With the Big 4 fading out, and Sinner plus Alcaraz rising up, men’s tennis began to revolve again in 2024

After being frozen in place for 20 years, the men’s-tennis world finally began to revolve again this season. Rafael Nadal and Andy Murray retired, while Novak Djokovic failed to win a Grand Slam title. Right on cue, two young upstarts, Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, took their places at the top of the game, and began to divvy up the major prizes between them.

The system—even though there really isn’t a system—worked. The transition between generations appears to be a smooth one. Which comes as something of a surprise to those of us who have wondered and worried for years about who would fill the shoes of the Big 3.

It was logical to expect a fallow period after such a fruitful one, as younger heirs jockeyed for the throne. But Sinner’s excellence and Alcaraz’s electricity have quieted those fears; the Italian and the Spaniard look like durable, popular champions. It’s as if the old guys hung around until they were sure the ATP would be in good hands without them.

The clearest changing-of-the-guard images of 2024 for me came at Roland Garros. Early in the tournament, 14-time champion Nadal exited Court Philippe Chatrier for the last time. Two weeks later, his countryman and most obvious successor, Alcaraz, lifted the champion’s trophy for the first time. It was strange to see Nadal, who had played the role of matador in that red-clay bullring for so long, simply raise his hand, put his head down, and walk out the door and down the tunnel for the last time.

It was the same door—though in a different city—that Rafa’s friend Roger Federer walked through after his Laver Cup farewell in 2022. If the first years of Nadal’s retirement are anything like Federer’s, we might be surprised how quickly he fades from the sport—or at least from the court.

In the 1970s, when I first started following tennis, older fans, players, and writers constantly criticized the champions of that moment—Borg Connors, Vilas—and compared them unfavorably to the Australian legends—Laver, Newcombe, Rosewall—who were heading into the sunset. The new guys didn’t come to the net, they didn’t play doubles, they needed two hands to hit their backhands, they were spoiled by fame and money, they hadn’t paid their dues on the amateur circuit, their hair was too long, et cetera.

When Federer, Nadal and Murray were at their peaks, I thought something similar would happen when they hung up their racquets. I imagined fans continuing to reminisce about them, to mourn them, to constantly, unfavorably compare the next generation to them, to shake their heads and say “nobody’s as graceful as Roger anymore,” or “none of these young guys fights like Rafa.”

You can never be bigger than the game. Roger Federer

But that hasn’t happened, or at least not nearly as much as I anticipated. If anything, the opposite has been true. Alcaraz in particular has been whole-heartedly embraced. I recently heard a U.S. sports reporter, whose main beat is NBA basketball, talk about how he had never seen an athlete like Alcaraz play tennis before. I couldn’t completely disagree, but I also wanted to ask, “You remember we just had Roger Federer, right?” I certainly didn’t expect to be mentally reminding people of RF’s existence, just two years after he retired.

This isn’t a bad problem for tennis to have. I’d rather be riveted by a new generation than nostalgic for the last one. But the passing of Federer, and now Nadal and Murray, into history is also a hard reminder of the finality of every career’s end.

When an athlete is gone, he or she is gone. Yet the game goes on, the tours don’t stop criss-crossing the globe, and we watch whoever is on the court in front of us. Wimbledon will be played next summer, and while we may think of Roger or Rafa or Andy, we won’t be rooting for them or dropping our jaws at one of their winners. On the one hand, the Big 4 seemed to be with us forever; on the other, it feels like five minutes ago that I was sitting in No. 1 Court at Wimbledon watching an 18-year-old Murray make his home-Slam debut in 2005, or sitting in a conference room in the Tennis magazine offices the same year, watching Federer and Nadal duel at Roland Garros for the first time.

From now on, Roger, Rafa, and Andy will belong to YouTube. If that sounds sterile and anti-climactic, it’s better than total oblivion, which is where the players and matches of earlier generations went, in the days before the Internet. With social media, none of today’s great athletes seem destined to vanish from their fans’ lives entirely. Murray will return as Djokovic’s coach in 2025. Federer popped up in several places in 2024—in a documentary, a book, and to give a commencement speech that went viral. Nadal has already built a mini-empire of academies that will likely produce a famous player or two of the future.

But the tennis world itself has turned.

“You can never be bigger than the game,” Federer said during the peak years of Big 4 dominance. We may have doubted him then, but 2024 showed us those words—happily—remain as true as ever.