The Budding Rivalry of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner

“A person’s tennis,” John McPhee writes in “Levels of the Game,” from 1969, “begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and characteristics of play.” Your style is an expression of your innate self, a product of small decisions, such as the way you hold your racket, your second-serve philosophy, your tendency to patrol the baseline or rush the net. “If he is deliberate,” McPhee continues, “he is a deliberate tennis player,” just as a flamboyant person plays flamboyantly; these self-discoveries emerge over thousands of hours of practice. But, in order for these styles to mean anything, we require a rival. We need someone else to draw out the unique shape of our play.