On the one hand, this is a cause for celebration. Tennis from a sporting concern aiming to capture eyeballs and interest, persisted well longer than anyone could've expected on the backs of the Big-3. Put aside that Djokovic is still arguably the 3rd best player in the world, but the Big-3 essentially dominated this sport from 2004 - 2023. That goes from Federer's first rise to #1, the entirety of Nadal's career, and then Djokovic's last top season (2023, when he won three slams to get his total to 24). Djokovic remained good in 2024, even winning his long missing Olympic gold, but for the first time since 2002, none of the Big-3 won a major. Sinner and Alcaraz split all four of them - Sinner winning on hard courts, Alcaraz on clay and grass. Tennis should count itself absolutely lucky. The sport should've been facing down an abyss at the end of the Big-3.
The Big-3 literally changed the sport, changed what it meant to consider the span of dominance, the lengths and heights a career could rise to. It reset the sports axis. Those three swallowed so much volume, but more than that so many careers. They won 64 of 81 slams played between Wimbledon 2003 and US Open 2023. The rest of the world one seventeen. Only three people managed to sneak in more than one - Stan Wawrinka, Andy Murray, and Carlos Alcaraz himself in that period. So many players that had they palyed in the 90s, or even early 00's were just left by the wayside. There was first the lost generation - the Dimitrov and Raonic types that came about in the early-00s but went away with nothing. If anything, they made the prior generation's second class of the David Ferrer's, Tomas Berdych's, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga's of the world seem downright consistent.
But the lost generation begat the "next generation" but with teh Big-3 just extending and extending their winning, they became if anything more lost. Alexander Zverev is a supremely talented player, who has won an Olympic Gold and two Year-End titles. He's made three Slam finals. Lost them all. Stefanos Tsitsipas was for years a top-5 player - made two slam finals himself, including once blowing a two-set lead to Djokovic in the 2021 French Open. Even the two "successes" of that generation leave us wanting more: first Dominic Thiem who seemingyl the day after his 2020 US Open Win hurt his wrist and was never the same, to Daniil Medvedev, who is somehow both a guy who beat Novak Djokovic to win his only slam, but also lost in memorable fashion 3-4 times in finals. This "next" generation got their careers lost as well.
Which brings us to Sinner and Alcaraz, who are both good enough to stake their ground completely, but also lucky enough to be just far enough younger than the Big-3 to catch the tail end. Sinner and Alcaraz had their run ins with Rafa - namely Sinner in the 2020 French Open, where Nadal swept him aside easily (Sinner was just 19 at the time). They've had theri run-ins with Novak - including Alcaraz being oddly inconsistent against Novak, save for the two Wimbledon finals (which granted, is quite the exception to draw). They were young enough to not pile up years of shrapnel and harrowing losses. And good enough to cut through anyway.
But here's where I have to think if tennis truly ever will be the same post Big-3, or will that nearly incomparable shadow still fall on these guys. Put it this way - Alcaraz just turned 22 years old a month back, and has now five slams. That's amazing. Guess who also did that almost exactly? Rafa Nadal. It is going to be a race to see if any of these guys can start outpacing the Big-3 - especially since at various stages each was at incomparable levels. Nadal the best say 19-23 of any of them (his 2005-2009), Federer the best 24-29 (his 2005-2010), and Djokovic the best 30+ (his 2018-present). Of course, who has the second best 30+... well that would be Rafa Nadal (his 2017-2022). They will almost always be behind in the chase.
The issue really is that the chase, the drama, the competing storylines where both the opponent and history are equally the competition, has been so everpresent in tennis since about 2008 (when Nadal beat Federer outside the French). From 2009 onwards, there was chasing of history, be it the slam record, or streaks at the French, or Djoko-Slam and Calendar Slams, and of course the slam record a 2nd time (Nadal in 2022 Oz) and a 3rd (Novak at 2023 French). Now it really will be many years until any of that is real (granted, I guess a Calendar Slam could still be a thing).
The challenge is Sinner and Alcaraz are so good. They are lucky to be this much younger, but maybe also the Big-3, especially Djokovic, is lucky they are so much yougner - that there was that 2020-2023 period, because since 2024 they've split the six slams. They've lapped the field. They have great games with few, if any, weaknesses. They are relentless players, emotionally cool and calm as well. They can play blistering tennis five hours into a Slam Final. They bring out the best in each other. They'll hopefully do the same to the Joao Fonseca's and other sub-20-year olds that can make this a Big-3 or Big-4 in a few years. But for now, they are peerless, but deserving of that praise.
Yet is it still the same. That was a tennis match for teh decades, for the ages, but it wasn;t the same. Maybe that's more a position people like me, who grew up and lived through teh entirety of the Big-3 era will be taking - for the youngsters who've only heard tell of the 2008 Wimbledon Final but didn't experience it in the moment - this year's French Open final may just be the pinnacle. I just worry that for too many people, me absolutely included, the pinnacle passed us and it may be years before we can have a rational argument we've gotten back to there again.
