By
Benjamin Hart,
staff editor at Intelligencer who joined New York in 2017
What, you don’t recognize Flavio Cobolli?
For over two decades, men’s tennis has been defined by something of a paradox: electrifying predictability. Starting with Roger Federer in 2003, a group of five men have utterly dominated the major tournaments, in an unprecedented consolidation of power at the top of the game. Between Fed’s first major win in 2003 and Novak Djokovic’s (probably) final one in 2023, those two legends and Rafael Nadal combined to win the biggest tournaments in tennis — the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open — a staggering 66 out of 77 possible times. The Big Three then gave way to the duopoly of Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner, who have captured every one of the last nine majors, and almost certainly many more to come.
