-2025
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
When Alcaraz plays badly, he can look uncentered and full of bad ideas. When Sinner plays badly, he looks like a machine just slightly miscalibrated, erring but with the right intent.
//
The tennis seemed to come out of nowhere. Writing about a match like this is attempting to impose a legible narrative on what is, effectively, two people trying to devise increasingly sophisticated ways of murdering one another for four hours. They were experiencing all kinds of small-scale spiritual and physical ups and downs, some of which would later make it into their comments after the match, and some of which will remain forever unknown, hard to articulate even for them, certainly in a second or third language. Often the real tennis match—its problem-solving, its private pains, its triage—resists after-the-fact comprehension.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
At this stage of their careers, Alcaraz was more prone to burning out psychologically, and Sinner physically.
Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
Old archetypes were often applied to new superstars, and in those formulations, Alcaraz was most often seen as the love child of Federer and Nadal, blending the former’s extempore all-court play with the latter’s brawn and vigor. Sinner, meanwhile, was the one seen as a power-injected, neo-Djokovic.
Chapter 11: Damage Control
Djokovic was still recovering from his Olympic bliss and would not play the role of the chaperone at the teen dance making room for the Holy Spirit between the youthful duo.
//
Some gifted but lesser players seemed to have this reaction to Alcaraz. He invited them into stimulating, inventive exchanges that reminded them of their own capabilities. Sinner, on the other hand, might just remind them of how far they were from the mountaintop.
Chapter 13: Changeover
Every time Sinner and Alcaraz saw an opportunity to attack, they seized it. Gone were the cagey, slow-burning rallies of Djokovic versus Nadal, each man hunting for a momentary lapse in stamina or focus. For the new kids, the game plan was to attack first, attack second. There was little taste for playing in a safe, error-reduction mode, the kind that Djokovic mastered in tiebreaks. Instead, Sinner said in an interview with Sky Sports that his tiebreak philosophy was to consider all the various attacks he’d tried over the course of the set and commit to those he felt had worked best. Sinner and Alcaraz were pioneering an era of “point-and-shoot” tennis, as Clarke put it, evoking the visual grammar of a first-person-shooter video game. If the ball was there to be hit, it would be hit—and hard.
//
Between these rivals, I could see each one mapping out the other’s tendencies, and then figuring out how to exploit the map the other had made. Specifically, in that second set, I came to appreciate a new wrinkle in the Alcaraz attack. He would rear back to hit a forehand, switch his grip as if to massage a drop shot—any savvy opponent would see that grip change and start shifting his weight to run forward—only to drive a slice deep through the court instead. He used this trick in two mesmerizing rallies, and each time it startled Sinner, perhaps the most balanced player I’ve ever seen. Both times he lost his footing and the point. With this mischief, Alcaraz had grafted another limb onto the decision tree in Sinner’s mind. The next time he moved his racquet that way, Sinner would remember what had happened before and wonder whether he should sprint ahead or stay put. To burden your opponent with additional uncertainty is to win the mind war.
//
The absolute best tennis induces laughter in audiences. This rivalry induced laughter even in the participants.
//
They both played true to their reputations. Sinner maintained a cruising altitude from start to finish, a level of tennis thousands of miles above most opponents, but not this one. Alcaraz’s level dipped and bobbed, but ultimately surpassed his rival’s in critical moments.
//
One was mercurial; the other methodical. One was a master of compartmentalization; the other seemed to feel everything all at once. Together they had made the sport anew.
//
Each has something the other lacks and would like to infuse into his own game. Alcaraz praises Sinner for his capacity to play every point at “9/10 or 10/10” intensity; the unspoken addendum is that he himself can fluctuate between 2/10 and 12/10. Sinner needs to find more comfort in the unscripted moments of feel and daring that are Alcaraz’s native habitat; there is more to tennis than the routine.
//
But the future will surely be defined by these two, interlocked in a joyful and absorbing struggle. They’ll get bigger and stronger; they’ll get smarter; they’ll get hurt; they’ll hurt each other. They could become genuine friends. They could drift apart.
BIG 3
Chapter 1: Empire
In the beginning, there was Roger Federer.
//
Perhaps the most poignant way to understand the Big Three was to see the optimism steadily squeezed out of their contemporaries, as if by a juicer, a cup filled to the brim with hopes and dreams.
//
Broadly speaking, these valiant victims of the Big Three moved through recognizable phases of career grief. First in this sequence was Persistence; all it would take was some dedicated training, some tactical adjustments, perhaps a few more twists of good fortune, and an important match may well swing his way in the future. After said match definitively did not swing in his favor, nor the one after, nor the one after that, the player might admit to Cluelessness. At this phase, they would have no particular intuition about what they could have done to win, and would feel altogether lost on the court. There could be bright flashes of Anger or Despair en route, but in time, the player arrived at Resignation. Perhaps this was the reality of playing tennis in this era, as stark and immovable as the face of a cliff, and there was nothing else to be done. At the end of this path was Enlightenment, a lovely ego death. To play a game for a living, to travel the world, to be alive at all, was a privilege—what’s that about a major?—no, he was content to sniff the freshly cut grass, kick the clay out of his shoes, and feel gratitude.
//
[Djokovic's] thinking was sophisticated in some ways and regressive in others, a prominent example of what might be termed “jock epistemology,” where elite athletes accumulate some useful beliefs for good reasons, some useful beliefs for bad reasons, and some bad beliefs for bad reasons.
Chapter 3: Boot and Rally
Then came the gatekeeper. It was an axiom in men’s tennis: If you do well enough in a meaningful tournament, there will come a time when you line up across the net from Novak Djokovic.
Chapter 4: Dancing in the Pressure Storm
When Djokovic is playing a best-of-five match, there’s often a luxurious lack of urgency to the affair. So what if he starts flat-footed? He is inevitability personified. He knows, as he gradually gets the blood pumping and the synovial fluids flowing, that he has a dozen higher gears of tennis at his disposal, and he’ll activate them as needed. He knows that his top gear can be matched by only a handful of people in the history of the sport. One of them was retired and probably eating fondue (Roger Federer), and another was busy rehabbing his hip (Rafael Nadal), and the youngest had just been upset the day before (Carlos Alcaraz).
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
And over the last two decades of the men’s tournament, one player has been its chief deity. Rafael Nadal has a higher success rate winning matches at Roland-Garros than I do at tying my own shoes. Heading into the 2024 tournament, he had won 112 of his 115 matches there. It is not merely one of the great feats in tennis, but one of the most consistent performances in any competitive human endeavor. Being that good at something must make it difficult to stop, as Nadal’s body now seemed to be urging him to do.
//
And yet Nadal has always played strange games with hope.
//
The old rites were all intact, even if the old tennis wasn’t.
//
On this court Nadal used to rigorously delete his opponents. A No. 1–ranked tennis player historically wins about 55 percent of points in a season; that much of an edge equates to a dominant performance. In his prime, Nadal had on several occasions won nearly 70 percent of the points in his matches at Roland-Garros. In his prime, it sometimes appeared he was landing eight haymakers in a row on an insensate corpse.
//
Then, while serving for the set, Nadal fell into a 0-40 hole he could not crawl out of. Watching him hit his signature shots, I started to see a ghostly overlay of the 2013 Nadal projected over the present-day reality. The 2024 down-the-line forehand pass that bonked into the middle of the net post would have instead arced savagely outside Zverev’s reach before dipping back into the corner of the court, following that infamous “banana” curve. It was possible to see the thrilling, crackling outlines of what Nadal once was, and occasionally the ghost and the present slid into serene alignment, before falling out of sync again. A slow and rickety recovery step, a belabored backhand falling a few feet before the service line, and the illusion dissipated.
//
Three years before, Musetti had taken a two-sets-to-none lead, only for Djokovic to leave the court, change his clothes, and wrest back control of the match, with the crushing inevitability of a bear trap. Musetti retired from that match while getting blown out 4-0 in the fifth set. He said he wasn’t actually injured but had simply realized “there was no chance that I could win a point.”
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
[Djokovic] summons some of his best ball when playing from a place of spite; he is most magnetic and authentic when playing the heel, too.
Chapter 10: Hoard of Gold
My internal terminology for the best Djokovic-Nadal matchups is Wide Tennis. It takes two—and really, only these two—to produce Wide Tennis. When playing lesser opponents, its full parameters cannot be glimpsed. Nadal can spend most of a match perched near the center of the baseline, imposing his entire will on each ball, cracking one crosscourt forehand, then putting the next into the cavernous opening left behind. Djokovic can spend most of a match sitting directly on top of the baseline, taking the ball early, batting it to opposite corners until the end of time. When together, however, they are both hell-bent on hijacking the other from their seat of comfort. The result is a version of tennis that is as visually striking as it is physically baffling. The legal area of play for singles is fringed by two strips known as the doubles alley, which extend the court wider for two-on-two play. But Nadal and Djokovic sprint behind, through, and even beyond these alleys in their singles matches. They travel out to remote locales, then recover back to the center of the court just in time to begin their next far-flung foray. Thus their tennis took on different dimensions. It looked distorted, as if reality’s projectionist had made an error with the aspect ratio.
//
Each man hybridizes offense and defense in a way that commands constant vigilance from the other. Each ball is struck with a reasonable expectation that the next ball will be coming back over the net, perhaps even harder and more angled. Both men intimately understand how difficult it is to hit the ball somewhere that would bother the other. Watching this version of tennis is like reading a text stripped of punctuation marks. Where you’d expect a point to reach its natural conclusion, it simply refuses, instead flowing out into a sequence of shots and sprints and shots and sprints that leaves no room for breath or error.
//
There was a ragged yearning in Djokovic’s body language, but a crystalline refinement in his actual strokes.
OTHER ATP HOPEFULS
Chapter 5: Smiling Through the Swarm
I felt somewhat sad as this man [Auger-Aliassime], who had at one time been considered the future of the sport, was devoured by the actual, undeniable future of the sport.
Chapter 8: Meddy in the Middle
[Medvedev's] personality, too, has left casual fans convinced that he is some enemy of the game. Perhaps they are reading too much into the expansive plain of his forehead, those cunning beady eyes, the physiognomy of a supervillain plotting to take down the power grid.
//
And in the middle of this fretful moment—scrapping with the greats, wondering if he would ever be loved, announcing his disillusionment—he was dealt another devastating fate. Enter the biggest prodigy in decades, seven years Medvedev’s junior, permanently a-grin, and instantly beloved.
//
One boy wonder was a healthy challenge; two of them muddled the future. Long ago, Medvedev had declared that his dreams were dead. Now he observed that tennis no longer held any joy. What was this melancholic Russian novel of a career? He had timed his birth poorly. He should have planned that out better.
TENNIS
Chapter 2: Cabeza, Corazón y Cojones
Tennis is a terminally nostalgic sport, always trying to make sense of its future by using its past.
Chapter 6: Triage Ward
In this way the court takes a record of the tennis played on it. A divot over here where someone took a hard fall after a diving volley. A smear over there where a player slid to retrieve a drop shot. A small comma behind the baseline traced by the back foot while a player served. In the right light, the clay itself looks like soft velour and the footprints look like places it has been thumbed against the grain.
Chapter 7: Joy in Suffering
The crowd is the third participant in every tennis match. It can bend the outcome, like the sun or the wind. If players are shown love by the crowd, they can tap into new reservoirs of confidence. If they are shown scorn—and they happen to be named Novak Djokovic—they can also tap into new reservoirs of confidence.
//
Tennis had gotten brawnier over the decades, but its competitors were still pressed into that display of genteel civility, just seconds after they’d spent four hours wired to kill.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
Unlike hard court, which sits inert, or clay, which is groomed and restored between matches, the grass cannot be reset. Wimbledon is a story of degradation.
//
Tennis is unambiguous that way. No loss can be blamed on a teammate or coach or external force. You are only as good as your wins.
Chapter 13: Changeover
Level is separable from the player; it can be commented on at a remove, as if a player were holding their own tennis out at arm’s length, putting it up to the light to study it more closely. Level is an instantaneous snapshot of where a player stands—their accuracy, ferocity, ingenuity at a given point of time. It is the result of their training, but also their jet lag, their love life, their legal proceedings, their last meal.
//
Tennis had gotten brawnier over the decades, but its competitors were still pressed into that display of genteel civility, just seconds after they’d spent four hours wired to kill.
Chapter 9: Tossing Out the Syllabus
Unlike hard court, which sits inert, or clay, which is groomed and restored between matches, the grass cannot be reset. Wimbledon is a story of degradation.
//
Tennis is unambiguous that way. No loss can be blamed on a teammate or coach or external force. You are only as good as your wins.
Chapter 13: Changeover
Level is separable from the player; it can be commented on at a remove, as if a player were holding their own tennis out at arm’s length, putting it up to the light to study it more closely. Level is an instantaneous snapshot of where a player stands—their accuracy, ferocity, ingenuity at a given point of time. It is the result of their training, but also their jet lag, their love life, their legal proceedings, their last meal.
