REVIEW: Sincaraz books capture Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz in the wake of new era-defining dominance

For 20 years, we had stasis at the top of men’s tennis. Since late 2022, it feels as if we’ve been moving in permanent fast forward.

The shift began that September. Early in the month, Carlos Alcaraz, then 19, won his first major title at the US Open. Later the same month, Roger Federer, then 41, bid a tearful good-bye to tennis at Laver Cup in London.

The other shoe—in the form of Jannik Sinner—dropped 12 months after that. First, the 22-year-old Italian beat 36-year-old Novak Djokovic in a series of important matches to close out 2023. Then he ended his long run of dominance at the Australian Open to start 2024.

We had been waiting for a changing of the ATP guard for so long, some of us wondered if it would ever happen. Who could follow the Big 3’s 66-Slam act? By the end of 2024, in stunningly swift fashion, we had our answer. That year, Alcaraz and Sinner split the four majors, and they did the same in 2025. At Roland Garros this spring, they gave us a classic final worthy of the very best of the Big 3’s.

After Federer, Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal raised the bar inhumanly high for so long, I expected we would see the return of the human—i.e., occasionally imperfect—champion to tennis. Instead, with their ever-faster pace of play and ever-cleaner ball-striking, Alcaraz and Sinner look poised to raise the bar higher. Jim Courier christened them the “New 2,” but that phrase has quickly reached its expiration date. Neither of them is 25, but at this point there’s nothing novel about their rivalry.

So maybe it makes sense that Sinner and Alcaraz—before marriage, before kids, before steady girlfriends, maybe even before their brains are fully formed—have already been given the book treatment. This summer saw the release of Being Carlos Alcaraz, by British tennis writer Mark Hodgkinson, and *Changeover*,\ by Giri Nathan of the sports site Defector. Anyone who has written a sports-related book will be jealous of their timing. There was no guarantee when they started writing that, at the moment their volumes arrived, Sinner and Alcaraz wouldn’t be injured or slumping or just mediocre. Instead, to the delight of their publishers, the two were about to play their third straight Slam final at the Open.

The measure of a good sports biography in my case is whether it (a) makes me want to watch its subject more, and (b) helps me see them with new and possibly more sympathetic eyes. Both of these books succeed in doing that, and in setting the narrative table for the sport’s next rivalry.

Hodgkinson’s Alcaraz bio is the more nuts-and-bolts of the two. If you want to fill in any gaps in your knowledge of early Carlitos, the book has you covered.

But nuts-and-bolts doesn’t mean dry. Hodgkinson is good at evoking Alcaraz’s hometown of El Palmar in southeast Spain, a laid-back village of 20,000 with year-round sun that’s referred to as “Europe’s orchard,” and where a giant mural of an 11-year-old Alcaraz is now plastered across a wall at his old elementary school.

For me, the early Alcaraz—who was nicknamed Tarzan by a coach—can be summed up in one image from this book. As a 5-year-old, he loved to bash the ball against the backboard at his local club over and over and over, ideally without end. Alcaraz’s father, a teaching pro at the same club, said his son resembled a mini ground-stroke machine when he went up against the wall—one who hid his dad’s keys so he wouldn’t have to leave, and cried when he finally did. Tennis was life for Alcaraz’s father, Carlos, Sr., and it would be for Carlos, Jr., as well.

From there, Hodgkinson takes us to the next stop on Alcaraz’s turbo-journey to the top: Juan Carlos Ferrero’s academy in nearby Alicante. That the former No. 1 would set up shop within driving distance of the Alcaraz family’s tiny hometown feels providential. The academy, located in the mountains far from any nightlife, turned out to be a suitably hardcore and ascetic introduction to big-time tennis for the fun-loving but not rebellious teenager. Even Covid was a blessing in disguise: Alcaraz spent six weeks locked down at Ferrero’s academy, and emerged a much-improved 17-year-old.

There’s not much dirt or gossip to report on Alcaraz yet. The worst thing he seems to have done so far is sing “We Are the Champions” off-key at a karaoke bar with friends in Ibiza after winning Roland Garros. Ferrero had warned him against the party trip. It’s good to know Alcaraz ignored him, and then won Wimbledon a few weeks later anyway.

Maybe most revealing to me is the fact that Alcaraz has seen two different psychologists, starting when he was eight. The first, Josefina Cutillas, may be as responsible as anyone for the fun-first, process-over-results attitude that has worked so well for him.

“When they spoke on Mondays, Alcaraz wasn’t allowed to tell Cutillas whether he had won or lost his latest match, only how he thought he had played,” Hodgkinson writes. “Giving attention to the result would have reduced Alcaraz’s tennis to winning or losing, to being a success or a failure, and Cutillas didn’t want that for him.”

“Cutillas was hoping that as a boy, and maybe deeper into his tennis life, he would be less interested in his results than in whether he was improving and meeting the standards he was setting for himself.”

By all accounts, Cutillas’s wishes have come true. Even today, Alcaraz says he plays his best when he enjoying himself, expressing himself in his shots and movement, and finding satisfaction in his own performance, rather than worrying about winning and losing. It’s an attitude that millions of tennis players over the decades have tried to maintain as they compete; Alcaraz may go down as the first ever to make it work.

Where Hodgkinson gets us up to speed on Alcaraz’s formation, Nathan, in *Changeover*, takes the reins and tells the story of the most recent development in his career, his rivalry and relationship with Sinner.

The book is an extended celebration of tennis genius, 2020s-style, and a more writerly affair than Hodgkinson’s. Nathan leads it with a Phillip Larkin poem about rebirth in nature. He says Alcaraz’s game “combined so many traits that didn’t belong together into a single psychedelic point.” He explains Daniil Medvedev’s mock-villainous reputation by detailing his appearance this way: “the expansive plane of his forehead, those cunning beady eyes, the physiognomy of a supervillain plotting to take down the power grid.”

Nathan admits that his work could be seen as one more cog in the tennis media’s “Rivalry Industrial Complex,” which is always itching to spring into overdrive when two players rise to the top at the same time. But he does a good job of outlining the differences, as players and people, between the two.

Like Alcaraz, and Nadal before them, Sinner was raised in a remote area: the village of Sexten, on the border between Italy and Austria in the Dolomites. While tennis was the be-all and end-all for Alcaraz and his father, it was “just another game” for Sinner and his family. Skiing was the default sport in their mountains. Sinner says it’s “very, very strange” to imagine a tennis player coming from there. He was an excellent skier, too, but his skinny frame was better suited to tennis, which he took up at the advanced age of 13.

Hodgkinson and Nathan both say that Alcaraz “plays how he feels” on any given day. Sinner, by contrast, is always planning his next move. Nathan quotes an early coach of Sinner’s praising his “capacity for work, and for simplifying it.” From a young age, he was thinking ahead to a pro career, and had little interest in juniors. He studied the pros for hours on video at night—but only the ones who had orderly playing styles that made “sense.” When he practiced with touring pros, he took a lot from the experience; unlike other kids, his coach said, he wasn’t just interested in the Instagram shot at the end.

If there’s an anecdote in Changeover that helps explain Sinner to me, it comes when he tells his coach at the time, Ricardo Piatti, “to stay f-ing calmer” on court, and then fires him soon after. Calmness, thoughtfulness, cool calculation: They mean a lot to Sinner. Precision is his calling card, and you need a cool head and a steady hand to time the ball the way he does, as consistently as he does.

Alcaraz and Sinner have both shown a desire to keep improving. Each has recently upgraded his serve, and each grabbed the No. 1 ranking because of it. Each of them has also shown an ability to live with and enjoy success. Nathan notes that Sinner began to show a looser side to his personality when he rose to No. 1 in 2024, and Alcaraz has been smilier than ever during his successful 2025.

This week in Paris, provided both of their bodies remain willing, they’ll play in the same event for the first time since the US Open. Right now, as we start to think about 2026, it seems like we’ve passed an early peak in the Sincaraz era. They gave us an epic Slam final in Paris, and two decent but fairly one-sided follow-ups at Wimbledon and in New York. It won’t be easy for them to keep manufacturing classics. Even Federer and Nadal never topped their five-setters at Wimbledon in 2008 and the Australian Open in 2009. Over the following eight years, they would only meet in one major final.

What might be next for Sinner and Alcaraz, and what might put an extra edge into their rivalry in 2026? One thing that has surprised me so far is that they have yet to create feuding fan bases—or, if they have, I haven’t found them. That was a major element of every Big 3 match: You knew, whenever they met, that it was life or death for millions of fans who loved their guy, and detested the guy across the net.

With Federer versus Nadal, and then with both of them versus Djokovic, there was always a king vs. usurper dynamic. Federer gracefully dominated for two years, before his polar opposite, the teenaged, muscle-bound Nadal, dared to challenge him. Then, just as they had won over the world with their tear-filled epics, along came Djokovic to crash the party. The fan resentment never abated.

Alcaraz and Sinner, who emerged at roughly the same time, lack that dynamic; neither is a rightful king or a usurper. Can these two nice and generally humble guys inspire the kind of loyalty, and the kind of hatred, that the Big 3 did?

If not, we may miss it, or we may not. For now, as these two books ably relate, we’re lucky to have two worthy heirs to the throne. Hopefully, we’ll never get bored of their brilliance.