“Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis”
By Giri Nathan
Gallery. 258 pp. $28.99
– – –
ADVERTISEMENT
There was a time not that long ago when sports legends granted writers unfettered access to their lives and thoughts. That’s how we learned who Muhammad Ali, Bobby Knight and Jimmy Connors really were: Journalists got into the rooms that fans couldn’t, and wrote down what they saw and heard – with little editorial interference.
Now, the balance of power between sportswriters and their subjects has flipped, and warts-and-all books and magazine features have given way to authorized documentaries. Netflix’s “Carlos Alcaraz: My Way,” which premiered in the spring, opens in the Spanish tennis star’s bedroom, where he shows off his sneaker collection and haul of grand slam trophies. But in the end, that three-part series offers only the illusion of intimacy. There’s loads of access but not much insight: We see what Alcaraz and his management team want us to see, and we hear what they want us to hear. My way, indeed.
In his new book, “Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis,” about the rise of the spellbinding Alcaraz and his merciless Italian rival, Jannik Sinner, Giri Nathan acknowledges that he didn’t pierce anyone’s inner sanctum. Nathan’s main interactions with his subjects come at stage-managed news conferences, where he has the privilege of occasionally asking a single question. “Changeover” is the inverse of a glossy documentary, and it is ultimately more rewarding than one, at least for fans of the sport that the 22-year-old Alcaraz and 24-year-old Sinner are reinventing. With his critic’s eye and powers of description, Nathan delivers loads of insight without the benefit of access. His book shows how two young men came to dominate tennis and our imaginations even if it can’t reveal who they really are.
The best evidence that Nathan, a staff writer at Defector, is an astute tennis observer is that he started working on “Changeover” in 2023, when Alcaraz had just two grand slam titles and Sinner owned zero. They’ve since combined to win seven grand slams in a row and played each other in the last two major finals, at the French Open (in one of the greatest tennis matches ever, won by Alcaraz) and Wimbledon (where Sinner got his revenge).
The Spaniard and the Italian first got Nathan’s attention in 2022, when they faced off in a five-hour-plus quarterfinal at the U.S. Open. Nathan calls that match, a five-set victory for the then-teenage Alcaraz, “a smothering counterexample to anyone fussing about what tennis could even be after the old gods faded away. New gods take their place.”
These two new gods – successors to the Big Three of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic – have emerged with shocking speed and force. When a scout first heard Sinner play, he thought he was listening to the clamor of a construction site, not the sound of a 14-year-old hitting tennis balls. Alcaraz, with his feathery drop shots and lashing forehands, arrived on the pro circuit with a preternatural ability to befuddle or overpower, depending on his whim. Alcaraz comes off as a mercurial entertainer, Sinner a metronomic introvert. And when they share the court, Nathan writes, they force each other to reengineer a game that has been played for centuries, “inventing a new grammar all their own.”
In diagramming their play, Nathan conjures his own vivid imagery. Describing their eighth career meeting, last year at Indian Wells, he writes that Alcaraz and Sinner “flew around … like air hockey pucks, occupying some frictionless and freer version of the world that we in the crowd could not access despite sitting just a few feet above them.” Of another, he notes that “the trick of playing Alcaraz is to strip him of opportunities to remember how original he is.” And it was Sinner, at his best, who “managed to pin Alcaraz to the back of the court, as a butterfly to a corkboard.”
Even prose this clarifying can’t quite convey the feeling of watching Alcaraz and Sinner glide and pummel their way around the court. (Credit where it’s due: For all the flaws of that Netflix documentary, it does include ample footage of Alcaraz playing tennis.) “Changeover” is best experienced with your phone by your side, and YouTube cued up to whatever “Sincaraz” exchange that Nathan says is worth watching. “The absolute best tennis induces laughter in audiences,” he writes about their 2024 match in Beijing. When I launched the extended highlights, I laughed, a lot.
That year, 2024, wasn’t a laugh riot for Sinner, even though he won two grand slams and finished the season ranked No. 1 in the world. In August, followers of the sport learned that he’d tested positive for a trace amount of a banned anabolic steroid. The story Sinner told of how that drug, clostebol, got into his system – via his masseuse’s bandaged finger – was, as Nathan argues, at once absurd and plausible. And the resolution of that positive test, a three-month ban in which Sinner missed no major tournaments, both harmed his reputation and allowed him to continue accumulating trophies.
Sinner’s suspension and the ballyhoo around it invited a whole range of questions, including from Nathan. The Italian has answered almost none of them in any depth, leaving us to speculate about what he did and how he felt. “What we lose, in this new media ecosystem,” Nathan writes, “are the thornier narratives that the players themselves don’t want to share.” What we’re left with is the only thing that’s unambiguous about Sinner: his talent. For Nathan, his play evokes “the popular cinematic depiction of aliens: slender, possessed of a strength irreconcilable with our understanding of human anatomy, demure in affect, capable of lethality without visible exertion. I found it hypnotic.”
At this stage of Sinner’s life and career, that kind of appreciation of what he does and how he transfixes us comes off as more authentic than any attempt to explain who he is. Like all great rivalries, Alcaraz vs. Sinner will endure because of how their matches make us feel. The story that Giri Nathan tells in “Changeover” is about the transcendence we’ve already seen and the possibilities we can’t see coming. Tennis’s new gods may feel distant, but every sports fan is grateful they’re here.
– – –
Josh Levin is a writer based in Washington. He is the author of “The Queen: The Forgotten Life Behind an American Myth” and the host of two seasons of the podcast “Slow Burn,” on David Duke and the rise of Fox News.