The Unbearable Sainthood of Jannik Sinner

The Marvel supervillain Thanos was known for his iconic declarative: “I am inevitable.” It’s not hard to imagine Jannik Sinnner, the new hegemon and (depending on where you stand) heel of men's tennis – the world number one-ranked player at the time of this article's publication – invoking those same words.

At the fourth round of this year's U.S Open, the 23-year-old Italian faced off against a familiar foe in Kazakhstan’s Alexander Bublik: a huge-serving, mercurial entertainer with the talent to beat anyone on a good day. Bublik had narrowly won their last encounter on the grass courts of Halle, Germany, back in June. His disorienting cocktail of a game– a one-two punch in his serve and forehand, often sprinkled with early dropshots and soft touches with his racquet – has tested the best.

In New York, before facing Sinner, the Kazakh hadn’t had his serve broken all tournament. This included a five-set thriller against the home crowd favorite, American Tommy Paul, in the previous round, which included three tiebreak sets. Against Sinner, a defending champion in imperious form himself, Bublik could hardly be considered a favourite, but there was every reason to believe he’d make it a fight.

Just as quickly as that belief had caught fire, Sinner snuffed it out decisively. Before long, Bublik found himself at the net, shaking hands with his opponent he’d lost to by 6-1, 6-1, 6-1 – a triple ‘breadstick’, as the scoreline is known among the purists. To extend that colloquial shorthand, Sinner had practically rendered one of the sport’s biggest servers a patron in a restaurant.

“I’m not that bad,” Bublik said to Sinner, smiling in disbelief, his arm around the younger player. “I mean, what the fuck?”

He may have voiced the central takeaway of every opponent Sinner’s faced since his reinvention as a player two years ago – when he ascended from promising young talent to bona fide world-beater, achieved the world number one ranking, and routinely made world-class players look like weekend hitting partners at your local park tennis courts.

The mechanistic inevitability of Sinner’s dominance feels reminiscent of former top-ranked and all-time great player, Novak Djokovic, who, during his prime years, seemed to possess the irreplicable quality of refusing to lose. But in their most recent matches, even Djokovic has increasingly lost against the young Italian – an unstoppable force and immovable object rolled into one, whose ruthless offensive groundstrokes exude an awe only equalled by his unquestioned dominion over the baseline.

Sinner, once a mere floppy-haired youth, has turned himself into an unflappable player. You can break his serve, but he’ll just break you right back. You could take a set off him, if you prayed hard enough to the tennis gods, but he’ll return the favour by closing out the match in the next few sets. Once he has a lead, he’ll step on your throat and keep his sneaker there until you suffocate. If by some miracle, you managed to actually beat him, he’ll make sure that it’s a fluke by returning the favor next time you play. 

Fans would be forgiven for thinking he had a divine mark, given his highly publicized meeting with the new Pope back in May. Truly, this sinner’s only vulnerability has been a three-month absence from the tour due to testing positive on a doping test last year. In other words, it took a straight-up suspension from the sport’s governing body to prevent him from annihilating just about every other player in his path.

Every player, but for one. Aside from Bublik, only one other person has beaten Sinner. Tennis’s greatest anti-hero and party-crasher has only been consistently stopped by the tour’s veritable party animal, a cat named Carlos Alcaraz. 

Two years Sinner’s junior, and somehow even more prodigious – although with far less baseline consistency – Alcaraz has been the golden boy to Sinner’s dark knight. The superhero to Sinner’s suave Bond villain. Watching him play tennis is like art deco to Sinner’s brutalism – the Spaniard is just as merciless toward his opponents, but his masterclasses are also more pleasing to the eye.

The rivalry between these two will push tennis to new heights for years to come. Already, Sinner and Alcaraz have been anointed as the new tentpole carriers for the sport, elevated to premature sainthood. But of the two, absent any shakeup in his soulless tennis and professional persona, only Sinner will elicit groans for years to come.

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The Third Column