{"id":116300,"date":"2025-09-03T18:31:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-03T18:31:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/116300\/"},"modified":"2025-09-03T18:31:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-03T18:31:08","slug":"giri-nathan-13-captures-a-new-tennis-rivalry-in-changeover","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/116300\/","title":{"rendered":"Giri Nathan \u201913 Captures a New Tennis Rivalry in \u2018Changeover\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

On a recent evening at the U.S. Open, tennis fans filtered out of the nearby Queens subway station and made their way down the hot, wooden boardwalk toward Arthur Ashe Stadium. There, they met an unusual sight. Next to a folding table piled high with books, Giri Nathan \u201913 posed for photos, chatting easily with passersby about\u00a0Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men\u2019s Tennis<\/a>, an exploration of the developing rivalry between tennis players Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz.<\/p>\n

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This nontraditional marketing strategy at the tournament, which continues through mid-September, was inspired by Nathan\u2019s memories of attending as a child. \u201cI just had such a vivid memory of that boardwalk, this splintery, rickety boardwalk,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd it was so tied up with my memory of the U.S. Open over the years, I just thought that would be a cool place to try to promote the book.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nathan, who wrote for Deadspin before co-founding his own sports publication, Defector Media, five years ago, got the idea for his book from watching the now-legendary 2022 U.S. Open quarterfinals match between Sinner and Alcaraz. \u201cThe absurd athleticism and shotmaking they were showing in that match looked very unlike anything I was seeing between any other pair of players on the tour,\u201d Nathan says. From that moment forward, he began following their careers more closely, gathering any information he could, slowly building the story that would become Changeover.<\/p>\n

While promoting his book on the boardwalk, Nathan met several people who thought it was \u201ctoo early\u201d for a book about this particular tennis rivalry. The previous rivalry that dominated the sport involved players so monumental they\u2019ve come to be known as the \u201cBig Three\u201d: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. But as their decades-long reign comes to an end, Nathan argues in Changeover, Sinner and Alcaraz have proven themselves more than worthy successors.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s more, Nathan sees value in writing at the start of a rivalry rather than waiting for its conclusion. \u201cI think sports books tend to capture an era at its end,\u201d Nathan says. \u201cAnd there\u2019s actually a lot of excitement and uncertainty and awkwardness and goofiness about the beginning of a player\u2019s career.\u201d<\/p>\n

At Princeton, Nathan took writing professor John McPhee \u201953\u2019s popular creative nonfiction class. Nathan refers to McPhee\u2019s Levels of the Game, about the tension between erstwhile tennis stars Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, as the \u201cclassic book about a tennis rivalry.\u201d Nathan himself was drawn into tennis writing for its potential for character studies. \u201cWhile they\u2019re playing tennis, [players] are totally exposed. They\u2019re not wearing helmets or pads or anything,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s a very open and vulnerable spectacle.\u201d<\/p>\n

Vulnerability and playfulness are at the heart of Changeover. Over his years as a tennis writer, Nathan observed players both on and off the court and discovered a strange split between the public perception of them and their true personalities. \u201cI think a lot of fans, when you\u2019re just watching on TV, you get this shallow narrative about a player,\u201d Nathan says. He wanted to capture \u201cmore well-rounded, human portraits\u201d of these tennis superstars.<\/p>\n

This interest in human connection was another reason for Nathan\u2019s \u201charebrained scheme,\u201d as he puts it, to sell books on the U.S. Open boardwalk. \u201cIt can be very lonely to be a writer and not have that human interaction with people who are reading your work,\u201d he says. \u201cI thought it would be cool to have a more IRL, real life kind of interaction with readers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite some interactions with skeptics, Nathan found the experience wholly satisfying. \u201cI would do that again in a heartbeat,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"On a recent evening at the U.S. Open, tennis fans filtered out of the nearby Queens subway station…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116301,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[565],"tags":[64,63,85,747],"class_list":{"0":"post-116300","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116300","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116300"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116300\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}