For nearly two decades, the men’s tennis game was dominated by Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. Only one of those guys is still around, and he can still consistently outperform every other player on tour—except when it comes to the creativity and athleticism of Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz and the precision and strength of Italian Jannik Sinner. Their rise has reshaped the tour’s landscape so dramatically that the sport now belongs to them, and likely will for many years to come.
Giri Nathan brilliantly captures this transitional moment in the sport in his new book Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis. Long considered one of the best writers covering tennis, Nathan spent all of 2024 chasing Alcaraz and Sinner across the world to understand how these two players had so quickly pushed out the old generation while emerging on top of their own. But more than the duo at the center of the book, Changeover is also a document of the agonies and ecstasies of tennis, an excavation of the sport itself.
GQ talked to Nathan about the following Alcaraz and Sinner around for a year, the binary of their brilliance, and who will win the U.S. Open on Sunday.
GQ: You spent 2024 watching as many Carlos Alcaraz/Jannik Sinner matches in person as possible. How many people on Earth do you think have seen more Alcaraz/Sinner matches than you?
Giri Nathan: I know that the stan communities are really robust so I don’t wanna go out on a limb and say I’m the preeminent expert on these two. But I have rewatched a lot of them and I’ve rewatched all of their early matches—one really good one I watched is the 2021 match they played in Paris and then the banger was the 2022 U.S. quarterfinal. But I have to be in the top 10 people on Earth, in terms of how often I’ve watched this stuff.
How early did you know that this would be the next great rivalry. You must’ve had to make a bet with the book, since books take a long time to come out.
With Alcaraz it almost wasn’t a bet because he broke out so early. He was a classic prodigy—he won his first major at 19 years old, in an era where teenage winners basically don’t happen anymore. I just think the game is too physically demanding, so that anomaly really stood out. I felt pretty secure in that half of it.
The bigger bet was probably Sinner. I was just so confident in his ball-striking ability, and I was waiting for the stamina and the conditioning and the physical stuff to come around. And it was starting to at the end of 2023. That’s when he logged some big wins over [Daniil] Medvedev and Djokovic and Alcaraz and it was all coming together for him then. So that’s when the book started going into motion. The bet paid off spectacularly.
I mean, you were right. They’ve won every Slam this year.
Honestly I could not take credit for it in an intellectually honest way. I knew they were gonna be really good, I just didn’t think it would be so abrupt this year.
You’re always trying to see as much tennis in person as possible. Are there things you can see in a live match that you don’t pick up from TV?
With Sinner in particular, if you can hear the sound of his racquet hitting the ball, it’s pretty preposterous. I’ve heard some fans find him kind of uncharismatic on TV, watching his matches, but I think if you do get to see him move and hear him hit the ball live, it’s arresting and hypnotic and enjoyable.
But the main thing I feel like I’m seeing is the trajectory of the ball a lot easier if you’re at court level, which exposes some of the subtler things the players are doing. Like, sometimes there’s underspin or sidespin on shots that you wouldn’t expect. And you can see just the variety the players are mixing in. Two forehands that look the same on TV from that POV might look totally different if you’re seated right behind the player. It’s just kind of a higher fidelity viewing experience. For the natural surfaces, you can pick up irregularities—the slipperiness on grass, divots in the clay—that you can’t see on TV. Plus all the little body language stuff that maybe the cameras don’t catch.
I know people who cover football—they go to the game, but if they wanna write about it, they need to go back and watch it on TV later. Do you ever feel like there are things in the broadcast you need?
Definitely. Sometimes the TV crew might pick up some of the muttering or the exchanges that I couldn’t get from my vantage point, so I’ll go and watch that. The truth is the game is moving so fast. There is a point that I described in the book where Alcaraz changes his grip in a way that I have never seen before to hit a shot from an angle I never seen before—and I had to rewatch it four times at quarter-speed to even be able to describe what he did on a technical level. Slo-mo replays were really useful to me when I was writing and to make sure I was describing things accurately.
I feel like a Sinner is ideal to watch on the court, whereas Alcaraz is ideal to watch as a highlight reel on TikTok.
For sure, Alcaraz was made for the phone. And that’s a theory that I advanced not that subtly in the book: I don’t think it’s an accident that he plays the way he does and that he was the first generation of pro athletes watching highlights as the basic unit of sports consumption. I really think it’s in the back of his head when he’s on the court and thinking: I could do some really cool shit right here.
We’re also in this era where athletes are tortured by having you do social video. There are endless clips where players are asked the most inane questions so tournaments can have content to publish. Sinner is rarely in them, but Alcaraz is in a lot of them for how famous he is.
He makes himself pretty available for that stuff. I think the influencer side of being a pro tennis player in 2025 comes pretty naturally to him. In the course of the book, I get to observe him a couple times in environments where a lot of players would just be totally over it. I saw him at a sponsor party, where usually players just walk in and walk out to fulfill their obligations. But Alcaraz was actually hamming it up and taking dozens of selfies. He was going beyond the call of duty, I would say, and I think he enjoys it.
Did you expect 2025 to shape up so similarly to 2024, especially after the repeat of Sinner winning Australia and Alcaraz winning the French?
Just the fact that they were so dominant and other players didn’t seem to be closing the gap over the course of 2024 when I was writing the book, I thought it very well could play out again in 2025. Especially Djokovic, who had been right there, he was only going to get older. As it turned out, he’s still really good and has made it to every semifinal so far this year. But he got hurt in Australia and then was executed by Sinner on clay and grass.
