When Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner played their dazzling quarterfinal match in the 2022 US Open—lasting five sets, five hours, and ending at 2:50 in the morning—pundits and fans alike buzzed at the prospect of a rivalry that could dominate men's tennis in the future. Few people were expecting the two players to dominate the men's tour as completely as they have the past two years, splitting the last seven major titles between them.
Yet Giri Nathan, a writer at Defector and The Second Serve, sensed that the story of Sinner and Alcaraz's ascent would be worth telling. His book Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis, follows both players through their dominant 2024 season. "To be honest, the way 2024 unfolded was way beyond my wildest expectations," Nathan tells me.
Sinner and Alcaraz split the four major tournaments evenly last year. This year, Sinner leads Alcaraz 2-1, winning the Australian Open and Wimbledon, but Alcaraz came out on top at the year's most dramatic match, a five-plus hour final at Roland-Garros that he won from two sets down. This week, both are on track to reach the final of the US Open for another installment in their rivalry.
Sports journalism has changed dramatically since when stars like Arthur Ashe were at the height of the sport. Decades ago, journalists could travel with the players and spend hours meeting their families or hanging out in the locker room. Now, journalists must rely primarily on press conferences, and players' teams shelter them from most one-on-one interviews.
"I thought a lot about what the purpose of traveling on tour so much last year was," Nathan says. "What was the point of all that, when the players' teams are going to be so cloistered and closed off? But the handful of really human moments that I got to witness really made it feel worthwhile."
Below, we discuss the state of sports journalism, how social media affects modern tennis stardom, and more.
I have such vivid memories of the period when Federer was just winning everything. It got really, really boring. Sinner and Alcaraz are the whole story right now, and it's exciting, but there's the possibility of it getting repetitive.
In the book, I make a point to gesture at the fact that the Big Three dominance was a little boring. For someone who's tasked with writing about sports, it was a little suffocating. I really didn't want to shy away from what you describe with repetitive winners. I think the men's game is easier to follow if you're a casual viewer of tennis. There are really only two names you need to have in your head.
I think the men's game is easier to follow if you're a casual viewer of tennis. There are really only two names you need to have in your head.
It also makes me think about the fact that you can't really choose these personalities. Whoever is the best at tennis is the best at tennis. I think the best chapter in the book is actually about Daniil Medvedev. He's a great character, but he's not the best player.
You don't have control over who the best players are. You do have some control over focusing the lens on those characters you find most captivating. I took some liberties with that in this book by doing mini portraits of players I found interesting if they happened to be playing one of our two principal characters. The fact that Medvedev's tennis was declining made that chapter less "newsy," but on the other hand, a lot more emotionally rich.
There's also the essential tension at the beginning of a super-young athlete's career, particularly if he's an athlete speaking in his second or third language: you're not going to get super-colorful insights from the horse's mouth. A lot of the interesting work when I was researching the book was talking to other players, older players in particular, and getting them to reflect on these two.
The fact is, when you're 20, 21, 22, you haven't lived that much life yet and you don't necessarily have perspective on the incredible things that you're already doing.
The fact is, when you're 20, 21, 22, you haven't lived that much life yet and you don't necessarily have perspective on the incredible things that you're already doing. So it was a fun challenge to try to paint these portraits of people in that sort of larval stage.
You also write about how little access journalists have to the players these days, and acknowledge the fact that that's obviously going to shape what it's possible to write. What were the challenges of working around those limitations? Is this dynamic really serving the athletes?
I think there's this totally flattened version of storytelling in sports right now. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the decline of traditional written journalism and social media being the main platform for these athletes to build their audiences. You basically get these propaganda vehicles, like Netflix docu-series with players having veto power over what goes in and what goes out. These things don't have much shelf life. I think that we will come to a point where sports fans realize that they're missing the stories that they would read or watch from a third-party, independent point of view that's able to be critical where necessary and emotionally sensitive where necessary.
In the book, I laid out human stories you can tell in tennis, and I hope you can tell how those would be enriched even more if players felt more comfortable sharing—or, I should say, if the players' teams and agents felt more comfortable. Pretty much any time I have gotten to sit down with a player and discuss things, they tend to be extremely open. I think that that constricted, almost paranoid worldview is coming from the teams, and from a sense of what is best commercially for the player. But if you have such a strong filter, you're going to end up restricting a lot of the rich human things about your athlete getting out into the world too.
Pretty much any time I have gotten to sit down with a player and discuss things, they tend to be extremely open.
You have a quote about the players living in a benign surveillance state, in terms of being filmed all the time for social media. It feels like that must be so much more exhausting, emotionally, than it would have been to be a star athlete in the past.
I wanted to capture what modern superstardom looks like, feels like, and in what ways it differs from the era that just passed. I think it's no accident that Carlos Alcaraz came about as part of the first generation of athletes who grew up with smartphones. He speaks frequently and honestly about wanting to create vivid highlight reel moments for the fans who've paid money to come watch him play. By contrast, one of Sinner's childhood coaches told me that when he was growing up, he would come home and watch full sets. He would never watch highlight reels.
I think the more you are able to not have your day-to-day life hijacked by the current of social media, the more you'll be in the right headspace to play professional sports. Tennis requires an inhuman amount of focus. I really wanted to convey just how hard it is to be that focused, with all the same things that have fractured our attention spans as tennis watchers. You really have to find a way to insulate yourself from it while also capitalizing on it to make money.
