This article is part of our New York Court Classics series, a special feature produced by The Athletic looking back at classic U.S. Open performances, iconic athletes and timeless moments.
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FLUSHING MEADOWS, N.Y. — In tennis, moments that seem seismic or transformative don’t always turn out that way.
When Marat Safin and then Lleyton Hewitt thrashed Pete Sampras in the 2000 and 2001 U.S. Open finals, it felt as if one or both of those men would dominate the sport for the next decade or so. Then Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic came along and everything changed. Safin and Hewitt won just one more Grand Slam title each; the Big Three won 66 between them and Djokovic is still active.
Right after Federer broke Sampras’ record of 14 Grand Slam singles titles, a 20-year-old Juan Martin del Potro beat him in the 2009 U.S. Open final. Four wrist surgeries later, Del Potro did heroically to even reach another one nine years on, when Djokovic beat him.
Tracy Austin won the U.S. Open as a 16 year old in 1979 and again two years later, at which point many more majors felt inevitable. Injuries and then a car crash meant that she played her last Grand Slam aged 20, barring a brief comeback 11 years later.
But some do become as meaningful as they felt at the time. Federer’s defeat of Sampras at Wimbledon in 2001 was hailed as a changing of the guard; it proved to be exactly that.
In recent U.S. Open history, one match stands above the rest. At 9:35 p.m. on Sept. 7, 2022, a player called Jannik Sinner stepped up to the baseline to serve to a player called Carlos Alcaraz in the quarterfinals. Five hours and 15 minutes later, the world of men’s tennis was forever changed.
Sinner and Alcaraz, then aged 21 and 19 respectively, played a stupendous match at mesospheric altitude and never came down. They did not just birth a rivalry to succeed those between the Big Three, softening the blow of their impending departures. They offered a tantalizing glimpse into the very future of the sport, serving notice of a reconfiguration of what it means to play tennis that continues to this day.
Alcaraz ultimately lifted the trophy in New York, setting in motion a domination of the majors that has seen him and Sinner win nine of the last 12, with Djokovic winning the other three.
They played an even longer, more epic match three months ago, when Alcaraz won the French Open final in five hours and 29 minutes, having saved three straight championship points. They met again in the Wimbledon final a month later, which Sinner won, and they are in line to do it again at this year’s U.S. Open. That would represent the first time two men have met in three straight major finals in the same year.
At 2:50 a.m., the U.S. Open’s latest finish in history following its second-longest match, everyone present knew they had witnessed history. The scoreline, a 6-3, 6-7(7), 6-7(0), 7-5, 6-3 victory for Alcaraz, doesn’t even come close to telling the story.
“Thanks to that match, I grew up a lot,” Alcaraz said in a news conference last week. “I have to deal with some situations, and sometimes I just think about the match, the way that I felt physically and the way that I just managed everything.”
Sinner spoke a few days earlier as though looking back at the start of a friendship as well as the beginning of a rivalry.
“I felt like we were getting to know each other and in different ways, but we also didn’t know exactly what to expect in the future,” he said.
Prior to meeting in New York, Sinner and Alcaraz had played each other three times. After their entertaining first meeting at the Paris Masters in October 2021, a defeated Sinner said to Alcaraz: “I hope we play a couple more times.” A beaming Alcaraz responded: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.”
They met again at Wimbledon the following year, with Sinner winning a fourth-round, four-set thriller that made casual fans sit up and take notice. A few weeks later, Sinner beat Alcaraz again, this time on clay in the final of the Croatia Open in another entertaining match. Once their U.S. Open quarterfinal was set, it was clear that it would be worth staying up for — especially because they were at intriguingly different stages of their careers.
Having climbed 99 spots in 12 months to end 2021 as the world No. 32, Alcaraz arrived for the 2022 season bulked up and ready to shatter the sport’s established order. Djokovic was king, with Nadal and Daniil Medvedev as his main rivals. Alcaraz won the Miami Open, Barcelona, and Madrid Open titles, beating both Nadal and Djokovic in the latter; by the time the U.S. Open rolled around, he was No. 4 in the world.
Before he arrived in New York, his best Grand Slam result that year was a French Open quarterfinal, but he wasn’t just winning: He was wowing the tennis world with his dazzling shotmaking skills, including a crazily effective drop shot.
Sinner’s steadier rise up the rankings was less attention-grabbing. He reached the French Open quarterfinals in 2020, and in 2022 made the last eight of both the Australian Open and Wimbledon. He even led Djokovic by two sets on Center Court, before what felt like an inevitable collapse. Sinner was clearly talented, but he still had the feel of a colt who was a little unsteady on his feet. Watching the Alcaraz match back, it is striking how much more slight Sinner looks compared to now. His style too was less eye-catching. Sinner was clearly an incredible ballstriker, but tennis had seen versions of him before. Alcaraz was something largely unrecognizable.
Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz’s 2022 meeting showcased their otherworldly skill for over five hours. (Julian Finney / Getty Images)
Still, Sinner was ranked No. 13 going into the U.S. Open and seeded No. 11. In a sign of his ambition, he had fired his coach from childhood, Riccardo Piatti, that February. Sinner replaced him with technical master Simone Vagnozzi and Darren Cahill, the regarded former coach of Grand Slam champions Andre Agassi, Hewitt and Simona Halep. Opportunity knocked for both players, with Wimbledon champion Djokovic absent because he hadn’t had the COVID-19 vaccine, while an ailing Nadal, who had won the first two majors of the year, was beaten by Frances Tiafoe in the fourth round.
Going into their quarterfinal, there were far more secrets between Sinner and Alcaraz than there are now.
“I feel like when we were very, very young, it was where you just go on court and just hit, you know,” Sinner said last week.
“Now I feel like we have to prepare tactically, we have to prepare it also emotionally and mentally.
“Everything is different, because in the past three years, we faced each other many times, and every match we play it’s different, if we watch the tactical side. So we make adjustments.”
Sinner’s words fit the match perfectly. There is a purity to it, unencumbered by tactics and prepared attempts to really manacle the other. There are fireworks whenever these two play, but over the course of their 14 meetings, their rivalry has evolved from a computer-game simulation on a tennis court into a battle of marginal gains. Their 2024 French Open semifinal was attritional, while for the first few sets of this year’s final there — and throughout the one that followed at Wimbledon — Sinner’s relentless ballstriking worked as designed to subdue Alcaraz’s most creative instincts.
In 2022, the relative immaturity of the rivalry created something almost extinct: a five-set match that was unrelentingly exciting.
Part of that came from Sinner and Alcaraz sharing a weakness that they have since turned into a strength: their serves. Giri Nathan, whose recently released book, “Changeover: A Young Rivalry and a New Era of Men’s Tennis,” documents their journey to the top of the sport, said in a phone interview Tuesday: “That was one of my most distinctive memories from that 2022 match.
“Both of these guys were ludicrously talented, but the serve was a deficit for both of them and actually led itself to more entertaining tennis because there were more neutral rallies that someone had to take control of.” Nathan, who has watched the match in full a handful of times and the 45-minute YouTube highlights even more frequently, writes in his book that they should screen them in movie theaters.
Three points in, they offered a taste of what was to come. A 15-shot rally ended with an Alcaraz dart to the net and a stop volley that landed dead on Sinner’s side. In the fifth game, Sinner came up with a drop volley of his own, which Alcaraz chased down and replied with a lob. Sinner sprinted back and flicked a forehand passing shot beyond his opponent.
Sinner and Alcaraz were remaking the geometry of the court in real time, foreshadowing how their ascendancy has forced the rest of the tour to be comfortable attacking from outside the tramlines and inside the service line, as well as flipping defense to attack at a moment’s notice. The Big Three pushed boundaries again and again throughout their careers, but this was PlayStation tennis, played at a pace that surely couldn’t be sustainable over five sets. During their rise, their competitors — most notably the “sandwich generation” that has played both them and the Big Three — have said time and again that the version of tennis that Sinner and Alcaraz play has destroyed the effectiveness of their own games.
Alcaraz won the first set 6-3, before producing the shot of the match, the tournament and possibly still his career.
With Sinner serving down 6-5, the Italian blasted a short forehand crosscourt toward the open court. Alcaraz moved so quickly to get it that he ran past the ball, and in a split-second flicked it from behind him, somehow generating enough pace and accuracy to not just get the ball back, but force Sinner into an awkward volley. From there, he chased down another shot and whipped a backhand pass for a winner. Alcaraz, grinning like a Cheshire cat and jutting his chin out in defiance, looked over to his coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero, as if to say: ‘“Did you see what I just did?”
Ferrero shook his head, said, “Wow,” and beamed like a proud parent. It was all the more remarkable given that Alcaraz had just seen three set points come and go.
Sinner held on, and after saving five set points in total, he took the second set on a tiebreak. Alcaraz had been taking up a wider than usual position while serving, but Sinner grew wise to it. Up 8-7, he anticipated a serve to his backhand and nailed a return winner down the line.
“I just loved that as an early example of how these guys, who were so young then, were making these constant tinkering adjustments,” Nathan said.
“I think those will probably get more subtle over time and maybe harder to pick up for the naked eye, but back then, when they were still so raw, it was a little more obvious when Alcaraz was trying something drastically different.”
Sinner reacted to winning the set with a big celebration, something now incredibly rare. In the third-set tiebreak, he reached the kind of supersonic level now more regularly associated with Alcaraz. Sinner took it 7-0, helped by an inside-out forehand winner and then a blazing forehand pass while running at full pelt. He was a set away from his first major semifinal.
Sinner served for the match up 5-4 in the fourth set, and even had a match point that he couldn’t take. “I just believe in myself that I could break in this moment,” Alcaraz said in his news conference after the match. Just as he kept believing when even closer to the cliff edge at Roland Garros this year, where he saved three match points from 0-40 on his serve.
Alcaraz won the next two games to force a deciding set, which began at 2:05 a.m. The crowd had thinned, but those who stayed couldn’t believe what they were seeing, and even the normally implacable Sinner was swept up by it. After hitting a forehand winner on the run after Alcaraz had lobbed him and then returned a smash, he whipped them up in a way he so rarely does now. But it was Alcaraz who ultimately prevailed, sealing the final set 6-3 with an ace and collapsing to the floor.
In his on-court interview, an exhausted Alcaraz said: “I always say you have to believe in yourself all the time, and that hope is the last thing you lose.
“I just believed in myself and believed in my game.”
Alcaraz beat Tiafoe in another late-night five-setter a couple of days later, and then Casper Ruud in the final to become the youngest ever men’s world No. 1. He has won Grand Slams every year since. Sinner took a bit longer to push on from this match, not winning his first major until January 2024, but their New York classic spelled out that in this brave new tennis world, Alcaraz was not going to dominate the sport alone.
That was one of Nathan’s takeaways, plus the fact that as different as the two men were, they shared plenty of similarities. “The heaviness of the ball, the pace of the ball, their movement abilities are on a tier of their own, if we allow that Djokovic is in something of a decline.
“And then the balanced nature on both serve and return and forehand and backhand. I think that even from that match, you can tell there’s very few vulnerabilities in these two players’ games to exploit, and perhaps they’re the only two who can do it to each other.”
“It was an important match to see also that our peak is very interesting. It was for sure one of the key matches,” Sinner said last week.
Alcaraz was even more definitive: “I think from that match people have talked about our rivalry, and I think from that match our rivalry had a place in tennis history.”
(Top photos: Julian Finney / Getty Images; Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic)
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