Great Magazine Reads: Jannik Sinner may not have the flash, but he’s a likable tennis superstar

(This is my 1,400th article published on Pop Culture Lunch Box. Thanks to everyone who keeps reading!)

I was a little late to the Winter issue of Esquire to read the Jannik Sinner feature, but it was still right on time in terms of the world’s best male tennis player prepping to return to the French Open—at the end of May—fresh off a three-month drug suspension.

It’s pretty hard to believe that he did much of anything wrong. Sinner says a massage therapist had illegal substances on his hands that resulted in his violation. Other players are mad that he benefitted from a double standard that top players don’t get suspended as long as lower-ranked ones with similar positive drug tests. Regardless, this interview came out before the suspension took effect and I was eager to learn more about this likable Italian superstar.

For starters, Sinner went pro in 2018 at the tender age of 16. By the time he was 17, he was still only ranked 546 in the world but got into a relatively big tourney in Bergamo, Italy and won. By June 2024, with Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic finally fading from the top, Sinner assumed the number-1 ranking. He hadn’t loosened his hold until the drug suspension took him out of action between February and May.

He won late year’s US Open and, in fact, every hard-court tournament he entered in 2024. He has become the kind of tennis superstar we don’t really see in this country. But if you live in Europe, you’ll witness massive Gucci and Rolex ads towering above you with Sinner’s image in just about every major city. He is beloved and cherished, like the great soccer players on that continent.

Of course, articles in U.S. magazines about tennis tend to feel like advertisements themselves … for the game of tennis. Take the recent GQ piece on Djokovic, which I recently dissected. It’s almost like we don’t even know how to write about the sport I call “the beautiful game,” even if soccer fans might take offense at that optioning of their own tag line.

I do like this apt description of Sinner’s game by Esquire:

He isn’t flashy. He absorbs the shots of his opponents, returning them with ground strokes so powerful they’ve been known to make crowds gasp. You can hear a Sinner shot in the way it smashes off the racket with stunning speed.

Sinner is someone I do want to like, especially now that I don’t have my beloved Nadal to cheer for, but I do think there’s something a little less attractive, a little less romantic, about Sinner compared to the players I typically cheer for. Carlos Alcatraz and Joao Fonseca are the players I would love to see dominate the sport more than Sinner because they have a certain flash that he is missing.

“For me, you don’t win a match the moment you step on the court,” Sinner says in the article. “You win 80, 90 percent with the physical preparation—how you warm up, how you prepare tactically.” Totally true, but that doesn’t necessarily make for John McEnroe- or Jimmy Conners-type entertainment viewing.

One of the bits of flavor to Sinner’s biography is that his dad was a cook and his mom was a waitress at the same ski lodge, and Sinner is said to be a wicked good skier.

But he chose to focus on tennis, saying, “I feel safe on the tennis court, because you are focused on one thing: this yellow ball, which you want to put on the court. The only thing you have to handle is the pressure, because the pressure is always there. It’s nice to have it. If you don’t have it, or you don’t care, you’re not in the right position.”

Words of wisdom to remember when you’re out on that court with nothing but yourself to beat the person on the other side of the net.