Vladimir Nabokov knew his tennis. He grew up playing on his family’s estate in prerevolutionary Russia, with wood-and-gut rackets and barefoot peasants as ball boys. As an émigré in interwar Berlin, he gave lessons on the courts behind the Schaubühne theater on the Kurfürstendamm. Lecturing on Don Quixote at Harvard in the 1950s, he tallied the titular knight’s victories and defeats as points in a tennis game. In his novels, the sport always seems to possess a certain hyperreal quality. Take Lolita, in which the full extent of Dolores’s vulnerability and Humbert’s predatoriness is never more vivid than when the pair step onto the court:
It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop….
She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life, revealed an innocence, a frankness, a kindness of ball-placing, that permitted a second-rate but determined player, no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to poke and cut his way to victory.
What Nabokov recognized was tennis’s remarkable ability to distill complex personalities into simple geometry: the revelatory “frankness” of Dolores’s shots, her susceptibility to Humbert’s uncouth “poke and cut.” “Literature will always remain a game for me,” he once wrote to his agent. Often that game involved two rackets and a ball.
When Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal played, geometry seemed to open out into personality, too. Twenty years ago, in an essay for The New York Times Magazine, David Foster Wallace captured their burgeoning rivalry as one of Nabokovian dualities. It was a battle, he wrote, between “the passionate machismo of southern Europe [and] the intricate clinical artistry of the north. Apollo and Dionysus. Scalpel and cleaver. Righty and southpaw.” Federer, to Wallace, represented the sport’s capacity to be an “expression of human beauty”; Nadal seemed “mesomorphic and totally martial,” all “unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations.” The next year, as if to underline these differences, the two played an exhibition match billed as the Battle of Surfaces. One half of the court was covered with grass—best suited to Federer’s sleek movement and crisp slice—and the other with clay, which favored Nadal’s heavy spin and attritional style. The implication was clear: these men were two different species, with very different natural habitats. To root for one or the other was to say something not just about what you valued in tennis but about how you saw life. It was beauty versus power. Tradition versus innovation. Talent versus grit. Mind versus body.
Two decades on, these oppositions have hardened into cliché. It’s difficult not to feel a pang of sorrow for Wallace whenever you read an extended piece of writing about Federer that emphasizes his apparent effortlessness, or about Nadal that stresses his work rate. (In a review for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Wallace once bemoaned the endlessly repeating “formulas of the generic sports bio”—he would no doubt have been mortified at his own article’s afterlife.) As the two books under review show, not even the best of today’s tennis writers altogether escape the temptation. Giri Nathan, whose enviably stylish essays for outlets like New York magazine and Racquet have won him a Tom Perrotta Prize for Tennis Journalism (yes, a real thing), obligingly notes that the Swiss “seemed never to sweat”; Christopher Clarey, the veteran New York Times tennis correspondent, avers that the Spaniard perspired so heavily that he “worked with Nike to develop fabrics to absorb his overabundant sweat.” It sometimes seems as though, even to their biographers, the players’ on-court oppositions are more real than the men themselves. And yet if there is one thing that Clarey’s account drives home, it’s that the two had much more in common than we like to admit.
Both, of course, were supremely talented, hardworking, and ruthless. You don’t win multiple Grand Slams without those traits. Both came from similar middle-class milieus and were, in public life at least, similarly polite and inoffensive. (It’s hard not to turn out somewhat anodyne, perhaps, if you’ve spent most of your childhood monomaniacally perfecting the art of thundering a small yellow ball over a net.) On court, Nadal was capable of extraordinary creativity, and Federer of metronomic consistency. And they liked each other, sort of. They played exhibitions for each other’s charities, and Nadal was among the first to take part in the Laver Cup, a pet project of Federer’s. But patently, to us spectators, these convergences were irrelevant. What mattered was the ability to do what Nabokov had done, in reverse: to extrapolate from these two men’s games (and from their carefully curated Nike attire) larger things about temperament, priorities, even politics. The brilliance of Nadal and Federer’s tennis rivalry, more often than not, was how well it was suited to being not about tennis at all.
To the enthusiast, the facts of Nadal’s life and career will be familiar. He grew up in the sleepy Majorcan town of Manacor, where, on the local clay courts, he was introduced to tennis by his uncle Toni. With tío by his side, he shot up the professional men’s rankings, culminating in his winning the 2005 French Open at nineteen. He went on to dominate that tournament, winning it an astonishing fourteen times, more than anyone in history. (Chris Evert is second, with seven.) Clay, and its slow, high bounce, was particularly well suited to his game. With his signature parabolic forehands—struck with a toreador-like flourish of his left arm—he pinned his opponents to their vulnerable backhand side until they missed or hit a weak ball for him to pounce on. He might have finished with even more titles had injuries not been a constant hindrance: by the end of his career, he was playing with daily pain-numbing injections that often left him without any sensation in his left foot. But still he won. His total of ninety-two titles puts him fifth of all time on the men’s tour. His collection of Grand Slams—twenty-two—is second only to Novak Djokovic’s twenty-four. (The notoriously science-skeptic Serb, whose clinical, defensive tennis is built around his astounding athleticism, has longevity in part to thank for this statistic. When Nadal retired at the age of thirty-eight, he had dropped well outside the top one hundred in the official tour rankings. Djokovic, now almost thirty-nine, remains comfortably perched inside the top five.)
What The Warrior promises is to tell us something more. In his three decades as a correspondent, Clarey had more access to Nadal than any other journalist in the Anglophone world. Some of his behind-the-scenes stories are indeed startling. We hear, for instance, that Rafa entered the French Open’s player restaurant in 2021, an hour after an intense four-setter against Djokovic, “limping like a crippled guy” from the agony in his foot. “Pain takes away your happiness, not only in tennis but in life,” he told Clarey the next year. “And my problem is that many days I live with too much pain.”
Clarey, however, seems reluctant to push his subject too far. He is a fluid writer who knows how to keep us reading, but Nadal, to him, is an aesthetic object—a tennis god to admire from a distance. This is most evident, and most weird, in the sections on his pupilage. It seems to have been, like many players’ childhoods, a pretty horrible time. (To see some of the sport’s unprettier effects on young competitors—from tantrums over line calls to parent-induced nervous breakdowns—you need only to visit your local youth tournament.) Nadal, by the sound of it, had it more difficult than most. Toni, who as a young man had dreamed of becoming a professional player himself, drilled his young nephew so relentlessly that by the time he began his senior career, his knees had already become permanently damaged. He made him practice with worn-down balls so that he’d learn to adapt to different conditions without complaint; when the boy’s mind wandered, he’d whack balls at him. At one point, Toni tells Clarey that he believes “too many parents and coaches smooth the path for the children. We never did this with Rafael.” That’s putting it mildly. At one junior tournament, Nadal was losing against an evidently weaker opponent when Toni realized he’d been playing with a broken racket. Young Rafa hadn’t noticed: he was so used to being blamed for his mistakes that it hadn’t occurred to him that something might have been wrong with his equipment. “Toni is no perfect coach,” Clarey observes, a little damply.
There are glimpses of hidden depths. We’re told that Nadal visited a therapist twice, for instance, at different points in his career, and that when asked about his many well-documented neuroses—meticulously arranging his water bottles on each changeover, cleaning the baseline with his foot, picking at his shorts, shirtsleeves, hair, and nose before each serve—he admitted they bothered him, but that some were “impossible” to stop. But this isn’t explored further. Clarey has a keen eye, noticing details as minute as the verbal tics shared by Rafa and Toni. Yet he doesn’t blink at the revelation that when the former was offered sessions with a sports psychologist as a teenager, “he and Toni rejected the offer.” Nadal, in The Warrior, is always a champion in the making. In that teleology, there’s no space for insecurity, unhappiness, or overbearing uncles.
One theory for the origin of tennis’s convoluted points system is that scores were originally kept with a clock. Each player’s hand would move a quarter turn with each point won, from 15 to 30 to 45 (later mysteriously changed to 40), before hitting the hour when the game was won. It is fitting for a sport in which competition stretches even the passing of time. The duration of a tennis match, unlike that of most sporting events, is not governed by a stopwatch; for it to progress, one player must beat the other, again and again. (The flexibility is extraordinary—the shortest men’s singles match ever played at Wimbledon lasted thirty-seven minutes; the longest, between John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, took eleven hours and five minutes.) It perhaps explains why tennis’s popularity hinges so significantly on the strength of its rivalries—Federer and Nadal, Venus and Serena, Borg and McEnroe.
The way the sport’s finances are structured also promotes the dominance of a very select number of players. Competitors on the ATP and WTA tours—the pinnacle of the sport for men and women, respectively—are typically paid somewhere between 12 and 20 percent of the income generated by tournaments in prize money. This is, compared with many other sports, astoundingly little. Those in the major American leagues (NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB), for instance, receive between 40 and 50 percent of the revenue. They also get the security of a team contract. Tennis players, as individual agents, are responsible for their own finances: their income is directly tied to their on-court performance. There is no formal union to defend their interests, no benefit scheme, no universal pension plan. What this means in practice is that the earnings are concentrated at the very top. Outside the sport’s superelite, who are able to supplement their income with sponsorship deals, appearance fees, and exhibition matches, the life of a professional player is often barely sustainable. (Conor Niland’s 2024 memoir The Racket, about his life as a player ranked just outside the top one hundred, offers a brilliant insight into the reality of such a journeyman’s existence.) The discrepancy is at times comically stark. The first Six Kings Slam, a three-day invitational exhibition tournament held in Saudi Arabia in 2024, paid each of its six (male) participants $1.5 million before they’d played a single match. Wimbledon, participation in which constitutes the summit of many a pro’s (including Niland’s) career, awards those who fight their way from the qualifiers into the main draw just under $90,000. Tennis as an institution knows how dependent it is on contests between a small number of megastars—and it knows how to ensure our attention remains firmly fixed on them.
The problem after Federer retired and Nadal’s body began finally to disintegrate was that there was nobody to replace them. Rafa facing off against Roger felt like a new installment of a gripping serial novel. Rafa obliterating the polite Norwegian Casper Ruud (as he did in the final of the 2022 French Open) was, by comparison, rather like reading a press release. Potential heirs were found lacking. The US Open final of 2020, between Alexander Zverev and Dominic Thiem, was so nerve-ridden as to be pitiable, with the towering Zverev’s serve crumbling from 130-mile-per-hour cannonballs to the kind of loopy seventy-mile-per-hour deliveries you might see in a public park. The next year, Zverev battled the equally lanky Daniil Medvedev (nicknamed “the octopus”) for the title at the ATP Finals; Giri Nathan describes the combination of their styles of play as “innovatively uncharismatic tennis…like two mantises entangled in a slow fight to the death.” Commentators sometimes refer to this as the sport’s lost generation. Men born in the 1980s have won eighty Grand Slam titles. Those born in the 1990s, who ought now to be dominating, have managed just two. What created this landscape of “stunted, thwarted little careers”? Perhaps there was simply nobody around with that magical combination of talent, work ethic, and mental fortitude. Undeniably, some of the players who might have challenged Nadal, Federer, and Djokovic were hampered by injuries. Yet it remains one of tennis’s great curiosities that almost as soon as the Big Three lost their dominance, the Nineties boys were eclipsed by two children of the new millennium.
Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, like a pair of young Dalai Lamas, were found just as their predecessors passed on to their tennis afterlives. And they outgrew the competition with awful speed. At twenty-four and twenty-two, each has already won at least twice as many Grand Slams as the entire lost generation put together. Unlike the Zverevs and Medvedevs of the world, they also fit into the kind of athletic-aesthetic duality that made Rafa and Roger so fascinating: the stern redheaded giant from the snows of South Tyrol against the entertainer from the sweltering Murcian coast.
Alcaraz has always struck me as the kind of tennis player Roald Dahl would have come up with. His pile of hair and schoolboy grin might have been drawn by Quentin Blake; his inventive, ebullient game feels like what might happen if you put a racket in the paws of Mr. Fox. “A local confectionery,” Nathan tells us, “sponsored Alcaraz’s early trips.” Tennis is, as he writes, “terminally nostalgic,” and the young Spaniard is already being described as combining Federer’s elegant forehand (hit, unusually, with a fully extended arm at contact), quick feet, and all-court style with Nadal’s strength and desire to fight for every ball. It is ironic, for that reason, that one of the most joyful things about him is his apparent disregard for the old gods.
Coaches these days drill players from a young age to play what is called “percentage tennis.” The idea is that you hit most of your shots in ways that are the least likely to result in errors: crosscourt, with high net clearance and plenty of topspin. The modern game is built on this principle. Rackets over the past decades have become so user-friendly—more powerful and forgiving of mistakes—and courts so reliable that the statistical pendulum has swung from favoring high-risk serve-and-volley to rewarding a more conservative power-based game. Allegedly, tourament organizers, expecting us to enjoy this, have further encouraged longer rallies by resurfacing courts and softening balls to create slower conditions. The result is that players end up tethered to their baselines, pushing each other from side to side until one of them makes an error. Alcaraz regularly goes for shots that defy this logic: drop shots from behind the baseline, approach shots while the opponent is in a good position. The laws of tennis—and of statistics—say this shouldn’t work, but Alcaraz is somehow able to play as if those laws don’t apply to him.
He’s not faultless. When unfocused, Nathan notes, he plays “squirrelly and confused tennis. He might get fixated on ideas that amuse him but do not win him points; he might start peacocking prematurely.” But he often plays with a flair that not even the old greats could aspire to. Alcaraz admitted that to prepare for the grass court season in 2024, he watched old videos not of Federer and Andy Murray, as he had done in previous years, but of himself. “Plato once theorized that people have immortal souls, full of knowledge accrued from past lives, so learning is actually just rediscovering that forgotten knowledge buried inside,” Nathan writes. “Perhaps this has only ever been true of Carlos Alcaraz.”
Jannik Sinner, “all thin limbs and knobby ends,” is the yin to the Spaniard’s yang. He is percentage play personified, flattening his opponents with the efficiency (and the emotion) of a bulldozer. He doesn’t play smarter; he simply plays better—faster, harder-hitting, more consistent. It’s easy to forget how difficult it is to strike a tennis ball with that kind of dependability. Imagine, for a moment, returning the kind of seventy-five-mile-per-hour forehand routinely hit by professionals. After the ball leaves your opponent’s racket, you have about a second to gauge its speed and trajectory, adjust your feet, rotate your body, and swing at precisely the right moment with exactly the right velocity. The ball will sit on your strings for five milliseconds—about one twentieth of a blink of an eye. Swing a few milliseconds too early or late, without the right footwork, too fast or too slow, and it will fly off course for an error. Sinner has mastered this art of timing better than anyone in the world. And he deploys it relentlessly. Whereas, in the early rounds of a tournament, Alcaraz’s victories can feel like MFA short stories (exposition, conflict, climax, resolution), Sinner meets his opponents, as Nathan fetchingly puts it, “with the sobriety of a librarian scanning a book, stamping a due date, and handing it back: 6-3, 6-1, see you next time.” While Alcaraz will play to the crowd’s energy and then cheerily recap his every move online (“I try to use less the phone. Has been difficult for me”), Sinner often seems lost in a world of his own, his emotions unreadable beyond the occasional clenched fist raised in private celebration.
In all of this, the magic of both players is that as soon as they play each other, they transcend their respective styles. Alcaraz brings Sinner out of his shell, forcing him to be more daring and inventive. Sinner challenges Alcaraz to show a reliability and focus that he doesn’t normally display. Their French Open final last year—a five-and-a-half-hour contest full of brilliant exchanges and dramatic twists—is already a strong contender for the match of the decade. Last-minute resale tickets for the next installments, the Wimbledon and US Open finals, were being listed for five-digit prices. It is a sign of how feverish expectations have become that the resulting three-hour match, in which Sinner fought back from a set down to clinch the title, was seen by many as a bit of an anticlimax. (The organizers of the Australian Open this year no doubt hoped they’d get to host the next bout, but they were thwarted by Djokovic, who probably surprised even himself by beating Sinner in the semifinal.)
Rivalries thrive on innovation, on each party’s need to improve and adapt to the other, on a narrative that evolves beyond the individual match. Will Sinner ever have Alcaraz’s ability to think on his feet? Will Alcaraz ever possess Sinner’s ruthlessness? Djokovic’s lone dominance in recent years seemed to suggest that, in the athletic but unexciting counterpuncher, the sport had reached its stylistic apogee. Sinner and Alcaraz have—thank God—proved otherwise. Nathan is no doubt right when he predicts that “the future will…be defined by these two, interlocked in a joyful and absorbing struggle.”
Tennis is, without question, the writer’s sport. Among the authors who played or wrote about the game, I count, along with Nabokov, Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Ezra Pound, J.R.R. Tolkien, John Cheever, Edward Said, Martin Amis, Lionel Shriver, and Geoff Dyer. I have undoubtedly forgotten countless others. Marianne Moore once recommended Bill Tilden’s The Art of Lawn Tennis (1921) over “small books of verse and sensational fiction,” praising it as “sound and aggressive both from the point of view of sport and of art”; much of Infinite Jest is set at the Enfield Tennis Academy. The best tennis players, like the best writers, have the capacity to use technique and determination to create moments of transcendent beauty. Nathan is pessimistic about the ability of today’s crop of journalists to rise to that challenge. “Sports media is dead; most of what’s left is window dressing for online sports gambling firms.”
The problem he identifies is one of independent access. As newspaper reporting has given way to committee-written social media posts and player-sanctioned docuseries, tennis journalism has become increasingly two-dimensional. Nathan is good on the mind-numbing insipidity of much of the output by what he calls the “Tennis Content Industrial Complex”:
Over the season, countless clips of mundane Sincaraz interactions whirled around the internet. The fellas exchanging a banal handshake as they crossed paths on the practice courts; Carlos making a vaguely Italianate pinched hand gesture and Jannik duly mirroring it back at him; the two of them stiffly interviewing each other in the sort of icebreaker game that might be played at a corporate retreat; and in an extremely 2024 image, a hellish AI-generated video in which the two wore Christmas sweaters and embraced, with a light nuzzle.
Reading the books under review makes clear how much harder it has become to pierce this barrier. Clarey’s reporting was built on personal relationships—The Warrior is peppered with snippets of candid conversations from hotel rooms and the backs of limousines. Nathan, you feel, is lucky to get in a question at a press conference. He mentions a “precious” tête-à-tête with Federer that lasts only as long as it takes the champion to walk the length of a hallway; in one touching moment he describes trying and failing to set up an interview with Sinner. Yet, as these books also underline, writing and reporting aren’t the same thing. Nathan’s book—which is thoughtful, elegantly written, and frequently very funny—manages to get to a human truth about its subjects that Clarey’s inside look does not. Nabokov would, of course, have been able to tell us all of this seventy-five years ago. Tennis writing’s capacity to reach beyond the simple mechanics of the sport hinges not so much on the writer’s observational acumen as on their ability to make their observations speak to a larger human experience. Changeover manages this admirably. Sports media might be ailing; sports writing, it assures us, is alive and well.
English (US) · 