A tennis analyst with an encyclopedic grasp on the college game, Alex Gruskin, told me a funny story about an event he hosted in 2020. One match had featured a 15-year-old boy named Nishesh Basavareddy, who often competed in rec specs. His opponent was a fifth-year senior on the University of Kentucky men’s tennis team. The teen won 18 of the first 20 points in the match, causing the college veteran to wonder aloud, “Am I playing fucking Djokovic?” Gruskin, through laughter, issued a code violation. From a young age, Basavareddy has had this effect on opponents. “That’s when I knew,” Gruskin told me. In the years since, watching Basavareddy’s court coverage, return game, and eerily clean two-handed backhand, he found himself making the Novak Djokovic comparison too.

I’d personally been keeping tabs on Basavareddy’s results for a while, due to some shared demographic categories (Indian-American, bespectacled, not tall). I’d sat in on some of his junior matches at the US Open, where he won the boys’ doubles title in 2022. The talent was obvious, but as Gruskin pointed out, his junior career had been interrupted by some serious knee injuries, too. Basavareddy has said that he did indeed model some aspects of his game after Djokovic, his favorite player, but also drew on players like Kei Nishikori and David Goffin, who were under six feet but adept at taking the ball early and redirecting the opponent’s pace. At this stage of his career, Basavareddy plays a bit more aggressively than Djokovic; he’s quicker to flatten out his backhand and assume some risk.

Basavareddy played for two seasons at Stanford, but last summer and fall he played such good tennis it practically forced his hand to go pro. He received some wild cards on the Challenger Tour, then won 28 of 34 matches in one stretch. He moved up to No. 138 in the world, received a wild card for the Australian Open main draw, and qualified for the Next Gen Finals. After consulting with his mentor Rajeev Ram—somehow there is more than one Indian-American, pro-grade tennis player from Carmel, Ind.—Nishesh opted to leave behind campus life for the world tour. Though on the off chance his parents are reading this, he has said that once he’s done with the tour, he’s “definitely” going to finish his degree.

This year, Basavareddy, 19 years old, is playing his first ATP tournaments. He hasn’t needed much time to get acclimated. In a thrilling run at the Auckland 250 this week, just his second event, he beat five top-100 names, including the tournament’s defending champ, world No. 23 Alejandro Tabilo. On Thursday in the semifinal he played the always slippery Gael Monfils, somehow for the second time this year. This match was its own education. Basavareddy outplayed the Frenchman throughout the first set, only to arrive in a tiebreak, where Monfils spent the time in between points keeled over, visibly in distress, propping himself up with his racquet, working the clock. But those of us who have been watching the Frenchman for nearly the whole duration of Nishesh Basavareddy’s life know one thing: Monfils is never truly dead, even when he looks like death. Basavareddy made a few errors on routine balls and wound up losing the first set despite having won nine more points in it.

The second set nearly followed the same script. Basavareddy was the steadier player, only to have a little hiccup while serving at 4–4. Monfils saw his first break points of the entire match and cashed out; minutes later the talented teen was packing his bags. Another bewildering escape from the Frenchman, and an object lesson in how to win only a match’s most essential points. The next stop on tour for Basavareddy is Melbourne, where he’ll get his first taste of a major tournament. There he will likely receive some more lessons, from a player who has indirectly taught him quite a bit: His first-round opponent at the Australian Open is its 10-time champ, Novak Djokovic.