Mind the Gap: On Giri Nathan’s “Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis”

---

Maybe it’s best to start with absence. The Canadian Open is hosted in Toronto and Montreal two weeks after Wimbledon and one month before the US Open. Men and women play in different cities, swapping between the two every year. The tournament’s placement within the schedule makes it prone to withdrawals from both the men and women’s sides, as players prioritize rest and recovery in between Grand Slams. This is becoming a proliferative occurrence as the ATP and WTA tour seasons becomes longer and more arduous with players having to play in longer tournaments (many ATP Masters 1000 tournaments have been bloated from 10 days to a Grand Slam’s fortnight) and in more tournaments generally; the gruelling ATP schedule competes with the behest upon players to serve various international tennis communities with their presence. The Canadian Open receiving the short end of the stick thusly has annoyed Canadians in the passive way typical of our ilk: disgruntled but ultimately unaffected. To say that the competition isn’t as stiff at the Canadian Open as the other ATP Masters 1000 tournaments on tour is difficult and perhaps even wrong, and yet walking through the stadium from the washroom back to my seat this past August, as I passed colonnades plastered with photos of recent winners hoisting their trophies, I couldn’t help but notice something strange: for four out of the last five men’s champions (2025 inclusive) their Canadian Open win was their first—and for three of them it is their only—Masters 1000 title (for those same three, it is their biggest title to date). This year, over a quarter of the ATP Top 20 pulled out, including Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz, and Novak Djokovic, the latter of whom hasn’t participated in the tournament since 2018 when he was ousted in the third round by eventual finalist Stefanos Tsitsipas. 

Without the world numbers 1 and 2 in the draw, this year’s Canadian Open (formally called the National Bank Open) had a more muted atmosphere than its go-around here in 2023.¹ In their absence, the field was more open than any major or Masters 1000 tournament in the last two years with the exception of Rome in 2024 and Madrid in 2025 (the only such tournament in which neither Sinner nor Alcaraz participated). This isn’t to say that there wasn’t any good tennis being played, nor does it take away from the very real feat of winning a Masters 1000 tournament. The remaining players slogged it out in the oppressive heat; at Centre Court the concrete stadium has its own micro-climate, both spectators and players alike bask in full sun all day, and the building’s high walls squander any chance of catching a breeze. There’s a ridiculousness that permeates each match as linesmen and ball kids alike scramble across the green and blue Har-Tru courts donning contrasting Psycho Bunny kits with the brand’s name emblazoned on the back.²

In the throes of this often surreal environment, where commerce intermingles in such obvious ways with these avatars of grace and beauty, it doesn’t take much for the mind to wander into hypothetical territory. Both Alcaraz and Sinner have lopsided head-to-heads against nearly each of the quarterfinalists in their favour. Having even just one of them participating lends itself to foregone conclusions of victory. This sort of defeatist attitude is now commonplace for even the most casual watchers of tennis; I can’t imagine what it’s like being a player up against the pair of them. During Wimbledon, Goran Ivanišević, Novak Djokovic’s ex-coach and himself a Wimbledon champion, eviscerated the ATP pool: “It’s actually a bit sad — they all work hard, but they’re light years behind Alcaraz and Sinner.” This was all the more apparent at the Canadian Open. Sinner and Alcaraz play exalted tennis; what we witnessed this year was fallible. Giri Nathan’s Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis attempts to reconcile this divide and define what sets Sinner and Alcaraz apart. 

I will admit that my first reaction to Nathan’s book was healthy skepticism. An attempt to concretize an era still in motion, to pin down players who have yet to cement their legacies seemed not just futile but ill-advised. Having now read the book, I can confirm that this is not what Nathan is trying to accomplish at all. Changeover focuses solely on documenting the 2024 season. “Tennis is a terminally nostalgic sport, always trying to make sense of its future by using its past,” Nathan writes.³ His goal with Changeover is to clarify the present. He has little interest in or use for comparing Sinner and Alcaraz to the Big Three of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic before them—sure, they are useful points of reference, but it does a disservice to all parties involved. The relationships between the Next Two and the Big Three are not one-to-one. Active players are usually classified in such simple terms, but as Nathan writes, “Anyone who’s 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.” Instead, Nathan uses Sinner and Alcaraz’s ascendance to deliver a treatise on the current state of men’s tennis, and an indictment against the slow decimation of sports media.

Changeover picks up where this story should start: the Sinner/Alcaraz quarterfinal match at the 2022 US Open.⁴ In their complimentary Nike kits, the two battled for over five hours in what was by far the most compelling match of the tournament, with Alcaraz prevailing in five sets just before 3 AM. We skip quickly through the 2023 season and on to 2024, where Sinner and Alcaraz’s rivalry became the story of the season.

My knowledge of how to play tennis is pretty limited to a decent forehand, an inconsistent backhand, and a very bad serve, and I’d imagine that for most people who watch tennis from the bird’s eye vantage point of a television broadcast it is easy to see that Ivanišević is right—Sinner and Alcaraz are lightyears ahead of the rest—without really knowing why. I watch a fair bit of tennis—I’ll have it on most days, especially when they’re in Europe or Asia when I can start as soon as I wake up—but I’m unable to pinpoint the microshifts in a player’s game the way Nathan does. Take the way he describes Alcaraz chasing down a lob from Daniil Medvedev during the 2024 Indian Wells final. “While scurrying back, he switched his grip as if to hit a forehand, which would have been impossible to do from that position—but he instead used the wrong face of the racquet and a nimble flick of the wrist to scoop the ball back into play.” Tennis has yet to be plagued by the analytics obsessives; of course, ludicrous stats abound, but since tennis is a game of inches, it’s more difficult to quantify than say, basketball, where it seems like every on-court decision is up for evaluation, contradiction, and re-evaluation. 

In the NBA “league parity” has become a hyper-fixation for pundits and fans alike; it is commissioner Adam Silver’s great experiment which has finally come to fruition with phenomenal returns. Look no further than the 2025 NBA Finals where the Oklahoma City Thunder prevailed over the Indiana Pacers in seven games, two small market Midwestern teams composed of young cores and a single star each, unlike the superteams that had become expectation if not the norm in the decade prior.⁵ Basketball is a team sport where assets such as robust defense and effective benchplayers can support raw talent, and can be distributed somewhat evenly throughout the league (my apologies to fans of the Brooklyn Nets). Tennis has no such comparison. It is impossible to trade or draft yourself into better standing. It is an isolating sport, and often incriminating—there’s nowhere to hide. Flaws are laid bare—if your serve is ass, you will double fault—but a player’s strengths are sometimes more deceptive. This is where Nathan’s close reading of matches proves invaluable. 

Nathan understands the cinema of tennis, with its psychological tension and narrative arcs; he treats the sport with the reverence it deserves. This quality is two-fold. First, on a purely sentence level, Nathan’s prose is scintillating. There were a handful of times while he was describing a particularly pivotal point that I was moved to tears. In David Foster Wallace’s essay “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”, he laments the flatness with which Austin and her ghostwriter depict the game in her celebrity memoir. It’s a lot of simple sentences, facts stripped of beauty.⁶ Changeover is the exact opposite of this. Here is Nathan on a single point during the Indian Wells 2024 semi-final match between Sinner and Alcaraz: “Alcaraz, caught running the wrong way, corrected course, skidding into a last-ditch effort, but as Sinner jogged to retrieve that ball, I could already see his full-tooth grin, his pace slackening as he recognized it was sailing out. Alcaraz was smiling too, waving a sarcastic hand, as if to dismiss the miracles his rival had just performed. He still held on to the game, punctuating it with an unreturnable 131-mph serve and a yelp of “yeh!” As the tennis ascended into madness, the crowd responded with the same. Someone a few sections over from me offered the performers a real-time review: “Y’all are doing a great job.” And they were.”

Changeover is rife with sections like this, where not only is it just plain good writing, but we understand these players better, how they operate on the court and off. What struck me is how Nathans positions Sinner and Alcaraz as two individuals whose fates are almost cosmically intertwined; they are each other’s destinies. During their first professional battle at the 2021 Paris Open after Alcaraz beat Sinner in straight sets: “Sinner leaned over to the victor, patted him on the shoulder, and said, ‘I hope we play some more.’” There’s no way Sinner could have known that his wish will be granted many times over, but it’s a slick, prescient moment when placed in their trajectories. Having played each other 15 times now, with their 2024 French Open and Wimbledon finals matches already established as blockbuster classics, I’m reminded of a sentence from John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, which details the semi-final match played by childhood friends Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner at the 1968 US Open from start to finish. “A tight, close match unmarred by error and representative of each player’s game at its highest level will be primarily a psychological struggle, particularly when the players are so familiar with each other that there can be no technical surprises.” Sinner and Alcaraz’s rivalry lacks the animosity of their predecessors but it still has weight as we’ve come to understand that they not just respect each other, they actually like each other. What makes films like Challengers  (and to be honest, what makes any great film) so compelling is that we have these distinct characters to root for or against; their relationships have an inherent conflict that betrays their off-court camaraderie.

The one thing Changeover lacks is disclosure. Apart from snippets from press conferences and moments on tour equivalent to stolen glances in a love affair, Sinner and Alcaraz’s voices are largely absent. As if anticipating this reflexive criticism, Nathan slyly addresses this concern in his chapter dedicated to Daniil Medvedev. Trapped between eras Medvedev is the only player born in the 90s (other than Domenic Thiem, who everyone always forgets about, even me writing this review!) to win a Grand Slam, and continues to be an anomaly on tour, not only with the way he’s adapted his game to his rangy physique, but also in his introspection. Known as a memelord on tour, Medvedev’s off-court persona is honest (but still very funny), and in responding to questions from journalists he eschews clichés typical of athletes at his level to deliver true insight. Alcaraz and Sinner do not share this quality; both are prone to giving the same rote answers multiple tournaments over. As noted by Wallace in his Tracy Austin piece, “It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.” Hence, the question of their involvement dissipates. And even if Nathan wanted to speak with them, one wonders if he’d be granted the chance. “Tournaments have whittled away the zones where players and writers could commingle. Storytelling is consolidated in the hands of the players. Sports media is dead; most of what’s left is window dressing for online sports gambling firms,” Nathan writes.

In the carcass of what used to consist of sports media, tennis seems to be particularly affected. In 2016, the Library of America published a collection of David Foster Wallace’s essays on tennis called String Theory. His piece on Tracy Austin’s memoir inclusive, there’s also a lengthy profile of Michael Joyce. The Joyce essay is interesting less because of Joyce himself (while reaching an incredibly impressive world singles ranking of 64, he was generally a cut or two below the elite and later found success coaching Maria Sharapova to a world no. 1 ranking and 3 Grand Slam singles’ titles, has worked with Jessica Pegula and most recently Ashlyn Krueger), more because of the total access that a fiction writer like Foster Wallace could get to a non-blue chip caliber player. Now, attention is allocated to the loudest voices, opportunists who go after their ex’s new boyfriend or amateurs who loudly proclaim themselves as “Anti-establishment” in their Twitter bio. They trade in slimy and intellectually-barren punditry for clicks and likes; meanwhile access for legitimate journalists continues to be not just limited but increasingly rare. The problem with this is that, as Foster Wallace writes in his essay about Federer, “…TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.” Writers like Nathan bridge that gap. We need a translator to take the two-dimensional and give it life.

Nathan is an active participant in this history. Though he’s not on court, he’s in the press box and in conferences and seated behind the players’ teams during matches. He presents himself as a journeyman reporter, not in the sense that we get records of his meals or the various hotels in which he stays, but in providing glimpses of life on tour, the veil between the narrative players present to us and reality breaks, if ever so briefly. But the most telling of these instances lies in Nathan running into Sinner’s team at the Cincinnati airport the day the news dropped that Sinner had violated the ITIA’s anti-doping policies. After failing a drug test over what Sinner’s team claimed was an accidental contamination from an ointment rubbed into his skin by an errant physiotherapist who had neglected to catch that said ointment contained a banned substance, Sinner and co. underwent a quiet legal battle that not a single member of the press was aware of until the news became official. “No journalist had managed to break the story that had been simmering undetected for four months, but also, there weren’t all that many journalists in the sport anymore,” Nathan notes.

Sinner’s just won the 2024 Cincinnati Open, and is celebrating at the airport’s Italian restaurant with his team when Nathan sidles up to them to offer his congratulations. He notes their order—and Sinner’s celebratory Coke Zero—and then continues to observe from a distance as both parties are on the same plane to New York City for the US Open. Unbeknownst to Sinner, he was about to enter the most turbulent time of his career thus far: he’d win the US Open and 2025 Australian Open in succession, earn his world number 1 ranking, but also develop a profound loneliness. Sinner boards with the plebs, though he sits in the first row. The image Nathan conjures of Sinner pushing the cart carrying his team’s bags as the rest trail far behind him is fitting for the story he tells. 

The 2025 Cincinnati Open final was held on a Monday (again, the bloated Masters 1000 schedules), and I met with a friend to grab a beer and watch (and ostensibly tinker at this review, which I did not do). Another Sincaraz final, the Internet bemoaned. Maybe they complained loud enough, because Sinner retired after 23 minutes, citing illness. Being on a patio in the middle of the day, the TV’s sound was off, so my friend and I were left deciphering the silent screen in confusion. First, Sinner sat at his end. The glare from the sun obscured the expression on his face. We knew it was over when his Nike wristbands came off, crumpling upon their release. Soon, Alcaraz rushes over to him, his hand resting gently on Sinner’s shoulder. Later, after they accepted their trophies as champion and runner-up, Alcaraz sat for his post-match interview. When asked about how he knew that Sinner wasn’t feeling well, he said, “I know him pretty well, I’ve been battling against him for the last two years. I know his style, his game, how he can play. So after the third game, he was missing more than often, he was more aggressive than he used to be, so I knew that something’s happened.” 

The fear on the patio, as well as online, was how this would impact the upcoming US Open, held a mere seven days after Cincinnati. Would Sinner be able to compete? Would Alcaraz cakewalk to his third Grand Slam victory of the year? We worried for nothing. The first week passed with its customary slew of upsets and easy victories; Sinner and Alcaraz handily defeated each of their opponents in quick succession. A feeling of inevitability set in as the second week of the US Open bore on in the same fashion, with Alcaraz treating even Novak Djokovic, who in the sunset of his career has caused problems for both him and Sinner on big stages, as though the 24-time Grand Slam champion is a lowly first rounder just lucky enough to be sharing the court at Arthur Ashe with him at all. When Sinner and Alcaraz met in the final, facing each other for the fifteenth time in four years, the complaints were even louder than Cincinnati. As Alcaraz and Sinner become the faces of the tour at the expense of everyone else, players and fans alike question whether this level of dominance is good for the sport.

In the prologue of Changeover, Nathan chides himself for watching Sinner and Alcaraz’s breakthrough semi-final match at the 2022 US Open from his couch rather than from the stadium. He’d skipped out for a brief reprieve of covering the humid Slam from the stands; what he thought was a well-deserved break ended up being a massive regret, and he dedicates Changeover to this mistake as “penance”. In watching the match, Nathan was exhilarated but also found himself strangely at peace. “I no longer feared the future, just my obsolescence in it. It was a smothering counterexample to anyone fussing about what tennis could be even after the old gods faded away. New gods take their place.” The same can be said about Nathan. Marketing has subsumed journalism, and people are rightfully concerned about what we will lose in the face of such purposeful annihilation. I hope that Changeover is not merely an aberration in the midst of the chaos.

1. Since the men and women switch cities every other year, by the basic principles of misogyny and bad marketing on the part of the Women’s Tennis Association, the men attract more attendants and achieve a greater fever pitch than the women. ↩︎
2. As a silver-tier sponsor, Psycho Bunny has its own merch stand near the entrance where eager and probably underpaid employees hand out thick cardstock instructions for a scavenger hunt where the prize is a 15% coupon. I have threatened to buy my sartorially conservative father one of the Psycho Bunny ballkid polos for his birthday. ↩︎
3. The past Nathan refers to is segmented into eras defined by sets of players: John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg; Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras; Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. Tennis will not only compare the greats against one another, but also the groups of competitors against whom these greats compete against (e.g., are the players that Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic beat better than the players Sinner and Alcaraz are beating now?). ↩︎
4. For full transparency, this is where my interest in tennis also starts. Barring a one-year stint being coached by Denis Shapovalov’s mother at the country club down the street from my childhood home, tennis remained largely as another failed venture of my parents’ to get me into sports. The 2022 US Open coincided with a very strange time in my life: I was working from home at a job I did not enjoy. (I quit earlier this year, right before Wimbledon, and I joked to my manager that I did so to have more time to watch tennis.) I must have put on a match during the day as background noise to the bullshit Excel work I was tasked with. I remember being struck by an unusual bout of insomnia, and stayed up late a few nights in a row to watch matches far past midnight on my phone in bed. All for a sport I couldn’t have cared less about a few days prior. The one thing I do remember is my excitement for the Sinner/Alcaraz match. I spent the hours leading up to the coin toss stalking through the kitchen and living room exclaiming, “He’s the only one who’s been putting up a fight against Alcaraz!” Again: I knew nothing about professional tennis in any meaningful capacity (and was probably just parrotting some broadcaster), but it was already clear to me what their meeting meant to the future of the sport. ↩︎
5. Game 7 had the best ratings in 6 years (when my beloved Toronto Raptors won the Larry O’Brien trophy). ↩︎
6. It’s kind of like watching Sascha Zverev play. I can’t in good conscience recommend witnessing (either in person or on TV) Zverev slap the ball with his racquet in long, soul-sucking rallies that look more like warm-ups with a hired hitter than a legitimate match, but if you want to know what uninspired tennis looks like, he’s the platonic ideal. When naive people complain to me about how boring they find tennis, just a ball being slugged back and forth in a rectangle painted with arbitrary lines, I can’t fault them if this is all they’ve been exposed to. He is lucky to be six and half feet tall, otherwise not sure how much success he’d find on tour, given his lack of both mental fortitude and general creativity. ↩︎