By Giri Nathan
Let us be frank: Things could have gotten funky with Stefanos Tsitsipas during a suspended tennis season. Life in a pandemic had plenty of us reconsidering routines, as the sudden departure from the everyday made stark what we liked and disliked about that everyday. Many will emerge from the other side with priorities reshuffled, a fresh worldview. For a tennis player, the burdens of international travel and grueling matches were lifted. For a tennis player of means, this meant unusual stretches of free time, which might allow them to entertain other flights of fancy—and for Tsitsipas in particular, there are many, many fancies. Just as a certain Australian pro could have (and may still) emerged from lockdown as a full-time videogame streamer specializing in first-person shooters, the young Greek could have emerged a full-time YouTube personality and travel photographer. He had once told me that his mind occasionally drifted off to his filmmaking while he was on the court. What would happen when this vivid mind was left to wander for months at a time?