Interview: Giri Nathan

This past summer, I hit up the US Open out in Queens for the first time in my life. It was a thoughtful birthday gift from my girl, who sipped on those overpriced honey deuce cocktails—the Long Island whites, vague Europeans, and Howard grads were tearing them up—all night, while I tore down some underwhelming Greek food that made me yearn for a true fix at Telly’s Taverna in Astoria with my guys. Even though, when we do hit the neighborhood we just end up going in at Sami’s Kabab House.

Under the bright lights of Louis Armstrong, we watched punk-ass Zverev get his shit packed in by the no. 1 lightskin Canadian in my heart these days, Felix Auger-Aliassime. (I wish $$$4U was good.) Felix was flying around the court at a pace I hadn’t seen since Andrew Nembhard (no. 5 ranked lightskin Canadian; there’s a surprising amount of lightskin Canadians, they swirling like a SEC d-lineman up there) put the clamps on my Knicks in the Eastern Conference Finals. Afterwards, I was on such a tennis high that I ordered that copy of Changeover, Giri Nathan’s new book on the rivalry between Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner and the long-awaited new guard of men’s tennis, that I had been meaning to for a few weeks.

During my commutes to the massive corporate shard of glass where my job’s at, I burned through the book in four or five days. Initially, I was kinda hesitant to tap in because Alcaraz and Sinner are prime examples of the PR-ification of the tennis star, but I was tripping considering Giri has such a unique voice in tennis journalism. I got hip to him through copies of Racquet Mag I picked up at Casa Magazines in the Village, and then, followed his pen over to Defector, where he’s a co-founder. Combining the technicality of old Sports Illustrated writers like Frank Deford and the bloggy spirit of the Deadspin era, Giri writes about tennis in a way that’s dripping with curiosity, passion, and humor. He’s the only dude that can get me to read an entire article on tennis ball manufacturing. I just know they’re up to some evil Coma (1978) shit in the Penn factory.

Giri brings that vibe (the good writing, not the evil shit) to Changeover, turning Alcaraz and Sinner into full humans even without the access of the Halberstam and Feinstein sports books of the ’70s and ’80s. Following much of their 2024 season, Giri dives into their upbringings and on-court game, going into such insane detail that I can now casually talk about racket speed and the bounce of the ball on clay and grass whenever I want. But it’s more than a book about their duels, it’s also about the passing of the torch from the Big Three era and a multi-generational clash. That’s where Giri really gets to flex his storytelling and mythmaking, depicting Djokovic as the final boss and Medvedev as the ordinary man caught in between a battle of superhumans. The chapter on Meddy is some of the best sports writing of the year.

A while back, I sent Giri a DM asking if he would talk to me about his book and he was with it. I’ve had friends and people I know that have written books, but I’ve never really spoken to them about the process in depth. I usually just tell them “that’s fire” or “you crazy for writing a whole ass book.” I remedied that on my call with Giri, who was at home in Park Slope ready to break down all that went into Changeover. Unfortunately, I didn’t ask him for his personal lightskin Canadian rankings.

Alphonse: How were you introduced to tennis?

Giri: When I was like 10 or 11 my dad started taking lessons, and I’d play with him. I played in middle school and high school; I wasn’t a particularly serious player, but it was the golden age of the sport, it was right as Fed was coming up. Then came Rafa. But my interest waxed and waned with the sport and I didn’t grow up thinking I wanted to be a sports writer. I kind of lost touch with tennis in college and then after I graduated I started watching it again.

I got a job at Deadspin, which was cool because they would let you cook and make mistakes. There, I got a chance to build out a tennis beat, which was exciting to me because it’s so popular worldwide, but there weren’t a lot of outlets writing about it regularly for American audiences. It felt like a good niche I could fill, and I got to do it with voice. Like, I didn’t have to go to the US Open thinking I need to write a timely recap of what happened in the most important match with the most important player. I was able to write about what catches my eye, and it kind of helped guide me from struggle tennis blogs to being able to write a whole book about it.

When you were getting back into tennis was there a specific moment that grabbed you?

Definitely. The timing worked out for me because it was around 2016, so I got back in in time to see the last battles of Serena, Roger, and Rafa. Then, came the 2017 season; in the previous year, people thought Federer and Nadal might be cooked and then they just went on a tear, meeting in that Australian Open final. I watched that match with my friend, it was a five-set classic. It was comforting to come back to the sport and it was still them two going at it, and at that point they had both added little things to their game.

One of the cool things about your book is that it really captures a moment in time. As a long time tennis fan one of the most frustrating parts is how splintered it is and how hard it is to learn about the rivalries that came before I was conscious. Did you feel that at all?

Yeah, I’ve had FOMO. You can hear about an old rivalry, but it’s hard to replicate that feeling of witnessing it pop off. Most writers and filmmakers are interested in telling the story of an entire legacy or the full sweep of a career, which is more serious but doesn’t capture that initial excitement. So one of my main goals was to try to preserve that feeling for some fan 20 years from now. But the sport does make it difficult. A lot of the writing about it is very meat and potatoes—here’s the score, here’s what happened in the match. I wanted to sink in and capture the ambience, the fan chatter, the physical spaces. There’s a couple good books that follow an entire season, I looked at those.

Which books?

There’s one called Hard Courts by John Feinstein, and another by Jon Wertheim called Venus Envy. They’re really good. They dial in on these specific epic matches and have these eulogies for great careers. So as a writer, I saw it as a perfect time to write about a changing of the guard and the narratives that come with that. I couldn’t have predicted that it would happen this cleanly.

How did you navigate not having the insane level of access those older books had? Like in A Season on the Brink, Feinstein is basically fucking living with Bobby Knight for a year.

I had an initial moment of panic when I was reading The Breaks of the Game, Halberstam is so enmeshed in the team and staff, like he’s getting into the backstories of the custodians at the facility. I just knew that in 2025 nobody has interest in that, everyone is trying to monetize their own personal story and form their own brand. That was the downside of writing now, but the upside is that we live in a surveillance state [laughs in a kind of damn, we’re fucked way]. There’s so many interviews, post-match conference transcripts, and YouTube clips out there that you can kind of assemble that story. Throughout the season, I kept a master doc of quotes and highlights that I found interesting, even stupid viral clips that showed a little of their personality. I did get to go to a lot of tournaments last year, too, but in the moments where I couldn’t that was helpful.

In some ways it might be even more accurate to write like that. I remember I was reading this Deford piece on a Borg-McEnroe match recently in a ’80s Sports Illustrated and thinking to myself “How did he fact check all of these match details?”

Yeah, they must be incredible real-time note takers or listen to radio replays or something. Infact my friend, Jeremy Gordon, wrote a good piece a couple of years ago where he went back and basically fact-checked some of the classic David Foster Wallace tennis writing. And it’s just like stuff that didn’t happen. Of course, he was a writer that was always blurring fact and fiction so he gets some leeway. I was lucky enough to take a class with John McPhee in college and he described all of the cassettes of voice notes and index cards of conversation he would keep in his reporting. I was like, “Man, we have it a lot easier now.”

Did you read Levels of the Game while you were in his class?

I did and read it a couple times since, it was for sure a model for my book in two respects. For one, structuring the book around one rivalry. And then, the way he dips in and out of action on the court and little tangents about their backstory. He does it in a way that’s so clean. But his is about one match, and of course, mine is more about a season.

Sometimes at my job when I have to write about a rapper a lot I’m always like “Shit, what could I possibly say about them now?” As someone who has written so much about Alcaraz and Sinner already, did you go into the book sort of overwhelmed by that feeling?

One interesting thing that helped me was just keeping an unrelated list of adjectives and phrases that I thought would be good ways to describe them in the book. I did that by reading a lot of non-sports writing that helped me draw from a different reservoir. It was a fun exercise to try over 270 pages, though not all of those descriptions made it into the final edit.

So are you saying you got a lot of the language for your tennis writing by reading stuff other than tennis writing?

Yeah, I would say stuff like music and food, subjects that require elements of craft and technique that I don’t know as a layman. But there’s nothing more fun to me than a writer who can walk me through like music production or cooking with a stylish paragraph. It’s not something you find a lot in sports writing, not because of the writers themselves, but just that most outlets demand overarching narratives. The luxury of a book is that you have so much space to talk about the air pressure or the way a ball moves. I read art criticism and nature writing, too, because I feel like they have a similar challenge. One nature writer I like is Annie Dillard. She comes up with these oblique and poetic ways to describe an insect I never seen.

Did you get any pushback from the ATP powers that be when writing the book?

They definitely didn’t roll out the red carpet. I told the ATP media relations guy that I’m working on this book and if he could help me set up any interviews and not a finger was lifted to make it easier for me. So I did a lot of direct outreach myself and saying “What’s up?” anytime I saw one of their agents. I understand it, my utility to them was quite low; I wasn’t interested in advancing any of their agendas. It was very much an insider’s outsider’s view of the season.

Of all the side characters in the book did you find one particularly difficult to write about?

It’s hard to concisely capture Djokovic’s whole multi-faceted and eccentric personality that has played out over, like, 20 years. I wanted to do it justice but that would probably need its own 600 page book. So it was a challenge to grab those details that I thought were most illustrative of him as a guy. One of the joys was that I feel like there aren’t many books or movies that capture an athlete in decline—and decline is relative when you’re talking about Djokovic because he can still beat pretty much anyone except those two guys. It’s also tough ’cause a legend in decline won’t always be a tidy and respectful story, like there are moments where Djokovic can be really cantankerous and spiteful. I tried to accurately portray them and give them context so readers didn’t feel that it was a sanitized version of the story.

Was it frustrating to go through so much footage and transcripts of Alcaraz and Sinner PR-speak?

There’s a huge generational shift with how they approach media in the first place. There’s a couple moments in the book where I try to get meta about that and talk about how players interact with press. I kind of touch on how the Big Three—sometimes Djokovic has been the exception—made civility the default on the ATP. There’s a level of cleanliness and media training with the goal of not losing any sponsorship opportunities. Secure the bag at all costs. With Alcaraz and Sinner I wasn’t waiting for it to crack, but in different ways it kind of cracked. There ended up being enough for me to chew on. I tried to also project a couple directions the rivalry could go while keeping it honest and responsible. We don’t know what will change as they get more comfortable. I’m also not in the business of predicting, otherwise I’d be doing betting odds or something.

When you wrote the Meddy chapter were you ever like, “Damn, I wish I was writing this entire book about him?”

Maybe that was like my way of Trojan horsing in my book proposal on the Medvedev biography. You might feel this, too, as a music critic, but there’s always this tension between what’s hot right now and what you personally find the most compelling. Like, obviously, the two guys are electric in their tennis and on a technical level, but I still found Medvedev the most interesting to talk to. He’s the guy dead in the middle of a generational shift, dealing with the old guys on their way out and the young guys on their way in. He’s also a darkly funny and sarcastic guy, which gives you a lot of material to work with. I felt like I had that chapter marinating in my head for three years. It’s almost like my intermission in the book.

Sort of a meta question: As a writer you’re usually behind the scenes, but is it weird to have to promote a book? It feels like it becomes as much about selling yourself as the story you wrote.

It’s weird to pivot into salesman mode, I feel like it’s something I was always reluctant to do. I’ve always just done the bare minimum like posting links to my articles and shit. I tried to do it in fun ways, like I set up this stand on the boardwalk in front of the US Open.

Oh yeah. I saw that.

I had to talk to dozens of tennis fans about my book, and probably 30% of them were straight-up like “I don’t read books.” A couple more were on the fence and I had to talk them into it; a couple more were like “It’s too early for this.” I don’t really like performing on the internet, but it was cool to talk to human tennis fans and try to convey my excitement for the subject matter in normal conversation. Anything is better than blasting my shit into the abyss.

Get yourself a copy of Giri’s book so he doesn’t have to Tweet about it.