Jannik Sinner has been biding his time. Is that time now?

Jannik Sinner speaks in a soft monotone, both in his native Italian and in his thoughtful, hesitant English.

A clenched fist near his stomach is about all the emotion he shows everyone on the field.

No one would describe anything about him as flashy; not his tennis playing, not his wardrobe – which includes a lot of sweatpants and T-shirts – and not his quiet life off the court. He has freckles and a shock of wavy red hair.

Before we go much further, it's probably wise to add a disclaimer. We know that this story will rely on some cultural stereotypes and generalizations about large populations in some of the largest countries in Europe, or at least large populations of tennis players from those countries. We know there are exceptions. Many of them.

In this case they are still useful because there is a well-deserved stereotype of an Italian tennis player. They have a kind of flair that shines through their personalities and their games, whether it's Matteo Berrettini's booming serve or Lorenzo Musetti's flashy backhand. or the way Fabio Fognini swung and swished across the field, leaving no mystery as to what he was thinking or feeling at any given moment.

If you understand Italian, you will hear a colorful language when you see them play. When you looked at these men, or, in the past, Flavia Pennetta or Francesca Schiavone, there was no doubt that you were looking at a tennis player from Italy.

Sinner, the 22-year-old former junior ski champion who defeated 10-time Australian Open champion Novak Djokovic in four sets on Friday, is not. At least not on the outside.

There's a pretty good reason for that, according to those who know him and Italy best. Sinner comes from the small town of San Candido in the northeastern corner of Italy, a region nestled next to, and with many cultural similarities to, Austria and slightly more distant Germany.

“It's a different part of Italy,” said Simone Vagnozzi, Sinner's head coach for the past year. Italians from that region are very serious, according to Vagnozzi. “They don't talk that much.”

Don't misunderstand Vagnozzi. In a quiet setting – around the hotel, or playing cards or golf (the other game his other tennis guru, veteran coach and commentator Darren Cahill, is trying to teach him) – Sinner is quick with a joke.

“So it's really serious on the field when he practices, and this is maybe the German part of him. But he is also very funny, and this is more the Italian part,” Vagnozzi said.

This was just after Sinner cut off his coaches' post-game press conference on Friday and demanded he be given the opportunity to ask what it was really like to coach Jannik Sinner.

“It's a shit job,” Cahill replied. “We don't get paid enough. That man is constantly giving us a hard time, and he's constantly taking our money in card games, and he enjoys it very much.”

“The truth is finally coming out,” Sinner said, then turned and left the room.

Jannik Sinner, breakthrough tennis star and demure Gucci model (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images for Gucci)

Sinner can often come across as a contradiction. His father is a chef and his mother waited tables at the restaurant where her husband cooked, giving Jannik a comfortable but modest upbringing. He is a Gucci model and a Rolex ambassador. But see him on a late summer afternoon after a morning of training in a mansion in the Hamptons during his preparations for the US Open and he is dressed in sweats and a T-shirt and large black-rimmed glasses, looking a little surprised and shaking. his head to his surroundings.

Most people don't see those parts of Sinner: the joker or the simple young man who will always think of himself as the son of hardworking restaurant workers.

They see the face on the billboards and the silent thinker who saw the two other top players of his generation, Carlos Alcaraz and Holger Rune, storm past him in 2022, even though Sinner had reached the quarter-finals of the French Open as a 19-year-old. year-old, which led to him being labeled as the 'next big thing'.

Sinner, 19, lost to Rafael Nadal in the quarterfinals of the 2020 French Open (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Sinner preached patience. The coach who raised him, Riccardo Piatti, the 65-year-old tennis player known as one of the game's top talents, had always told him to treat his first 150 tour matches as a learning experience.

To the outside world, Sinner talked in that passive monotone about the process of evolving into a top tennis player. Inside, in the quiet environment, he was thinking about something else, and it wasn't a joke.

One day in early 2022, Sinner fired Piatti and his entire coaching team, replacing them before this year with Vagnozzi, a new fitness trainer and physiotherapist, and adding Cahill because of his experience working with top players including Simona Halep and Lleyton Hewitt.

All of them, especially Sinner, have made it their mission to make Sinner a more versatile player, one who can do more than hit the ball from the baseline like a bot in a tennis video game. It was a two-step-forward, one-step-back approach to his career. His ranking dropped to 15 at the end of 2023 and from 10 at the end of 2022.

Still, he talked about patience and process. Inside it killed him. He watched Alcaraz win Grand Slam titles and Rune leapfrog him in the rankings as he tried to add weight, endurance and variety to his game. Would the work ever pay off?

“Patience can be your biggest enemy in one sense, because if you're not that patient, you'll rush one way, and then you might forget some of the steps you need to do to become a better player, to be better physically to become,” says Sinner. said Friday evening. “At some point, I don't know, I feel like what we're seeing now from my side is due to a whole year of work and the process of what we created to become the best version of what we have done. That's me now.”

“Patience is not easy to deal with,” he added. “It's also practice.”

This is where Cahill has been most helpful, as a calming influence, said Sinner, someone who can maintain the balance between the quiet Germanic exterior and the playful and passionate Italian interior. Cahill, the son of an Australian football coach, has learned the right moments to say the right words to Sinner.

Coach Darren Cahill and Sinner at Wimbledon last year (Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Before Friday's match against Djokovic, they spoke little about tennis for hours. “Twenty minutes before the match we talked about tactics and how to deal with certain situations,” Sinner said. “Cahill helped not only me, but the whole team to believe in ourselves, but also to enjoy ourselves, because we travel so much around the world, and to enjoy time together is very important.”

He will face Daniil Medvedev in his first Grand Slam final on Sunday.

The hard work has paid off.

(Top photo: Nicolo Campo/LightRocket via Getty Images)