By Daniel A. Kaufman
___
Anybody who is aware of me is aware of that I’m tennis participant and fanatic of lengthy standing. [I have been playing the game since around 1974.] Additionally, you will know that I feel tennis is in decline, regardless of the efforts of the modern ATP and sports activities media [and fandom] to persuade everybody that Novak Djokovic is the Best Of All Time or Roger Federer or Serena Williams or whoever else. They aren’t. And understanding why will go a great distance in the direction of understanding the methods wherein the sport went incorrect over the various a long time by which I’ve watched and performed it.
However, first I need to say one thing of a extra normal nature about sports activities, as a result of my criticisms of the present state of tennis are located amongst extra normal concerns in regards to the nature and goal of aggressive, spectator-oriented athletics. Comparatively talking, human beings usually are not bodily spectacular. Any variety of animals are quicker [e.g. cheetahs], stronger [e.g. bears], extra agile [e.g. gazelles], and extra dexterous [e.g. monkeys], and for that reason, the “pure” sports activities – working, leaping, weightlifting, and the like – are of the least curiosity to me. How spectacular is it to be the “World’s Strongest Man” or UFC champion or another such factor, when the feeblest orangutan or gorilla can rip your arm out of its socket, with none effort? Or to be the world’s quickest lady, when the slowest gazelle or cheetah can go away you within the mud? Or the perfect swimmer, when there are … dolphins?
The place people impress is within the intersection of our physicality and our intelligence, and consequently, probably the most fascinating and thrilling of the skilled sports activities are these wherein this intersection is what’s being examined. This implies video games that contain a considerably strategic and tactical strategy to the applying of bodily prowess, and tennis is such a sport.
____
Tennis goes back at least as far as the Tudors, however the sport as we all know it started simply previous to the “Open Period” with the arrival on the scene of a gaggle of Australian gamers, together with Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Ken Rosewall, and Tony Roche, whose model and high quality of play laid the muse for the tennis of immediately, within the sense that the sport lastly shed its genteel, clubby id and have become like different skilled sports activities. [1] Particularly spectacular have been the Davis Cup groups Australia fielded from this group, beneath Harry Hopman, who later emigrated to the US and taught on the Port Washington Tennis Academy, the place he skilled future tennis stars like Vitas Gerulaitis and John McEnroe and thereby influenced the best way the game could be performed within the 1970’s and 80’s.
It was an all-court sport – baseline, serve/volley, and all the pieces in-between – performed on surfaces that behaved so in another way that completely different play kinds and techniques have been wanted to succeed on every. Grass courts performed nothing like clay courts, which performed solely in another way from arduous courts. If a baseline-heavy participant needed to have any likelihood on grass, he must serve and volley, which is why Guillermo Vilas, a legendary baseliner, performed an virtually solely serve/volley sport with a view to beat Ilie Nastase and take the 1974 Masters trophy on grass.
Racquets have been fabricated from wooden, with small heads [68 inches average], strung with pure intestine strings. With such a small head and even smaller candy spot, correct type and eyes locked on the ball have been a should if one was to hit cleanly and never mishit. Comparatively compact swings have been essential – you possibly can’t swing these racquets with the unique, looping movement of a Rafael Nadal, with out mishitting – so that they favored flat and slice strokes over topspin, which meant balls stayed fairly low to the bottom, requiring gamers to stay crouched with a view to make their pictures. The truth that racquets have been composed solely of pure supplies meant that they supplied nice really feel and nil components: the racquet did what you probably did and nothing extra.
With the introduction of artificial supplies into racquet and string manufacturing and with racquet-head sizes increasing radically to over 100 sq. inches, racquets immediately achieve this a lot that one spends as a lot effort controlling them as one does on techniques and gameplay. With a wooden racquet, I can return a hard-hit drive from my opponent with a cream-puff drop shot [if at the baseline] or a drop volley [if at net]. With a recent racquet, you need to put huge quantities of underspin on the balls to impact this, or else the racquet will spray them out of bounds. Certainly, one motive why there may be such overuse of topspin from the baseline immediately is to maintain the ball within the courtroom, because the racquets are so overpowered that balls will sail out in any other case, if hit with any tempo. You might solely hit so arduous with wooden and intestine strings, and it wasn’t doable merely to overpower your opponent. Service aces have been way more a matter of placement than sheer pace – evaluate an ace by John McEnroe to 1 by, say, Andy Roddick – and also you needed to assemble and arrange factors with a view to end one other participant off. This remained true, even with the introduction of steel racquets into the sport, just like the Wilson T2000 and the AMF Head Skilled, which gave a bit extra energy, however at the price of diminished management. [And their head-sizes were consistent with their wood counterparts.]
Court docket situations may very well be fairly tough: grass courts as a result of they grew to become torn up and stuffed with divots as soon as a match had gotten underway, and clay courts have been a severe fall-risk in the event that they have been too moist or too dry. On this match between Rod Laver and Tony Roche, the courtroom was so treacherous that cleats grew to become essential halfway by, due to the variety of slips and falls.
____
This period of tennis – the Open/Wooden Racquet period [the 1970’s and early 80’s] – represents the sport’s excessive level. Its gear and settings and coaching routine highlighted the weather that I earlier urged make an expert sport fascinating: it required athleticism, however one couldn’t rise to the best ranges on that alone and even primarily; the very completely different challenges posed by the completely different surfaces required one to haven’t simply an A sport, however a B and C sport, as nicely a big toolset, when it comes to the types of pictures one might hit from completely different positions; and the truth that racquets and strings did nothing greater than what you probably did meant that you simply couldn’t simply blow individuals off the courtroom, so the tactical sport beat the ability sport each time. [This point was made most effectively in the famous 1975 Wimbledon final, where Arthur Ashe defeated the much more powerful Jimmy Connors with cunning and guile.] [2]
Issues remained comparatively steady into the 1980’s, even with the shift to graphite racquets in the course of the last decade. These racquets supplied extra energy and considerably diminished management, however inside a variety that also demanded tactical play. The following technology performed basically the identical sport as their quick predecessors however a bit of tougher and a bit of quicker. The athleticism required additionally ticked up a notch. However while you watched a Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg or Pete Sampras play, you have been watching basically the identical sport that had been performed by Connors, McEnroe, and Borg.
This example wouldn’t final. The mix of the brand new, artificial racquet supplies and the elevated emphasis on strength- and fitness-training meant that gamers like Goran Ivanisevic and Mark Philippoussis served at speeds that will flip matches into first-serve proportion contests, which began a service arms race. Get your first serve in and win the match! wouldn’t be a recipe for fascinating tennis within the 1990’s.
What occurred subsequent was a type of domino impact ensuing from this improvement. First, the grass courtroom tournaments largely disappeared. Initially, three of the 4 Grand Slam tournaments – the game’s most prestigious occasions – had been on grass: The US Open; Australian Open; and Wimbledon. For a quick interval, the US Open grew to become a clay [Har-Tru] match, however then each it and the Australian Open switched to hardcourts, so immediately, three out of 4 of the Grand Slams are performed on hardcourts and only one is on [red] clay. Second, the grass courts that remained have been made slower and hardier, that means that they performed extra like the opposite surfaces when it comes to pace and bounce and would stay in a comparatively pristine situation, even nicely right into a match. You’ll by no means see grass courts in a significant match immediately torn up like they have been in earlier eras.
Lastly, racquet know-how superior even additional, and most significantly, a brand new technology of artificial strings that “grabbed” the ball made it doable to hit groundstrokes at a really excessive tempo with out lacking, so the previous tradeoff between elevated energy and diminished management was considerably mitigated.
When mixed, these developments triggered a dramatic change within the sport. Serve and volley was halted in its tracks, because the slower surfaces and super-powerful racquets and grabby strings made a giant serve not solely a lot simpler to return, however passing pictures towards an approaching volleyer a lot simpler to make. And although the strings made it simpler to maintain the ball within the courtroom whereas blasting it 100 miles an hour from the baseline, the stiff, brittle high quality of the artificial frames and the wildly elevated tempo of play diminished shot selection to a mere handful of viable pictures and made setups very arduous to tug off. Add to the combination the homogenized surfaces, and the sport devolved right into a baseline-bash-and-grind that rewarded health and consistency above all else. So, with the exception, maybe, of the sport’s present top-tier geniuses – together with Roger, Rafa, and at instances, Andy Murray – it’s now not the case that tennis is a sport wherein techniques trump energy. Certainly, fairly the alternative is true: in tennis, immediately, energy and endurance trump techniques more often than not. [3] The stability between physicality and intelligence that I spoke of earlier has develop into skewed closely in the direction of the previous and away from the latter, and the sport has been diminished consequently, one thing that’s mirrored in decreased public curiosity, the peak of which was within the 1970’s and 80’s, when the highest gamers loved movie star nicely past the tennis world. [4]
I haven’t mentioned something but in regards to the ladies’s sport, which underwent roughly the identical trajectory however suffered its results even worse. Missing the bodily energy, endurance, and pace of the boys, ladies’s tennis was much more tactical and shot-selection wealthy and felt like a wholly completely different sport: slower, extra affected person, and extra depending on precision, talent, and smarts. There has by no means been – or ever will probably be – a greater baseliner [of either sex] than Chris Evert who, in her prime might hit a dime wherever on the courtroom, and there by no means was nor will there be a participant as spectacular, general [and again, of either sex], as Martina Navratilova. [The rivalry between the two remains the greatest in the history of the sport.] Evonne Goolagong had a few of the most lovely strokes and motion within the sport, and Hana Mandlikova was some of the naturally gifted gamers ever to be on the tour.
It’s as a result of the ladies’s sport was much more tactical and depending on shot-selection than the boys’s that the affect of the artificial racquet/string revolution, adjustments in courtroom surfaces, elevated emphasis on health, and super-high tempo of play was additionally higher. Energy grew to become all the pieces, starting with Steffi Graf and Monica Seles, nevertheless it actually hit its game-destroying peak with the dominance of Serena Williams, whose physicality and energy have been so overwhelming that the identical baseline-bash-and-grind sport into which the boys’s sport had slid, grew to become much more outstanding on the ladies’s aspect. And now that Serena is hardly taking part in anymore, it’s develop into painfully clear that ladies’s tennis immediately is little greater than an inferior model of the boys’s sport. So dangerous is it, certainly, that I can’t bear to look at it anymore.
____
Returning to the query of “Best of all Time,” it ought to be clear at this level why any such evaluation is solely ineffective. How might one probably inform, for instance, who’s a greater participant, Bjorn Borg or Novak Djokovic or Martina Navratilova or Serena Williams, until one might see how Djok/Serena would have performed with the previous gear and on the previous surfaces and the way a younger Borg/Navratilova would have performed with and on the brand new ones? Given how way more tough the sport was with the sooner gear and on the sooner variations of the courtroom surfaces, if we’re to guess, the presumption needs to be in favor of Borg/Navratilova. I alternate each few months between taking part in with wooden and modern racquets [a Wilson Chris Evert model and a pro-stock Head Prestige], and the distinction in problem is profound and demonstrable. Past narrowing and shrinking the sport, the brand new racquets and strings have additionally made it simple for gamers to develop lazy swings and footwork, as they mean you can get away with issues that you just can’t get away with taking part in with wooden, one thing you understand instantly while you swap from one to the opposite. And don’t even get me began on what it will be wish to attempt to play on grass courts within the situation of the one on which Laver and Roche performed the 1969 US Open Closing.
The present development of figuring out who’s the Best of all Time by counting Grand Slam singles titles is senseless and determines nothing of worth. Why ought to this, reasonably than any variety of different statistics — consecutive weeks at #1; variety of tournaments received; variety of matches received; profitable proportion; whole variety of singles & doubles titles received; and so on. — be the idea on which such a judgment is made? And am I actually presupposed to imagine that somebody who racked up all their victories throughout an period when there was little competitors [as Steffi Graf did, after Monica Seles was stabbed by a deranged fan and left the game] is healthier than a counterpart from a unique period who has decrease numbers however performed in a way more aggressive discipline [like Evert or Navratilova]?
It’s my view [one expressed often by John McEnroe] that tennis made a mistake in permitting outsized racquets and artificial frames and strings, which set in movement the adjustments to the game that now we have been speaking about. It’s value observing that Main League Baseball did not make this error when it discovered itself confronted with an analogous problem [high-quality metal bats], and for causes of each security and high quality of gameplay, it stays wood-bats-only to this present day. If skilled tennis had carried out the identical – required racquets and strings to be fabricated from wooden and intestine with a standardized, small head-size – maybe it might have prevented arriving on the unenviable place wherein it finds itself now. [5]
Notes
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tennis#Tournaments_and_tours_of_the_pre-Open_Era
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tennis#Open_Era
In retirement, Roche would coach the likes of Ivan Lendl, Pat Rafter, and Roger Federer.
[2] Matts Wilander, former world #1, presents a wonderful evaluation of Ashe’s techniques right here:
[3] This can be altering with the most recent crop of gamers, who appear to be returning to a extra all-court model of play [and particularly Carlos Alcaraz and Sebastian Korda], although it will likely be fascinating to see how far they get on this regard, given modern racquet and string applied sciences.
[5] https://www.essentiallysports.com/us-sports-news-baseball-mlb-news-why-are-metal-bats-banned-in-mlb/
