Like a lot of tennis fans, journalist Giri Nathan watched Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner duel into the small hours of the morning at the 2022 U.S. Open, bearing witness to Alcaraz saving match point on his way to winning a five-set thriller. It lasted more than five hours, and it didn’t end until about 3 a.m. But instead of doing it courtside, he did it from his sofa, inscribing the contours what he calls a “futurist epic” into his notebook.
Like a lot of tennis fans, the match convinced him that these two were going to take over the sport. So he decided to embark on a book about it, as the two young men wrote the prophesy into reality over three years of incendiary tennis.
Nathan, a co-founder of the sports website Defector Media, has published “Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis” with Gallery Books. He spent the 2024 season squarely focused on Sinner and Alcaraz, in which they split the four majors and accelerated their ascension into a tennis stratosphere of their own creation.
“I was fortunate that I picked that year, because they definitely delivered and continue to deliver,” Nathan said during a recent interview about the book and the sport.
Sinner and Alcaraz have now won all the Grand Slam men’s singles titles contested since January 2024. Novak Djokovic, the greatest player of the modern era with 24 Grand Slam singles titles, has described them as being “levels above” everyone else. Their rivals in the rankings say that Sinner and Alcaraz have changed the sport so much that their games look like they are made of tissue paper by comparison.
They just played each other for the fourth time in a final in 2025, in Cincinnati. Alcaraz won, after Sinner retired through illness down 5-0. Will the streak of finals continue at the upcoming U.S. Open? Barring an unforeseen injury, Nathan thinks so.
An excerpt from “Changeover” follows the interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
How early an adopter were you on Alcaraz and Sinner?
I was following some forums where people are following the junior events and minor leagues. Alcaraz was one that people saw coming a long way out, just because of the results he was having in the juniors. So that one was less of a surprise. The first match I remember watching of his was his first ATP win in Rio in 2022. Sinner was a lot more surprising. I only became aware of him when he started going on a tear in the Challenger Tour (the second tier of professional men’s tennis).
The rhythm of his career was different than Alcaraz’s.
Why do you think tennis ends up with these duopolies in ways that other sports don’t? Björn Borg and John McEnroe. Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova. Steffi Graf and Monica Seles. It seems especially apparent on the men’s side.
At the tournaments that really count the most, the majors, there’s so much testing of these players that there’s not going to be someone suddenly redlining and winning seven matches in a row. I do feel like the best talent does win out in tennis in a way that’s not necessarily true in other sports, or a team sport in a single-elimination tournament. You’re playing best-of-five set matches, so I think it’s a real filter of talent. You get the actual top players coming out in the end.
The other stuff is a little mushier and intangible. It probably has things to do with resources. Money is concentrated at the top of the tour in a way that is quite unique. Endorsement money and prize money is all highly concentrated in the top 15-ish, 20 players. That continues to extend the competitive advantages that those players enjoy.
Is it fair to say that Sinner’s success has surprised you more or not?
To the extent I could have seen something coming, that was maybe slightly against consensus. His ballstriking always had that quality, from the first time I got to see it in person. So for me, even when he was having some of the struggles earlier in his career, with five-setters and perhaps conditioning too, I kind of always thought this guy was gonna figure it out. The quality of his ball was so anomalously good. I can’t say that I predicted he would have a season as dominant as the one he had last year, but I really thought he would be one of the guys collecting Slam titles. With Alcaraz, that was more a traditional prodigy arc.
Are you surprised Alcaraz hasn’t won more?
I think there’s something very adorable about the Alcaraz fan base: they tend to catastrophize. He does have these somewhat inexplicable losses from time to time, but zoom out even a little bit and he’s already on a trajectory to be an all-time player. Anytime I’m a little puzzled by losing to a lesser player, I just chalk that up to part of the maturing process and think about how unbelievably ahead of schedule he is in so many other ways.
What is your favorite Alcaraz vs. Sinner match at this point? I think I know the answer…
Before Paris this year, it would have for sure been the U.S. Open 2022. That’s when I first had the little seed of a thought to write a book to cover this rivalry. But right now, it’s got to be this year’s French Open final. It just seemed like it was one of those once-in-a-lifetime matches. It kind of sums up nicely where they’re both at in the rivalry, because early on, you might have said it’s Sinner the hard-court guy and Alcaraz the natural-surfaces guy, but it’s gotten level enough that Sinner had three championship points on Alcaraz’s favorite surface. And then obviously what happened after that point of the match is unforgettable too.
Carlos Alcaraz’s five-set win over Jannik Sinner at the 2025 French Open is among the greatest men’s matches of all time. (Lindsey Wasson / Getty Images)
Were you as surprised as everybody else that Alcaraz was able to save the three championship points and then come back?
When he won that set, I texted a friend and I said, “I think he’s going to win this.” He does have this way of — even if he was distracted, or his level was kind of unsatisfying earlier in the match, he just snaps into focus when the scoreboard is most dire. It’s one of the most charismatic things about his tennis.
How did you process the email last summer telling you about Sinner’s anti-doping case?
His camp had been quite cagey in terms of fielding interview requests for a while, so in one sense it was clarifying. But from a narrative perspective, it was a meaty topic that I need to start diving into. I wanted the book to still work chronologically, because I wanted to replicate the feeling of surprise that we had when we were following the season.
So I didn’t want to foreshadow Sinner’s case or lead off the book with it. It added a lot of psychological intrigue. There are some details of that saga that are only gonna be known by the people directly involved. We can ask all the questions. There’s a lot of common dodges and evasions. Fans are never going to get that full, satisfying answer on certain questions.
Do you think there’s an asterisk next to anything that he has accomplished?
Based on the information available, I would say no. I don’t think that the concentration of clostebol that was found in his body would be performance-enhancing. There’s some side theories about it being used as a masking agent. But I look at the risk-reward calculus for a player of his profile, and I don’t think it’s really worth it. That’s not to say that I think the players are leaving other advantages on the table. I think they use everything toeing right up to the line of a banned substance.
When reporting the book, did you get a sense of how much Sinner and Alcaraz actually like each other, and how each thinks about the other one?
That was one of the main questions I was interested in. They have a really good professional relationship. It’s sort of like having a buddy in the workplace. But I think tennis fans and maybe even some tennis media like to portray it as more than that.
During a rain delay at Indian Wells last year, they said they hung out in the locker room and talked about life. After the Beijing Open final, they shared the private jet to Shanghai. One of the things that I really liked writing about was those moments where they would talk in more detail about each other’s game and what they admired about it, what the other had that they were still working on. One of Sinner’s coaches, Darren Cahill, said that Sinner watches Alcaraz more than he watches any other player. It’s an arms race to see who’s improving, in what ways and how quickly, and how to keep up.
Some people want them to hate each other a little bit more.
I’ve heard that from a couple fans. I get it. I also wonder if it’s like a generational thing where I feel like these kids are just pretty well-adjusted and they can’t summon that same hatred of past rivalries. I think it would add a certain bite.
What surprised you the most that you learned about each of them through this process that you didn’t know before you got into writing it?
With Alcaraz, he has this puppy-like public image. It makes it seem like he’s always having a blast. I think he is often having a blast, but I think the last season definitely complicated that picture. Some of the burnout toward the end, the comments he was making about the schedule. He’s not this comically optimistic and chipper guy all the time. He does have his normal ups and downs like any other person in their line of work.
With Sinner, I think a lot of the flatness or stiffness from him comes from being the kind of guy who, if he had his way, public life and private life would just be totally separate. He has to deal with it, because that’s just the reality of being a top tennis player right now.
There’s a moment in the book when I just watch him hanging out at the airport. That, in turn, really humanized it for me, and it reminded me that the pictures constructed of these players in the public eye can be kind of one-note. It’s always fun to just catch those random little human moments.
They’ve split all the majors since last January. How long do you think this will all last?
I think it could last a while. I think some people say offhand that maybe the third party to really challenge these guys is still in his early teens, and I think that could be the case. A lot of fans and people in tennis are excited about (João) Fonseca. Physically, he’s not quite on their level yet. So I think it could be just these two guys racking up the majors for another, I don’t know, two, three seasons, who knows? It seems like you need a bit of injury luck or other luck to keep up with these guys.
But narratively, I definitely hope that some players can.
Who’s going to win more majors?
At the start of the summer, I think my answer would have been Alcaraz, in a kind of uncomplicated way. Having seen how Sinner performed on clay and then on grass — but also being two years older — I think I’m going to still come out and say Alcaraz. But by a hair. I think it’s going to be close the whole way.
With the physicality of the sport and the relentlessness of the schedule, it’s hard to see either one lasting another 15 years, isn’t it?
That was one of the clearest things to me in the course of writing this book, hearing week after week how this is unsustainable. You’ve got this model that’s built off of a sport that was far less physical, and then the scheduling demands are only increasing. I hope that. For the sake of the players, they figure out a solution because we’re not going to see that same longevity if it continues with the current state of things.
The following excerpt details their match at the 2022 U.S. Open, in which Alcaraz and Sinner played the computer-game epic that announced their incipient takeover of tennis to the world.
As the U.S. Open rolled back around, it was the hour of Carlitos once again. Novak Djokovic couldn’t travel to the U.S. because of a federal policy that required noncitizens to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Rafael Nadal, who had suffered an abdominal tear earlier in the summer and played at the Open through visible pain, lost in the fourth round. Alcaraz became the favorite to win, but his path was laborious. In the fourth round, he played the veteran Marin Čilić, who had won the tournament eight years before, and dragged the wunderkind into a five-set slog that lasted three hours and 53 minutes. Alcaraz won to secure his place in the quarterfinal against Jannik Sinner — the futurist epic that I stupidly missed.
Alcaraz and Sinner were the No. 3 and No. 11 seeds, respectively. A fan coming to this match with fresh eyes would have seen that their gifts overlapped quite a bit. They had the finest groundstrokes of their age cohort, all precision and heavy spin, concussive power even when reaching for a faraway ball. But there were also some key differences. Alcaraz was superior in foot speed and vertical leap, and his shot selection skewed far spicier, thanks in part to his softer hands. Sinner had a longer wingspan, once-in-a-generation timing that produced outlandish power with minimal energy expenditure, and a sturdier backhand.
They also shared one conspicuous flaw. The staple skill at the top of the men’s tour is a consistent serve that earns low-effort points, because the returner struggles to put it back into play. For both players, the serve was a weakness that needed to be refined in the future; for the viewers, it was a boon to entertainment, because the points landed in neutral territory, where both players had to get creative to earn an advantage in the rally.
Their lack was our gain.
To lay out every intricacy of the match would require its own book. Every surface of it was embedded with little experiments, regrets, and triumphs. Alcaraz toyed with an unconventional wide position on serve, which opened up an even more extreme angle for him; Sinner began slinging those returns down-the-line. One such return won Sinner the second set and left Alcaraz standing motionless. Sinner won every single point in the third-set tiebreak and led early in the fourth set. But he also blew a match point on his own serve late in that set, when Alcaraz began to play the high-pressure rallies with more clarity.
Sinner led again early in the fifth set, only for Alcaraz to break back and high-five some courtside fans. He was developing a taste for crowd work; Sinner kept to himself. For both players there were discrete moments when victory seemed inevitable. But the win belonged solely to Alcaraz. The head-to-head had been leveled at 2-2.
After the match, Sinner remembered the crosscourt backhand he’d hit on match point, barely wide, thinking that if he’d kept it inside the court, he could have advanced to the semifinal instead of Alcaraz. But he said he had to “cancel” these ruminations so as not to get fixated on past mistakes. Though he’d lost, Sinner accomplished something
more abstract with this match. He killed off any illusion that Alcaraz would rule the next era of tennis alone. Sinner had been just one ball away from beating Alcaraz in three straight matches on three different surfaces in 2022. In the early days, when sample size is small, rivalries are mutable, and the narratives shapeshift with every match. Or even
with a single shot, missed by inches.
While Sinner was hung up on one particular shot he’d missed, Alcaraz was surely delighted by one particular shot he’d made, a highlight wild enough to turn tennis agnostics into converts. He was returning serve. Sinner’s serve yanked him out to the left corner of the court. Alcaraz blocked the ball back and recovered to the middle. From there, he had to guess where Sinner was going to strike next, and he started moving toward the right corner. But he’d guessed wrong. Instead Sinner had put the ball clean down the center of the court, and Alcaraz was about to run past the ball. There was no solution for this puzzle.
Except, of course, the absurdist solution: leaping straight into the air, wrapping the racquet behind his torso, and flicking the ball back over the net. This wasn’t just a desperation behind-the-back shot that barely burbled over the net; it was an aggressive passing shot that genuinely threatened Sinner. Alcaraz won the point. His coach (Juan Carlos) Ferrero shook his head and clapped, joining the rest of the crowd in a state of disbelief.
Many matches that stretch to five sets are hailed as classics, but closer inspection reveals their lulls and impurities. The thrilling fifth-set tiebreak gets enshrined in popular memory, and everyone politely forgets the third-set dud. This one, though, was euphoric from first ball to last. It was a match so good that fellow pro Coco Gauff tweeted that she had an early morning plane to catch, but refused to sleep and miss any of it. At the end it was a five-hour-and-15 minute odyssey. For the second match in a row, Alcaraz was on court past two a.m., playing for a thinned-out audience of diehards who were allowed to clamber down to the money seats, rewarded for their patience with a better view of tennis’s future.
Rueful on my sofa, I resolved never to miss another match between these two if I was within a 500-mile radius.
Excerpted from Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis. Copyright © 2025 Giri Nathan. Published by Gallery Books, an Imprint of Simon & Schuster, LLC. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
(Top photo: Corinne Dubreuil / Abaca via Associated Press)