I GREW up revering Roger Federer “as religious experience” (Wallace, 2006). Now my tennis fandom, in search of new saints and idols, came to rest on a Sinner. His is a case of aura tennis that tugs at the heartstrings of identity politics
(Over)zealous fans tend to watch only their chosen player’s side of the court. For economic reasons, some of us don’t set up camp outside grand slam stadiums, but wait for the full uploads of concluded finals matches on YouTube.
We peek at Google scoreboards during live play, or go on X for live tweets, refreshing these pages in what would be our nervous tic as chopped liver spectators on our couches and laptops.
Fandoms throw their lot with a chosen player in blind faith. We are proselytized by his/her jenesaisquoi on TV and social media. We are the annoying analysts on reddit, but are too damn nervous to watch in real time, moaning over every error as if we’re entitled to commissions on the player’s prize money.
It’s hard to argue that our fandoms are informed by the little details on their gameplay separating them from others.
Jannik Sinner’s game has been praised as clean, technically sound, and powerful.
On video, it’s just…crunchy. Sinner stands in polarity to the goonier Carlos Alcaraz, a tireless golden retriever considered in some reddit circles as the new Federer, a wunderkind in the mold of Nadal.
Not so fast, say Sinner fans.
The recent Wimbledon final between the two rivals had the makings of a match won on technique — Sinner pressing on the Alcaraz service with aggression and all-around play, and having Alcaraz wait on his chances to blast out his characteristic winners.
Those chances never came during Sinner’s pushy bid for his first Wimbledon title, and in four sets the German-speaking Italian bucked the drama he was subjected to the previous month, when the longest French Open men’s final slipped through his fingers.
Which makes one wonder, why I am not an Alcaraz fan. In the latest Wimbledon final, the Spaniard had the faith of the King of Spain, who made the trip to London to see his bet turned into tinola after this cockfight. Alcaraz was also a two-time defending champion with the poetic dropshot that withers back like the perfect tease from any fleet-footed opponent. In their previous encounters Sinner had never been wise to it.
But this final was different in that the South Tyrolean could no longer allow the impudence of Alcaraz’s flashy shotmaking undermine his top seed ascendancy, and somehow he was reading Alcaraz’s racquet with a valedictory preparedness, a now or never, a suite of contingencies.
He was never found on the wrong foot, his serve chipped, not painted, the lines to confuse the enemy further, he thwacked his forehands with adamantium force from his strapped, slightly injured elbow.
Despite his brutalist tennis, Sinner’s mild-spokenness and ascetic’s constitution suit the PR machine shaping him into Italy’s darling— or full canonizing. His working class family portrait endears. Since pronouncing how proud he is to be Italian, as quoted by La Repubblica after his Wimbledon win, he might inspire no further questions on his hometown’s allegiances hereon.
Trentino-Alto Adige (also known as South Tyrol), the region he hails from, is a cultural breakaway north of Italy, where at some point secessionist sentiments simmered and the feeling of being Austrian, instead of Italian, overrules the region’s technical autonomy.
Sinner himself speaks German as a mother tongue like an overwhelming majority of South Tyroleans, and doesn’t seem to roll his r’s during Italian press conferences.
Add to that the subliminal public wooing through his countless endorsements and every Italian must be living all the Dantesque circles of capital Sinners.
His distinct redheaded mop is a natural carrot lobby. In Torino, where the ATP Yearend Finals were held in 2024, his face was on bank vitrines, pasta packets, portico walls, and magazine covers.
The universe is complete, even amid odd pushbacks against commercial overexposure.
Yet, Italy has historically glad-handed sporting achievers—consider Diego Maradona’s enduring hypnosis of Napoli and the ubiquity of the Argentine’s image on the Italian city’s walls and tourist souvenirs.
In his home country, a Sinner win is as big as a World Cup win.
Finally, Italian youth are taking up a sport other than football.
The same aura has an otherworldly geographic reach. A quick s(troll) of reddit forums reveals diehards like me outside of Italy who have yet to see his topspin live, yet who remain the most undeterred defenders of the world no. 1, even in the shadow of clostebol, three-month suspensions, and lately, the re-hiring of the coach directly responsible for failed drug tests in 2024.
Mind, the latter are very real reasons I must question this fandom, and any champion’s aura for that matter.
What is the live secret to the steady machine hum of his ball hitting? Or perhaps this is simply good old penis envy on my part on behalf of our own Alex Eala, who is negotiating the ranks of the WTA in a plea for Sinner-level impact for the Philippines?
Nike’s post-Wimbledon homage speaks plainly: “Winning heals everything.” Who knows, Sinner’s win in London, a first for an Italian, might even be healing the last vestiges of fascism in Italy (South Tyrol was once subject to Mussolini’s Italianization project).
Count on a Sinner’s parable for a quasi-spiritual makeover of tennis programs all over the world. No pressure, Alex.
Citation:
Wallace, D. F. (2006, August 20). Roger Federer as religious experience. The New York Times. The New York Times
(Frances Mae Ramos is a writer, painter, and French language coach. She graduated with an MA in Anthropology at the University of the Philippines.)
