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Sometime in 2009 or 2010, after yet another loss to Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal, I distinctly remember feeling sorry for Novak Djokovic. He was clearly a very good tennis player, but he was just as clearly doomed to have played in the wrong era.
Federer and Nadal had won 25 of 30 Grand Slam events between Wimbledon 2003 and the 2010 US Open, and while Djokovic had managed to snag one of the five strays when he took the 2008 Australian Open crown, he obviously wasn’t going to get many other opportunities. In a different era, he could have won maybe five or 10 Slams!
My numbers turned out to be a little bit off. Over time, Djokovic mastered his fitness, his flexibility, his backhand and his serve and slowly became the best in-match problem solver the game has ever seen. He won three of four Slams in 2011 and forced the Big Two to become a Big Three.
We never completely know how the future is going to unfold. We get a lot of the details right but whiff horribly on others. Federer and Nadal indeed combined for 42 Slam titles, each crushing the previous record of 14. That, we expected. But we didn’t expect Djokovic, after spotting them both enormous leads, to zip by both of them to 24.
Right now, it appears the men’s game has entered another Big Two era, with Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner having split the last seven Slams and nine of the last 12. (The other three, of course, were all won by Djokovic in 2023.) They’ve met in each of the last two Slam finals, and heading into the second round of the US Open, they were a combined 87-10 on the year — 4-4 against each other and 83-6 against everyone else. In Slams, that’s 2-2 against each other and 37-1 against the field. With Sinner only 24 years old and Alcaraz at 22, it’s easy to envision a world in which these two each…
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