TURIN, Italy — This is what they have been waiting for.
Some really good tennis players have congregated in northern Italy for the ATP Tour Finals, the most exclusive men’s tournament in the sport. Only the best eight players available receive an invitation.
Novak Djokovic, the greatest player of his era, and maybe any era, isn’t here. He’s 37, a combination of injured and exhausted and trying to save himself for next year’s Grand Slams.
For the generation of players born in the middle and late 1990s, Djokovic’s absence represents a void they have dreamed of for most of their careers. For the first time since 2001, no member of the Big Three (Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal) is in the field for the event.
It is a harbinger that will before too long spread to the rest of the calendar, removing the top layer of the sandwich that for years squeezed all those hot shots born in the years leading up to the 21st century out of Grand Slams and Masters 1000s. When Djokovic won the 2023 U.S. Open, he racked up their 66th title in 79 majors. They played each other so often in finals and semifinals that players born in the 1990s barely got the chance to lose in the late stages, let alone imagine winning.
“I think the mental coping that I was doing was, well, every time I was in the quarters I played Djokovic,” said Taylor Fritz, 27, at this year’s tournament. Fritz reached his first Grand Slam semifinal there, then his first final. He lost to Jannik Sinner, who, along with Carlos Alcaraz, is the avatar of how Djokovic and Nadal (who is retiring this month after the Davis Cup) have stuck around just long enough to complete their wreckage of the sandwich generation’s tennis lives.
Just when they thought the Big Three were going to stop hogging all the oxygen, a 19-year-old from Murcia and a 21-year-old from the Dolomites stepped onto Arthur Ashe Stadium in 2022 and played five sets of computer game tennis that left the 90s group breathless once more. Since that quarterfinal, Alcaraz and Sinner have won six majors between them and have both spent time as world No. 1, which Sinner currently occupies.
Djokovic won the other majors. The sandwich squeezed once more.
“Those guys are I guess younger, but they have done better than, let’s say, the ’90s kids, whatever you or I want to call them,” Casper Ruud, 25, a three-time Grand Slam finalist, said in a news conference on Monday. Ruud lost to Alcaraz in the final of that fateful 2022 U.S. Open; Nadal and Djokovic annihilated him at Roland Garros in successive years.
“They have been, this year, almost in a league of their own.”
This isn’t how the sport usually goes. There was an interregnum between the Pete Sampras/Andre Agassi dominance of the 1990s and the emergence of Federer, and then Nadal and Djokovic. There was time for the Patrick Rafters and Marat Safins and Carlos Moyas and Juan Carlos Ferreros to get a slice of the limelight. Later, Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka fought their way to majors; Juan Martin del Potro and Marin Cilic grabbed opportunities when they came.
There is unlikely to be another interregnum for some time, but there are slivers of that light. Ruud registered his first win over Alcaraz in five attempts on Monday afternoon, taking advantage of an under-the-weather opponent playing in his worst environment — indoors on a fast court. After, he acknowledged that Alcaraz’s error-strewn match contributed mightily to his success as he tries to play more aggressively to rise to the heights that Sinner and Alcaraz have taken tennis.
“It’s not the nature of my game,” he said. “I’m hesitating a little bit when I need to be too aggressive. But I’m trying.”
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better,” Samuel Beckett famously wrote. That’s about what tennis has become for Ruud’s generation, which also includes Fritz, Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev, and Andrey Rublev, all of whom are in Turin.
Some appear to be managing the process better than others.
Medvedev, the most successful member of the group, is in the midst of an intense struggle to find motivation. Mentally and physically exhausted, he has reached the end of his strings.
“Every practice is a struggle, every match is a struggle,” the six-time Grand Slam finalist and 2021 U.S. Open champion said in a news conference on Sunday after losing to Fritz in straight sets. Medvedev was blowing even Sinner away not so long ago, racking up six straight wins with his beguiling defense and serve. Since then, a shoulder issue, changes in balls, and Sinner’s development have knocked him back. Alcaraz’s ability to dominate the front of the court has negated the deep return strategy that Medvedev used to put so many opponents out of joint.
Medvedev, 28, is a former world No. 1. Zverev, 27, is the current world No. 2 and has won the ATP Tour Finals twice, but he says he knows that he holds that position on the ATP computer alone.
Being at the top of their sport can make them feel like also-rans. Tennis will do that to you.
Zverev took on another leading member of the sandwich generation on Monday night in Rublev, who is 28 and is always teetering on the edge of another unpleasant incident of self-flagellation. He has bloodied himself multiple times in the past year. Like salt being rubbed into wounds, the match was delayed by about 20 minutes while the ATP awarded Sinner the trophy for finishing the year as the world No. 1.
There probably was no good time for the ceremony. This Tour Finals is basically a sandwich generation convention. It was going to be awkward no matter what.
Like Ruud, and also the 27-year-old Fritz, Zverev has embraced the challenge of trying to match Alcaraz and Sinner, if not every week or every season, but at least during a single two-week stretch of seven matches, when he can win a so-far elusive Grand Slam. He is an Olympic gold medalist but has said all the other tournaments he has won will ultimately mean nothing unless he wins one of the four majors.
To that end, Zverev has basically let go of any results he might achieve this fall. Last month in Paris, he practiced for an hour every day after his matches as he rolled to the title in the year’s last important big tournament, the Paris Masters.
He said he was happy with the outcome. He’d rather win than not. Who wouldn’t? But he remains focused almost singularly on improvement, and if that meant taking to the court in Paris on weary legs, so be it. The Australian Open was a little more than two months away then and is closer now; Zverev wants to be playing the kind of tennis the game demands by then.
Like Ruud, he believes he has to play more aggressively to have a chance to stay on the court with Sinner and Alcaraz.
“When they get an easy ball, when they’re in an attacking position, 90 percent of the time the point is over, whether it’s a winner or an unforced error,” he said. “That’s how hard they hit the ball, that’s how aggressive they are. I think in that aspect I can improve. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
After the Sinner show, he did it very well on Monday night against Rublev to win 6-4, 6-4, pushing into the court and practically throwing his racket at the ball nearly every time he got the chance to put away a point, even sometimes when the chances weren’t there.
None of this is to suggest that all hope is lost and that Sinner and Alcaraz will win everything important for a decade. That just doesn’t happen. As Ruud noted on Monday after his win, “They’re also human. I mean, they will lose matches, just not that many during a year.”
Sinner may yet be stopped by off-court forces greater than any player. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is seeking a ban of one or two years in its appeal of Sinner’s doping case, which it submitted to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) in September.
Earlier this year, Sinner twice tested positive for clostebol, an anabolic steroid. Three tribunals convened by the tennis anti-doping authorities accepted his explanation that the substance inadvertently ended up in his system after his physiotherapist used it to treat a cut on his own finger and then gave Sinner a massage. WADA, too, accepts his explanation but believes he should bear some responsibility for the actions of his team.
Until then, the players will have to keep trying to figure out how to topple him and Alcaraz on the tennis court. On Tuesday, it’s Fritz’s turn, as he and Sinner will duel in a rematch of the U.S. Open final, in which Sinner won by doing what Fritz does, but a bit better — and by tweaking his return position when Fritz gathered some momentum. Fritz hasn’t been hanging around the top 10 since the late 20-teens like his European peers. He’s only recently become a serious threat with a ticking clock, trying to max out his potential before it’s too late.
(Top photo: Nicolo Campo / LightRocket via Getty Images)
