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.
