Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men's Tennis
Autor Giri Nathanen Limba Engleză Hardback – 11 sep 2025
* A BLOOMBERG 10 BEST BOOKS OF SUMMER 2025 *
The story of Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner, and their epic new rivalry, as told by "the best tennis writer in America" (Brian Phillips, The Ringer).
For more than two decades, Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer dominated men’s tennis so thoroughly that it became difficult to imagine how the game would keep its shine once they retired.
Then came 2024—the first year since 2002 that none of them won a Grand Slam tournament—and a technicolor future was revealed. The major titles were divided between a pair of prodigies in their early twenties: the effervescent showman Carlos Alcaraz, whose infinite variety of shots won him the French Open and Wimbledon; and the relentlessly cool Jannik Sinner, whose power and precision secured him the Australian Open and US Open even amid a doping controversy. Though other young contenders jostled for the spotlight, and Djokovic tried to hold his ground, the transcendentally gifted Alcaraz and Sinner just kept installing their new regime.
Punctuated with humor, brimming with insight, and rooted in a true fan’s love of the game, this work of elevated sports journalism is a captivating primer to the rivalry poised to define the next decade of the sport.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9781668076248
ISBN-10: 1668076241
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Gallery Books
Colecția Gallery Books
ISBN-10: 1668076241
Pagini: 272
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 20 mm
Greutate: 0.43 kg
Editura: Gallery Books
Colecția Gallery Books
Notă biografică
Giri Nathan is a staff writer and cofounder at Defector Media. His writing has appeared in New York magazine, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New York Times, National Geographic, The New Yorker, and The Believer. He is the senior correspondent at tennis outlet The Second Serve. In 2022, he received the Tom Perrotta Prize for Tennis Journalism. His work was selected for the 2025 editions of The Year’s Best Sports Writing and The Best American Food and Travel Writing. Follow him on X @GiriNathan for his latest stories.
Extras
Chapter 1: EmpiresCHAPTER 1 Empires
In the beginning, there was Roger Federer.
He was lean and composed, and seemed never to sweat. His feet moved over the court as do the feet of a water bug on the surface of a pond. His style was arty and aggressive. He always struck the ball a fraction of a second earlier than I expected. As a viewer, I was constantly taken aback by this, like a clap that landed just ahead of the beat, over and over. His opponents had no time to appreciate this quality, because the ball had already arrived at their feet. Many fans enjoyed seeing a hard game made to look so easy. But even Roger, at the outset of his career, was not yet so interested in toil. “Grit,” as he’d later describe it, was something he had to learn. So he did. By his early twenties, the man from Switzerland was dominating the professional tour in a way few ever had. Ponytailed for a while, then with floppy locks tucked into a headband. Somewhat supercilious, keenly aware of his distance from the rest of the pack, Roger was aloft on his own cloud. He was the first one at the party.
Next to arrive was Rafael Nadal.
A strange chimera, who seemed ancient, yet terribly modern. Feral, but also quite polite. Long hair, long shorts, no sleeves, big muscles. He applied spin to the ball with a fury not yet seen. His shots sailed high over the net and plunged back to earth with urgency. He was also curiously damp. On the island of Mallorca, the lefty Rafa was raised on clay, one of three main surfaces on which tennis is played, and he ruled it from the moment he set foot on tour. Tennis players are oddly fond of the term “fighting spirit,” and Rafa was its living embodiment, a man who did not grasp surrender. Though he seemed impossibly full of life, he also grappled with injuries all over his body, causing many to question his longevity, which, in the end, would be no problem at all. He and Roger played indelible epics. Nadal unwound Federer’s poise and forced the Swiss to evolve beyond his instinctive style. For a while it seemed it would be just these two, locked in permanent struggle, carving one another into genius as great rivals do.
Maybe it would have been so if not for Novak Djokovic.
To call him “limber” was too mild. He seemed to be composed of something other than flesh, some taffy-like substance that let him elongate and coil his body into confounding positions. He had short-cropped hair and close-set eyes that would widen as if in terror when he was about to return serve, which he did better than anyone ever had. His genius was less showy than the others, more attritional, but just as keen. And where the other two had grown up well-off in western Europe, he had emerged from Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars. His path to the high life of pro tennis had been more perilous. A wall he used to hit tennis balls against as a child had been struck by NATO bombs. He spoke of his family’s experience with loan sharks. Early on, he would wilt in long or hot matches, which was funny in retrospect, because raw stamina became a defining trait. He liked to do silly impressions of his peers, eager to perturb the sport’s sterile atmosphere. Sometimes he sparred with crowds. In time he relished his role as interloper. With his talent as crowbar, he pried his way into the Roger-Rafa duopoly. Where there had been one rivalry, now there were three, each of them distinct.
After him came—well, no one. For two decades, aside from the occasional guest stopping by for a cocktail and then getting shooed away, it would be just the three of them at the party, and a lot of people banging at the door.
The professional tennis tour runs all year long, across dozens of tournaments. The most important are the four majors. If you’ve heard of any, you’ve heard of these: the Australian Open, Roland-Garros (colloquially, the French Open), Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. At the outset of each tournament, there are 128 players. Two weeks later, there is only one champion, who has won seven consecutive matches. A victory pays a few million dollars, assures a place in history, and improves or reaffirms a player’s ranking. At any given time, a tennis player knows precisely where he ranks among his peers. He lives every day in a bare hierarchy that anyone can look up. Winning a match rewards a player with “ranking points.” To get a sense of the relative importance of the tournaments, all you need to do is look at the points. A major is worth 2000 points. Beneath those are the Masters 1000 tournaments, which are unsurprisingly worth 1000 points. Beneath those, 500-level tournaments, then 250-level tournaments. You can imagine this as the pyramid that makes up the top professional division of men’s tennis, also known as the ATP Tour. Beneath it are lower levels of competition—the Challenger Tour, Futures—that can be thought of as the minor leagues.
Perhaps I have given you an emotionally impoverished version of the story. No child drifts to sleep thinking of winning 2000 ranking points—they dream of winning a major. These four tournaments are the stuff of legacy, the currency in tedious debates about who is better than whom. For some fans, the simplest shorthand for a player’s historic significance is the number of majors they won. There are many, many worthy feats in tennis outside of winning those tournaments, but in the popular imagination, and to hear many players tell it themselves, these four are untouchable. If given a chance, a player would trade any number of smaller trophies for just one of them. The exchange rate is infinite.
The tennis major is one of the hardest feats to pull off in contemporary sport. Winning seven best-of-five-set tennis matches is a profound physical and psychic ordeal, a truth that has only deepened as the sport’s athletic demands have increased. To win those matches requires an alignment of circumstances: the tactical know-how to adapt to seven different opponents, the ability to recover from the wear-and-tear of each match, the mental acuity to play each point in isolation without getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the whole task. I have always thought about a major as a marathon run while engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
For roughly two decades, from 2004 to 2023, Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic won almost all the majors. As a result, they came to be known as a collective unit—the Big Three—like some cabal conspiring to hoard all the joy and prestige for themselves. It is not as though they were the only good tennis players born between the years 1981 and 1987. They had brilliant peers, players who would have won a major or two in other eras but had the blunt misfortune of being born at the same time as the three best ever to play. In any attempt to win a major, inevitably, a player would have to muscle their way past one member of the Big Three. Sometimes they’d beat one of them only to be evicted by another. Tomáš Berdych, the flinty, powerful Czech, once beat two of them in a row only to be eliminated by the third in the Wimbledon final. It was too much to ask of any one mortal.
Perhaps the most poignant way to understand the Big Three was to see the optimism steadily squeezed out of their contemporaries, as if by a juicer, a cup filled to the brim with hopes and dreams. You would hear the most extraordinary admissions of inadequacy. In pro sports, particularly individual sports, militant self-belief is a prerequisite for the job. And yet here these gifted competitors were, their confidence cracked, openly explaining to the press that their best efforts weren’t remotely enough against these three adversaries. And that was only what they were willing to say in public. Who knows what macabre doubts went stalking through their heads as they took their post-match showers or car rides to the airport.
Broadly speaking, these valiant victims of the Big Three moved through recognizable phases of career grief. First in this sequence was Persistence; all it would take was some dedicated training, some tactical adjustments, perhaps a few more twists of good fortune, and an important match may well swing his way in the future. After said match definitively did not swing in his favor, nor the one after, nor the one after that, the player might admit to Cluelessness. At this phase, they would have no particular intuition about what they could have done to win, and would feel altogether lost on the court. There could be bright flashes of Anger or Despair en route, but in time, the player arrived at Resignation. Perhaps this was the reality of playing tennis in this era, as stark and immovable as the face of a cliff, and there was nothing else to be done. At the end of this path was Enlightenment, a lovely ego death. To play a game for a living, to travel the world, to be alive at all, was a privilege—what’s that about a major?—no, he was content to sniff the freshly cut grass, kick the clay out of his shoes, and feel gratitude.
The players whose talent most closely approached the Big Three were the ones to most clearly see the chasm that still separated them. Often, these players would explain just how unpleasant their matches had been. Andy Roddick, a funny and frank American with one of history’s great serves, who actually did win the U.S. Open in 2003, shortly before the Big Three shut the door behind them, battled with Federer too many times not to see the situation clearly. Once after a defeat in 2005: “I was bringing heat, too. I was going at him, trying different things. You just have to sit back and say ‘too good’ sometimes. Hope he gets bored or something. I don’t know.” Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a barrel-chested Frenchman who looked a little like a young Muhammad Ali and had a pugilistic play style to match, was totally out of ideas in 2013, reflecting on two narrow five-set losses to Djokovic and Federer. “To be honest, I have no idea. You know, if you have some advice for me, I will take it because I don’t know.” That same year David Ferrer, a Spaniard blessed with uncommon foot speed and consistency, described the landscape dispassionately. “I am trying to do my best every match. But I know they are better than me. What can I do?” he wondered after being routed by Djokovic in an Australian Open semifinal. Five months later he would lose to Nadal in the Roland-Garros final. At season’s end he was asked if he could envision himself winning a major the next year: “No, I don’t think so.” In a work culture defined by positive visualization exercises and constant gestures of self-motivation, this was hair-raising stuff. Years later, after Tsonga had retired, he was chatting with his countryman Gaël Monfils—also shut out by the Big Three, also immensely gifted—and the two discussed why they’d been unable to win a major. “I was not good enough,” said Tsonga, and Monfils agreed.
But even if the Big Three’s direct contemporaries suffered, surely there would be a path for the next generation of players. Time was on their side, theoretically. They were younger, and this was a game premised on agility and reflexes, qualities that do not age like wine. By mid-2017, Djokovic had joined Federer and Nadal as people in their thirties. That is the decade when a player slips out of his physical prime and reckons with the cumulative damage of a life on tour. And the trio seemed, for a brief moment, vulnerable. If you squinted, you could pinpoint 2016 as a year of hope. Two members of the cabal disappeared into injury exile. Federer had taken an awkward step while giving his kids a bath. He heard a click in his left knee and wound up requiring surgery on his meniscus. Nadal, nursing pain in his left wrist, missed big chunks of the season, even withdrawing midway through his favorite tournament, Roland-Garros. Not to accuse anyone in the locker room of celebrating a competitor’s pain, but the youth saw an opening, a knife-width of light in the doorjamb.
Instead, Federer and Nadal returned the following season and split 2017’s majors, two apiece, playing the most visionary tennis of their late careers. Federer had adopted a larger racquet, which souped up his sometimes vulnerable one-handed backhand. Nadal played a near-perfect clay season. The hair on their heads had thinned out, and their first step wasn’t quite as explosive as it had been, but their self-knowledge was absolute, and they were still beating everyone on tour. It was a down year for Djokovic, who’d insisted on playing through an elbow injury that eventually required surgery. But he’d be back the next season, and as a unit, the Big Three were not budging. The story continued as it had.
The major tournament, historically a site of glimmery intrigue, became a fortnight of foregone conclusions. No matter how spirited some underdog looked at the start of a tournament, you knew, at the business end of the tournament, it would be one of three familiar faces holding the trophy. Time did not conspire in favor of youth, at least not quickly enough to rescue whole generations of players from doom. In tennis, the wealth is concentrated at the very top of the tour. And the Big Three were the first to play in an era when one could amass roughly the GDP of a small island nation, thanks to both prize money and endorsement deals. The nine-figure reward for dominating the modern game could then be applied to cutting-edge conditioning and medical care, prolonging careers beyond their assumed expiration dates. This was an emerging pattern across sports at the time—think of LeBron James or Tom Brady or Lionel Messi tearing it up well into their mid-thirties. Like them, the Big Three were scrupulous stewards of their own bodies. Federer’s style of quick, punchy points was easier on the aging physique. Nadal carefully managed his complex suite of ailments, including a congenital foot problem he’d been working around since the start of his pro career. Djokovic was a seeker, living at the frontier of forward-thinking inquiry and batty pseudoscience, which would later manifest itself in knottier ways. But his emphasis on mobility was paying off, allowing him to continue his on-court contortionism well into his silver years, and his stamina was legend.
So this trio kept winning. And the career grief, like some intergenerational trauma, was inherited by the next batch of players, too. It was no longer just the members of the Big Three’s direct age cohort, but then also the younger millennials, those born in the nineties, tasked with the same impossible labor. Among them was Grigor Dimitrov, the spry Bulgarian saddled with the nickname of “Baby Fed” due to strokes that resembled those of his frustratingly overtalented colleague. There was Kei Nishikori, the fragile but deadly sharpshooter from Japan, and Milos Raonic, the ace machine from Canada. All of them managed moments of transcendence but never fulfilled the major dream. This generation followed the last into the juicer. And then yet another generation emerged. Surely, this would be the one to break the spell?
Reader, it would not. The same words of confusion and futility from 2004 were spoken by different men 15 years later: “His game style has something that it kind of makes the other half of your brain work more than it usually does,” said Stefanos Tsitsipas, a dreamy, pseudo-philosophical Greek seen as potential heir to major titles, reflecting on a 2019 drubbing from Rafael Nadal. “I’m trying to understand, but I cannot find an explanation for that.” That same year, another top prospect, Dominic Thiem of Austria, described “the unique and also brutal thing” in the structure of his job. He had just ended Djokovic’s 26-match winning streak at the majors, only to run straight into another monster. “I beat yesterday one of the biggest legends of our game. Not even 24 hours later, I have to step on court against another amazing legend of our game, against the best clay-court player of all time.”
As a writer, I began to feel a little stupid. There was a cycle. I was exhilarated by a young prospect, who was playing tennis that appeared fresh and audacious, and who seemed hardworking and shepherded by a smart coach, and I hoped to draw attention to their cause, only to know, in the innermost chamber of my tennis conscience, that they would be slain time and again by this geriatric elite. It was a narrative conundrum. Each time I could convince myself to write the story, allowing myself to feel the frisson of novelty. But I knew that would fade. Each time I felt a little bit more like Charlie Brown approaching the football. At times, I could even be a bit ungrateful about these three great men, unfolding three of the most spectacular rivalries in the history of sport. But I wanted to see new players test them in new ways. Sometimes I just wanted to write about the new rather than the old.
We cannot advance another step without acknowledging those men who did manage to break down the door and enter the major title party. The Big Three were comprehensive, but not total. Chief among all other players was Andy Murray, the crotchety Scot who established a tier of his own. He made it to world No. 1, he beat all of them at the biggest events, and he clogged up the late stages of so many majors that the term was sometimes extended to “Big Four” to include him. He would end with three major titles. Then there was Federer’s countryman Stan Wawrinka, a rumpled late bloomer who looked as if he’d rolled out of bed only to demonstrate some of the most hellacious groundstrokes anyone had ever seen. Though far less consistent than Murray, this occasional juggernaut won three majors also. Then there were four one-offs, all of whom managed to sneak in a U.S. Open title. First was Juan Martín del Potro, a soulful colossus with a forehand to pierce any defense. As a 20-year-old the Argentine had upset a swaggering Federer to win the 2009 U.S. Open, and seemed fated for many more such titles, only to be waylaid by injuries. There was Marin Cilic, a slightly hunched Croat with a mighty baseline game who peaked in a wild two-week run in 2014. There was the aforementioned Thiem, a hardworking bruiser who fashioned himself into the Big Three’s most serious threat in the late 2010s. He won a 2020 tournament empty of fans due to the pandemic, and empty of Novak Djokovic, for reasons we will soon explore. And finally there was Daniil Medvedev, far too flavorful a character to relegate to an aside. We’ll get to him later. But this is the end of our list of exceptions.
The era ended on a long fade, not a cut to black. In 2018, Federer won his record 20th and final major at the Australian Open, and in 2020, he was slowed down by another knee problem, this time for good. He played infrequently until the end of 2022, when he retired at an exhibition tournament, his hand clenching Nadal’s, both blubbering. The two original rivals had become good friends. By then Nadal had already surpassed Federer’s major record, setting a new standard at 22, his last coming at Roland-Garros in 2022, which he played on a left foot so quieted by pain-killing injections that he described it as “asleep.” From there, his injuries, too, became unsustainable, and the prospect of retirement drew closer over the next two years, even though he played well in those rare windows of good health. Djokovic, the youngest member of the bunch, seemed as supple and motivated as ever. He had gained the upper hand in each of his rivalries against Federer and Nadal. He erased many of their other records, achieved new ones, and acted, even in the absence of his two counterparts, as a solitary “final boss” to test the mettle of all newcomers. They almost always failed that test. Djokovic kept stacking up major titles until he stood alone at 24.
If this last phase of the Big Three era was something of a predictable one-man act, it was also a fascinating full-spectrum character study of an eclectic figure. Djokovic could be intelligent and humane at one turn, cranky and dour the next. His thinking was sophisticated in some ways and regressive in others, a prominent example of what might be termed “jock epistemology,” where elite athletes accumulate some useful beliefs for good reasons, some useful beliefs for bad reasons, and some bad beliefs for bad reasons. He could be quite generous to players at the outset of their careers. Sometimes he agitated as a labor organizer on behalf of lower-ranked players. He also professed his belief in telepathy and telekinesis. He once invited a man to explain to his sizable social media audience, on a live stream, that positive emotions could purify tainted water. He was skeptical of conventional medicine and did not want to vaccinate himself against the coronavirus, a conviction so firmly held that he skipped out on major tournaments that would have required him to cave. He attracted a new sort of fan in this era, people who fancied themselves to be raging against the establishment, who seemed always to locate him as the victim of a vast conspiracy, and expressed their love for him in paranoid style. (One prominent member of this fan base, whom Djokovic once shouted out by name, speculated that Nadal had colluded with Bill Gates and Joe Biden to prevent Djokovic from attending the 2022 U.S. Open.) He arrived in Australia for the 2022 Australian Open, under the impression that he had obtained a vaccine exemption, only to be detained and deported in a Kafkaesque legal saga that clearly wounded him. He won a lot of tennis matches in between all this. It was odd to see a man so frequently aggrieved even as he rose to the unquestioned status of Greatest of All Time, surpassing his two historic peers.
All the while, it had become more and more difficult to make sense of the future, which had been obscured by these three men for so many years. The tour had become littered with stunted, thwarted little careers, like a landscape of bonsai trees. When Djokovic stopped winning—assuming that happened before the heat death of the universe and the attendant end of organized tennis—would the major titles be distributed more erratically? Would the steady dictatorial rule of the Big Three be followed by a riotous free-for-all? Would fans, long invested in these three rich characters, lose touch with the pro tour? The only certain thing, it seemed to all of us, fans and journalists alike, was this: Whatever was coming next could not possibly look like what had just passed.
In the beginning, there was Roger Federer.
He was lean and composed, and seemed never to sweat. His feet moved over the court as do the feet of a water bug on the surface of a pond. His style was arty and aggressive. He always struck the ball a fraction of a second earlier than I expected. As a viewer, I was constantly taken aback by this, like a clap that landed just ahead of the beat, over and over. His opponents had no time to appreciate this quality, because the ball had already arrived at their feet. Many fans enjoyed seeing a hard game made to look so easy. But even Roger, at the outset of his career, was not yet so interested in toil. “Grit,” as he’d later describe it, was something he had to learn. So he did. By his early twenties, the man from Switzerland was dominating the professional tour in a way few ever had. Ponytailed for a while, then with floppy locks tucked into a headband. Somewhat supercilious, keenly aware of his distance from the rest of the pack, Roger was aloft on his own cloud. He was the first one at the party.
Next to arrive was Rafael Nadal.
A strange chimera, who seemed ancient, yet terribly modern. Feral, but also quite polite. Long hair, long shorts, no sleeves, big muscles. He applied spin to the ball with a fury not yet seen. His shots sailed high over the net and plunged back to earth with urgency. He was also curiously damp. On the island of Mallorca, the lefty Rafa was raised on clay, one of three main surfaces on which tennis is played, and he ruled it from the moment he set foot on tour. Tennis players are oddly fond of the term “fighting spirit,” and Rafa was its living embodiment, a man who did not grasp surrender. Though he seemed impossibly full of life, he also grappled with injuries all over his body, causing many to question his longevity, which, in the end, would be no problem at all. He and Roger played indelible epics. Nadal unwound Federer’s poise and forced the Swiss to evolve beyond his instinctive style. For a while it seemed it would be just these two, locked in permanent struggle, carving one another into genius as great rivals do.
Maybe it would have been so if not for Novak Djokovic.
To call him “limber” was too mild. He seemed to be composed of something other than flesh, some taffy-like substance that let him elongate and coil his body into confounding positions. He had short-cropped hair and close-set eyes that would widen as if in terror when he was about to return serve, which he did better than anyone ever had. His genius was less showy than the others, more attritional, but just as keen. And where the other two had grown up well-off in western Europe, he had emerged from Serbia during the Yugoslav Wars. His path to the high life of pro tennis had been more perilous. A wall he used to hit tennis balls against as a child had been struck by NATO bombs. He spoke of his family’s experience with loan sharks. Early on, he would wilt in long or hot matches, which was funny in retrospect, because raw stamina became a defining trait. He liked to do silly impressions of his peers, eager to perturb the sport’s sterile atmosphere. Sometimes he sparred with crowds. In time he relished his role as interloper. With his talent as crowbar, he pried his way into the Roger-Rafa duopoly. Where there had been one rivalry, now there were three, each of them distinct.
After him came—well, no one. For two decades, aside from the occasional guest stopping by for a cocktail and then getting shooed away, it would be just the three of them at the party, and a lot of people banging at the door.
The professional tennis tour runs all year long, across dozens of tournaments. The most important are the four majors. If you’ve heard of any, you’ve heard of these: the Australian Open, Roland-Garros (colloquially, the French Open), Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open. At the outset of each tournament, there are 128 players. Two weeks later, there is only one champion, who has won seven consecutive matches. A victory pays a few million dollars, assures a place in history, and improves or reaffirms a player’s ranking. At any given time, a tennis player knows precisely where he ranks among his peers. He lives every day in a bare hierarchy that anyone can look up. Winning a match rewards a player with “ranking points.” To get a sense of the relative importance of the tournaments, all you need to do is look at the points. A major is worth 2000 points. Beneath those are the Masters 1000 tournaments, which are unsurprisingly worth 1000 points. Beneath those, 500-level tournaments, then 250-level tournaments. You can imagine this as the pyramid that makes up the top professional division of men’s tennis, also known as the ATP Tour. Beneath it are lower levels of competition—the Challenger Tour, Futures—that can be thought of as the minor leagues.
Perhaps I have given you an emotionally impoverished version of the story. No child drifts to sleep thinking of winning 2000 ranking points—they dream of winning a major. These four tournaments are the stuff of legacy, the currency in tedious debates about who is better than whom. For some fans, the simplest shorthand for a player’s historic significance is the number of majors they won. There are many, many worthy feats in tennis outside of winning those tournaments, but in the popular imagination, and to hear many players tell it themselves, these four are untouchable. If given a chance, a player would trade any number of smaller trophies for just one of them. The exchange rate is infinite.
The tennis major is one of the hardest feats to pull off in contemporary sport. Winning seven best-of-five-set tennis matches is a profound physical and psychic ordeal, a truth that has only deepened as the sport’s athletic demands have increased. To win those matches requires an alignment of circumstances: the tactical know-how to adapt to seven different opponents, the ability to recover from the wear-and-tear of each match, the mental acuity to play each point in isolation without getting overwhelmed by the enormity of the whole task. I have always thought about a major as a marathon run while engaged in hand-to-hand combat.
For roughly two decades, from 2004 to 2023, Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic won almost all the majors. As a result, they came to be known as a collective unit—the Big Three—like some cabal conspiring to hoard all the joy and prestige for themselves. It is not as though they were the only good tennis players born between the years 1981 and 1987. They had brilliant peers, players who would have won a major or two in other eras but had the blunt misfortune of being born at the same time as the three best ever to play. In any attempt to win a major, inevitably, a player would have to muscle their way past one member of the Big Three. Sometimes they’d beat one of them only to be evicted by another. Tomáš Berdych, the flinty, powerful Czech, once beat two of them in a row only to be eliminated by the third in the Wimbledon final. It was too much to ask of any one mortal.
Perhaps the most poignant way to understand the Big Three was to see the optimism steadily squeezed out of their contemporaries, as if by a juicer, a cup filled to the brim with hopes and dreams. You would hear the most extraordinary admissions of inadequacy. In pro sports, particularly individual sports, militant self-belief is a prerequisite for the job. And yet here these gifted competitors were, their confidence cracked, openly explaining to the press that their best efforts weren’t remotely enough against these three adversaries. And that was only what they were willing to say in public. Who knows what macabre doubts went stalking through their heads as they took their post-match showers or car rides to the airport.
Broadly speaking, these valiant victims of the Big Three moved through recognizable phases of career grief. First in this sequence was Persistence; all it would take was some dedicated training, some tactical adjustments, perhaps a few more twists of good fortune, and an important match may well swing his way in the future. After said match definitively did not swing in his favor, nor the one after, nor the one after that, the player might admit to Cluelessness. At this phase, they would have no particular intuition about what they could have done to win, and would feel altogether lost on the court. There could be bright flashes of Anger or Despair en route, but in time, the player arrived at Resignation. Perhaps this was the reality of playing tennis in this era, as stark and immovable as the face of a cliff, and there was nothing else to be done. At the end of this path was Enlightenment, a lovely ego death. To play a game for a living, to travel the world, to be alive at all, was a privilege—what’s that about a major?—no, he was content to sniff the freshly cut grass, kick the clay out of his shoes, and feel gratitude.
The players whose talent most closely approached the Big Three were the ones to most clearly see the chasm that still separated them. Often, these players would explain just how unpleasant their matches had been. Andy Roddick, a funny and frank American with one of history’s great serves, who actually did win the U.S. Open in 2003, shortly before the Big Three shut the door behind them, battled with Federer too many times not to see the situation clearly. Once after a defeat in 2005: “I was bringing heat, too. I was going at him, trying different things. You just have to sit back and say ‘too good’ sometimes. Hope he gets bored or something. I don’t know.” Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a barrel-chested Frenchman who looked a little like a young Muhammad Ali and had a pugilistic play style to match, was totally out of ideas in 2013, reflecting on two narrow five-set losses to Djokovic and Federer. “To be honest, I have no idea. You know, if you have some advice for me, I will take it because I don’t know.” That same year David Ferrer, a Spaniard blessed with uncommon foot speed and consistency, described the landscape dispassionately. “I am trying to do my best every match. But I know they are better than me. What can I do?” he wondered after being routed by Djokovic in an Australian Open semifinal. Five months later he would lose to Nadal in the Roland-Garros final. At season’s end he was asked if he could envision himself winning a major the next year: “No, I don’t think so.” In a work culture defined by positive visualization exercises and constant gestures of self-motivation, this was hair-raising stuff. Years later, after Tsonga had retired, he was chatting with his countryman Gaël Monfils—also shut out by the Big Three, also immensely gifted—and the two discussed why they’d been unable to win a major. “I was not good enough,” said Tsonga, and Monfils agreed.
But even if the Big Three’s direct contemporaries suffered, surely there would be a path for the next generation of players. Time was on their side, theoretically. They were younger, and this was a game premised on agility and reflexes, qualities that do not age like wine. By mid-2017, Djokovic had joined Federer and Nadal as people in their thirties. That is the decade when a player slips out of his physical prime and reckons with the cumulative damage of a life on tour. And the trio seemed, for a brief moment, vulnerable. If you squinted, you could pinpoint 2016 as a year of hope. Two members of the cabal disappeared into injury exile. Federer had taken an awkward step while giving his kids a bath. He heard a click in his left knee and wound up requiring surgery on his meniscus. Nadal, nursing pain in his left wrist, missed big chunks of the season, even withdrawing midway through his favorite tournament, Roland-Garros. Not to accuse anyone in the locker room of celebrating a competitor’s pain, but the youth saw an opening, a knife-width of light in the doorjamb.
Instead, Federer and Nadal returned the following season and split 2017’s majors, two apiece, playing the most visionary tennis of their late careers. Federer had adopted a larger racquet, which souped up his sometimes vulnerable one-handed backhand. Nadal played a near-perfect clay season. The hair on their heads had thinned out, and their first step wasn’t quite as explosive as it had been, but their self-knowledge was absolute, and they were still beating everyone on tour. It was a down year for Djokovic, who’d insisted on playing through an elbow injury that eventually required surgery. But he’d be back the next season, and as a unit, the Big Three were not budging. The story continued as it had.
The major tournament, historically a site of glimmery intrigue, became a fortnight of foregone conclusions. No matter how spirited some underdog looked at the start of a tournament, you knew, at the business end of the tournament, it would be one of three familiar faces holding the trophy. Time did not conspire in favor of youth, at least not quickly enough to rescue whole generations of players from doom. In tennis, the wealth is concentrated at the very top of the tour. And the Big Three were the first to play in an era when one could amass roughly the GDP of a small island nation, thanks to both prize money and endorsement deals. The nine-figure reward for dominating the modern game could then be applied to cutting-edge conditioning and medical care, prolonging careers beyond their assumed expiration dates. This was an emerging pattern across sports at the time—think of LeBron James or Tom Brady or Lionel Messi tearing it up well into their mid-thirties. Like them, the Big Three were scrupulous stewards of their own bodies. Federer’s style of quick, punchy points was easier on the aging physique. Nadal carefully managed his complex suite of ailments, including a congenital foot problem he’d been working around since the start of his pro career. Djokovic was a seeker, living at the frontier of forward-thinking inquiry and batty pseudoscience, which would later manifest itself in knottier ways. But his emphasis on mobility was paying off, allowing him to continue his on-court contortionism well into his silver years, and his stamina was legend.
So this trio kept winning. And the career grief, like some intergenerational trauma, was inherited by the next batch of players, too. It was no longer just the members of the Big Three’s direct age cohort, but then also the younger millennials, those born in the nineties, tasked with the same impossible labor. Among them was Grigor Dimitrov, the spry Bulgarian saddled with the nickname of “Baby Fed” due to strokes that resembled those of his frustratingly overtalented colleague. There was Kei Nishikori, the fragile but deadly sharpshooter from Japan, and Milos Raonic, the ace machine from Canada. All of them managed moments of transcendence but never fulfilled the major dream. This generation followed the last into the juicer. And then yet another generation emerged. Surely, this would be the one to break the spell?
Reader, it would not. The same words of confusion and futility from 2004 were spoken by different men 15 years later: “His game style has something that it kind of makes the other half of your brain work more than it usually does,” said Stefanos Tsitsipas, a dreamy, pseudo-philosophical Greek seen as potential heir to major titles, reflecting on a 2019 drubbing from Rafael Nadal. “I’m trying to understand, but I cannot find an explanation for that.” That same year, another top prospect, Dominic Thiem of Austria, described “the unique and also brutal thing” in the structure of his job. He had just ended Djokovic’s 26-match winning streak at the majors, only to run straight into another monster. “I beat yesterday one of the biggest legends of our game. Not even 24 hours later, I have to step on court against another amazing legend of our game, against the best clay-court player of all time.”
As a writer, I began to feel a little stupid. There was a cycle. I was exhilarated by a young prospect, who was playing tennis that appeared fresh and audacious, and who seemed hardworking and shepherded by a smart coach, and I hoped to draw attention to their cause, only to know, in the innermost chamber of my tennis conscience, that they would be slain time and again by this geriatric elite. It was a narrative conundrum. Each time I could convince myself to write the story, allowing myself to feel the frisson of novelty. But I knew that would fade. Each time I felt a little bit more like Charlie Brown approaching the football. At times, I could even be a bit ungrateful about these three great men, unfolding three of the most spectacular rivalries in the history of sport. But I wanted to see new players test them in new ways. Sometimes I just wanted to write about the new rather than the old.
We cannot advance another step without acknowledging those men who did manage to break down the door and enter the major title party. The Big Three were comprehensive, but not total. Chief among all other players was Andy Murray, the crotchety Scot who established a tier of his own. He made it to world No. 1, he beat all of them at the biggest events, and he clogged up the late stages of so many majors that the term was sometimes extended to “Big Four” to include him. He would end with three major titles. Then there was Federer’s countryman Stan Wawrinka, a rumpled late bloomer who looked as if he’d rolled out of bed only to demonstrate some of the most hellacious groundstrokes anyone had ever seen. Though far less consistent than Murray, this occasional juggernaut won three majors also. Then there were four one-offs, all of whom managed to sneak in a U.S. Open title. First was Juan Martín del Potro, a soulful colossus with a forehand to pierce any defense. As a 20-year-old the Argentine had upset a swaggering Federer to win the 2009 U.S. Open, and seemed fated for many more such titles, only to be waylaid by injuries. There was Marin Cilic, a slightly hunched Croat with a mighty baseline game who peaked in a wild two-week run in 2014. There was the aforementioned Thiem, a hardworking bruiser who fashioned himself into the Big Three’s most serious threat in the late 2010s. He won a 2020 tournament empty of fans due to the pandemic, and empty of Novak Djokovic, for reasons we will soon explore. And finally there was Daniil Medvedev, far too flavorful a character to relegate to an aside. We’ll get to him later. But this is the end of our list of exceptions.
The era ended on a long fade, not a cut to black. In 2018, Federer won his record 20th and final major at the Australian Open, and in 2020, he was slowed down by another knee problem, this time for good. He played infrequently until the end of 2022, when he retired at an exhibition tournament, his hand clenching Nadal’s, both blubbering. The two original rivals had become good friends. By then Nadal had already surpassed Federer’s major record, setting a new standard at 22, his last coming at Roland-Garros in 2022, which he played on a left foot so quieted by pain-killing injections that he described it as “asleep.” From there, his injuries, too, became unsustainable, and the prospect of retirement drew closer over the next two years, even though he played well in those rare windows of good health. Djokovic, the youngest member of the bunch, seemed as supple and motivated as ever. He had gained the upper hand in each of his rivalries against Federer and Nadal. He erased many of their other records, achieved new ones, and acted, even in the absence of his two counterparts, as a solitary “final boss” to test the mettle of all newcomers. They almost always failed that test. Djokovic kept stacking up major titles until he stood alone at 24.
If this last phase of the Big Three era was something of a predictable one-man act, it was also a fascinating full-spectrum character study of an eclectic figure. Djokovic could be intelligent and humane at one turn, cranky and dour the next. His thinking was sophisticated in some ways and regressive in others, a prominent example of what might be termed “jock epistemology,” where elite athletes accumulate some useful beliefs for good reasons, some useful beliefs for bad reasons, and some bad beliefs for bad reasons. He could be quite generous to players at the outset of their careers. Sometimes he agitated as a labor organizer on behalf of lower-ranked players. He also professed his belief in telepathy and telekinesis. He once invited a man to explain to his sizable social media audience, on a live stream, that positive emotions could purify tainted water. He was skeptical of conventional medicine and did not want to vaccinate himself against the coronavirus, a conviction so firmly held that he skipped out on major tournaments that would have required him to cave. He attracted a new sort of fan in this era, people who fancied themselves to be raging against the establishment, who seemed always to locate him as the victim of a vast conspiracy, and expressed their love for him in paranoid style. (One prominent member of this fan base, whom Djokovic once shouted out by name, speculated that Nadal had colluded with Bill Gates and Joe Biden to prevent Djokovic from attending the 2022 U.S. Open.) He arrived in Australia for the 2022 Australian Open, under the impression that he had obtained a vaccine exemption, only to be detained and deported in a Kafkaesque legal saga that clearly wounded him. He won a lot of tennis matches in between all this. It was odd to see a man so frequently aggrieved even as he rose to the unquestioned status of Greatest of All Time, surpassing his two historic peers.
All the while, it had become more and more difficult to make sense of the future, which had been obscured by these three men for so many years. The tour had become littered with stunted, thwarted little careers, like a landscape of bonsai trees. When Djokovic stopped winning—assuming that happened before the heat death of the universe and the attendant end of organized tennis—would the major titles be distributed more erratically? Would the steady dictatorial rule of the Big Three be followed by a riotous free-for-all? Would fans, long invested in these three rich characters, lose touch with the pro tour? The only certain thing, it seemed to all of us, fans and journalists alike, was this: Whatever was coming next could not possibly look like what had just passed.
Recenzii
“A scintillating account… Nathan compellingly chronicles how Alcaraz and Sinner began to flourish as the previous era of tennis’s ‘Big Three’ (Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, and Rafael Nadal) receded… Throughout, Nathan provides exceptional commentary on how the pair operates as foils in both style of play and temperament. This gripping chronicle of a new frontier in the game aces it.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
“Giri Nathan is the best tennis writer in America. When too many of us are busy looking back at the era that's ending, he's written a book that looks forward, with optimism and insight, to the era that lies ahead. Changeover is an absolute joy.”
—BRIAN PHILLIPS, New York Times bestselling author of Impossible Owls and senior staff writer at The Ringer
“What strikes and delights me about Changeover is the tenderness with which Giri Nathan speaks on the page. The book is warm, inviting, curious, and abundantly caring.”
—HANIF ABDURRAQIB, New York Times bestselling author of There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
“A tour de force—as dazzling as any Sinner-Alcaraz match. Stylish, smart, funny, and humane. I'll return to Changeover again and again."
—LOUISA THOMAS, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football and staff writer at The New Yorker
“Giri Nathan is our best young tennis writer: Avid, shrewd, droll, culturally attuned, searching. Changeover is Nathan in full flight.”
—GERALD MARZORATI, author of Seeing Serena and Late to the Ball
“Deftly weaving between awestruck wonderment and playful irreverence, Nathan breathes fresh life into tennis prose—just as Sinner and Alcaraz have done on court, and with just as many jaw-dropping highlights.”
—BEN ROTHENBERG, author of Naomi Osaka
“A riveting exploration of the most electrifying new rivalry in tennis. Nathan brings to the page a rare gift—some writerly blend of Alcaraz's creativity and Sinner's precision. Changeover is a triumph.”
—BEN TAUB, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New Yorker
“Given how ubiquitous Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have become, it’s easy to forget the speed with which these players have come to dominate men’s tennis … Nathan, a co-founder of the sports site Defector, captures the phenomenon astutely. His propulsive book is the first to chronicle the two athletes in such depth.”
—BLOOMBERG, “The 10 Best Books of Summer 2025”
“Award-winning tennis journalist Nathan’s fresh writing style captures the passion for this sport as he contrasts each player’s background, temperament, and playing style.”
—BOOKLIST
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (starred review)
“Giri Nathan is the best tennis writer in America. When too many of us are busy looking back at the era that's ending, he's written a book that looks forward, with optimism and insight, to the era that lies ahead. Changeover is an absolute joy.”
—BRIAN PHILLIPS, New York Times bestselling author of Impossible Owls and senior staff writer at The Ringer
“What strikes and delights me about Changeover is the tenderness with which Giri Nathan speaks on the page. The book is warm, inviting, curious, and abundantly caring.”
—HANIF ABDURRAQIB, New York Times bestselling author of There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension
“A tour de force—as dazzling as any Sinner-Alcaraz match. Stylish, smart, funny, and humane. I'll return to Changeover again and again."
—LOUISA THOMAS, New York Times bestselling coauthor of Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football and staff writer at The New Yorker
“Giri Nathan is our best young tennis writer: Avid, shrewd, droll, culturally attuned, searching. Changeover is Nathan in full flight.”
—GERALD MARZORATI, author of Seeing Serena and Late to the Ball
“Deftly weaving between awestruck wonderment and playful irreverence, Nathan breathes fresh life into tennis prose—just as Sinner and Alcaraz have done on court, and with just as many jaw-dropping highlights.”
—BEN ROTHENBERG, author of Naomi Osaka
“A riveting exploration of the most electrifying new rivalry in tennis. Nathan brings to the page a rare gift—some writerly blend of Alcaraz's creativity and Sinner's precision. Changeover is a triumph.”
—BEN TAUB, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New Yorker
“Given how ubiquitous Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have become, it’s easy to forget the speed with which these players have come to dominate men’s tennis … Nathan, a co-founder of the sports site Defector, captures the phenomenon astutely. His propulsive book is the first to chronicle the two athletes in such depth.”
—BLOOMBERG, “The 10 Best Books of Summer 2025”
“Award-winning tennis journalist Nathan’s fresh writing style captures the passion for this sport as he contrasts each player’s background, temperament, and playing style.”
—BOOKLIST
Descriere
* Bloomberg 10 Best Books of Summer 2025 *
The story of the end of one epic era in the sport, and the birth of another, as told by "the best tennis writer in America" (Brian Phillips, The Ringer).