Articles by Steve Tignor

Playing with Fire: The delicate role of emotion in pro and rec tennis

Thu, 02 Jul 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Can fire become ice? Early in his career, John McEnroe occasionally tried to find out.

“I’m going to play like Borg today,” he would announce at practice, referring to his arch-rival Bjorn Borg.

The idea, of course, sounded preposterous. The New Yorker was McTantrum, the game’s enfant terrible. The Swede was the Angelic Assassin; a side-eye from him was the equivalent of a racquet-pulverizing tirade from anyone else. Not surprisingly, Johnny Mac’s attempts to emulate Borg didn’t last long.

What did last was the shadow their rivalry cast over the sport. The contrasts between them—attacker vs. defender, stoic vs. grouch—made their matchup the most iconic of the Open era. Forty years later, we can see a similar split at the top of the game: Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal win by keeping their emotions under control; Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams win by letting them out. All of which leaves the rest of us with questions. How much emotion is too much to show? Does letting off steam help us relax, or does it enrage us further? Is there a way to do what McEnroe never could: fuse fire and ice into a winning combination?

Before we try to solve those tennis-related dilemmas, we should step back and look at the age-old concept behind them: catharsis. The Greeks defined it as the process of releasing negative emotions by acting them out. In modern terms, it’s known as “blowing off steam.” A tennis match, where some form of frustration is acted out after virtually every point, would seem to be an ideal format for witnessing the process in action.

But does all of our venting actually do us any good? According to some psychology studies, the idea that aggressively expressing your frustration will help you release it is a myth. In one experiment from 1999, a group of participants were provoked into anger; afterward, some were given a chance to hit a punching bag for two minutes, while others did nothing. Then the whole group came together to play a competitive game. Contrary to the “blowing off steam” theory, it was the people who had punched the bag that continued to act aggressively during competition.

If we can’t take our rage out on our racquets, what’s the best way to deal with it on court? Frank Giampaolo, author of Championship Tennis, suggests we try a more cautionary metaphor than “letting off steam.”

“Anger is like fire,” Giampaolo says. “Fire managed can help cook your meals and heat your home. Unmanaged, it can burn your house down.”

Alexandra Guhde, a clinical psychologist who has worked with tour players, says it’s important to distinguish between emotions and the actions we use to express them.

“Anger and frustration are great allies on court. They’re passionate emotions,” she says. “Often, in [my] work with professional athletes, it centers on helping them welcome the experience of frustration, so they get comfortable being uncomfortable.”

Comfortable enough, in other words, not to lash out.

“What happens when we smash a racquet or knock a ball out of the court is that we rehearse our rage,” Guhde says. “We practice it against ourselves, encourage our negative self-talk to get louder, treat ourselves with contempt. That’s not a good way to keep the confidence flowing!”

Dr. Jim Loehr, a co-founder of the Human Performance Institute in Florida, says the danger in acting out your anger is that it can become a habit.

“The brain is constantly adapting,” Loehr says. “If you chuck your racquet, you’ve opened a door, and started to train your mind that this is acceptable. Your motor skills and problem solving suffer under the influence of anger.”

According to Loehr, expressing your emotions is a normal response to nervousness. Even the best players choke, he says, but they learn to control their anxiety. Just as important, they learn to fuel themselves from their positive emotions, rather than their rage. Watch Serena and Djokovic closely and you’ll see that it’s their fist-pumps, rather than their racquet-smashes, that typically signal their return to top form.

That’s easier said than done, right? But just because you don’t have the talent of a world No. 1 doesn’t mean you can’t learn to make your emotions work for you.

Here are four ways to do just that—none of which will leave your racquet in tatters.

1. Prepare mentally the same way you do physically

According to Loehr, emotional management begins before you get to the court.

“You need to look at all the variables in someone’s performance,” he says. “You can choke because you’re not properly hydrated, or if you haven’t slept enough. If you’re not physically ready for a match, you won’t be as mentally ready, and you’ll get nervous and frustrated more easily. It may look like you’re just gagging, but there’s so much more to it.”

2. Focus on what you can control

Too often, we deflect our anger onto things that are out of our hands—the wind, sun, noise, bad bounces, our opponent’s lucky line-clippers.

“When athletes struggle to control their frustration, I try to get them to step back and determine the true source of the anger,” Giampaolo says. “Is it an untrustworthy backhand, or impatience, or a tendency to play too fast? From there, you can find individualized solutions.”

Treat your reactions to adversity the same way you do your serve, backhand or forehand—i.e., something to analyze, practice and improve.

3. Welcome frustration

Adversity in tennis is inevitable, and so are the feelings that come with it. The question is: Are you using them positively or negatively?

“When I work with players learning to channel their anger, I like to refer to a book by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Fight,” Guhde says. “He talks about how to use anger skillfully, which is not to whip it into a frenzy of aggression. If you don’t welcome it, you won’t be able to encourage it to pass through your system.”

4. Don’t give yourself time to get negative

Loehr developed a system in the 1980s called “The 16-second Cure.” This was the amount of time he believed a player needed to recover from the stress of the previous point, and reset for the next one.

After watching what the top pros did between rallies, he broke those 16 seconds into four segments, to be repeated before every point:

—Start with positive body language, throw your shoulders back and walk purposefully.
—Relax by walking around a little and looking at your strings, so your eyes have a place to rest.
—Prepare for the next point by training a confident gaze across the net as you decide where to hit your first shot.
—Go through your serve or return rituals.

And if you still get the urge to smash your racquet or let out a primal scream, remember what McEnroe himself said recently. Without his tirades, he told the Associated Press, he “would have been a 40 percent more boring player.” But he “would have been 20 percent better.”

A lesson for Djokovic: limits are not just "illusions of your ego"

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 20:11:00 +0000

“I don’t believe in limits,” Novak Djokovic told U.S. journalist Graham Bensinger last month. “I think limits are only illusions of your ego or your mind.”

The sentiment is hardly a new one for Djokovic. Whenever he’s asked if he can win a calendar-year Grand Slam, or break Roger Federer’s men’s record for major titles, Djokovic repeats the same mantra: “I don’t believe in limits.” The philosophy has served him well on court. Like many tennis players, Djokovic is a big believer in the power of visualization; unlike most players, he rarely fails to turn his visions into reality.

Djokovic’s latest vision was the Adria Tour, a charity exhibition series that was scheduled to be played in four Balkan cities over four weekends. Djokovic saw it as a chance to showcase his home city of Belgrade to the tennis world. The night before the first leg of the tour, he posted a picture of himself arm in arm with two other Adria stars, Dominic Thiem and Alexander Zverev, on a Belgrade street. “Grateful to welcome my friends to my city,” a beaming Djokovic wrote. “Feels good to have an opportunity to show them where I come from, the beauty of this place and our people.”

Djokovic and the Adria organizers also saw a chance to do something no one else had tried: To bring tennis back just as we remembered it. Neither Serbia nor Croatia, the first two countries on the Adria Tour, had been hit hard by COVID-19. As Djokovic would later say, he and others involved in staging the event believed the virus had “weakened.” So they played with none of the usual coronavirus restrictions. In Belgrade, fans jammed the seats, players shook hands and hugged, and ball kids fetched towels for them. The sight was thrilling and alarming in equal measure. The fact that Djokovic and his wife and the other players then went dancing—indoors, with no social distancing—was simply alarming.

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And that’s when Djokovic came up against a very hard limit, one that he couldn’t visualize his way past. He, his wife, Jelena, and half a dozen other people involved in the Adria Tour—including Grigor Dimitrov, Borna Coric, and Viktor Troicki and his pregnant wife—have tested positive for COVID-19.

“Unfortunately, the virus is still present,” Djokovic said in a statement on Tuesday, “and it is a new reality that we are still learning to cope and live with…I am sorry for each individual case of infection. I hope that it will not complicate anyone’s health situation, and that everyone will be fine.”

Not surprisingly, Djokovic is being pilloried in the press and censured by his fellow players. Barstool Sports called him the “village idiot,” and Nick Kyrgios described the Adria Tour as “boneheaded.” There are rumors that the ATP Player Council may move to oust him as its president. Many will see his infection as a comeuppance, and you can understand why. This spring, Djokovic earned corona-related criticism for (1) wavering on whether he would take a vaccine for it; (2) breaking lockdown rules to practice at a club in Spain; (3) describing the US Open’s original entourage restrictions as “extreme,” and (4) traveling back to Serbia before being tested on Monday.

Djokovic also posted a much-derided Instagram chat with Chervin Jafarieh, a real-estate broker turned wellness entrepreneur who was promoting an expensive herbal treatment called Cymbiotika.

During their talk, Djokovic asserted, among other things, that “Scientists have proven that molecules in the water react to our emotions,” and “Through the power of prayer, through the power of gratitude, [people] manage to turn the most toxic food or the most polluted water into the most healing water.”

Some will wonder if Djokovic thought he could ward off the virus with positive emotion. But as much as he believes in the power of visualization and the mind, he also knows that tennis requires actual physical preparation, too. Few players have been as meticulous about nutrition and training as Djokovic, who is gluten-free and observes a plant-based diet. It’s hard to believe that someone who is so careful about what he puts in his body could be so cavalier about contracting a virus. And yet he was.

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Djokovic didn’t force any of the other players to join the Adria Tour. He wasn’t the only person involved in the decision to stage it without COVID-19 restrictions. And we don’t know how the infections started. But he has earned the criticism he has received, because he was the ringmaster of the show, and because he’s a leader in men’s tennis. Djokovic’s positive test, and those of his wife and fellow players, are a lesson for everyone, not just for the tennis world—about reopening too quickly, about flouting science, about trusting in the wellness movement and power of positive thinking, and, most importantly, about the continuing danger of the coronavirus.

What makes it worse to me is how happy and proud Djokovic was to bring tennis to Belgrade. He beamed when Thiem and Zverev joined him for dinner there, and he cried when the weekend was over and his childhood memories of the city flooded back. Djokovic’s critics say he “wants to be loved”; in this case, he wanted his home to be loved. But it was the wrong time to try to live without limits.

Ten years later: Reliving Isner and Mahut's 183-game battle of 70-68

Tue, 23 Jun 2020 17:17:00 +0000

“Nothing like this will ever happen again, ever,” John Isner said after winning the fifth set, 70-68, over Nicolas Mahut at the 2010 Wimbledon Championships. So far Isner is correct, but he needed another titanic fifth set—this time a 26-24 defeat against Kevin Anderson in the 2018 semifinals—for Wimbledon to terminate over 100 years of tradition and institute a fifth-set tiebreak at 12-all. Isner and Mahut's clash was so absurd, it inspired a star-studded HBO mockumentary, "7 Days in Hell."

Ten years later, we look at a (nearly) unbreakable moment.

On the afternoon of June 23, 2010, something odd happened in offices, bars, and homes all across the United States: People began watching a tennis match. It wasn’t, when it started, an important tennis match: John Isner, the 23rd seed, was facing Frenchman Nicolas Mahut in the first round at Wimbledon on side court No. 18. Few people in the U.S. believed Isner was a threat to win the tournament, and fewer still could pronounce his opponent’s last name.

There were long stretches when the match wasn’t especially interesting to watch, either; it offered little drama from one point to the next. By the time the world began tuning in, Isner and Mahut were deep into a fifth set, and had been trading service holds for hours. Play had been suspended once for darkness the previous day. Now, as the sun set over the All England Club again, and the score reached 20-all, 30-all (!), 40-all (!!), 50-all (!!!), it looked as if this match would be suspended for a second day, for the same reason. Had that ever happened before? Had anything that was going on out on Court 18 ever happened before? Even the scoreboard found itself in uncharted waters. Designed to go only to 47-47, it malfunctioned and had to be fixed that evening.

If Isner and Mahut's record is to be broken, it will have to happen at Roland Garros, the only Grand Slam without a fifth-set tiebreaker. (Getty Images)

People had tuned in at their offices, bars, and homes for one reason: Isner and Mahut were in the process of playing the longest match in tennis history. It also, almost certainly, qualifies as the most incredible match ever played. The last decade in men’s tennis has been about outsized, record-breaking achievements: Roger Federer’s Grand Slam total, Rafael Nadal’s nine French Open titles, Novak Djokovic’s streak of dominance in 2011. You can add Isner-Mahut to that Olympian list. While it was brutal for the two men to play, and a chore at times to watch, the statistics are mind-blowing to recite now.

Score: 6-3, 3-6, 6-7 (7), 7-6 (3), 70-68

11 hours, 5 minutes: Total match time. That’s four hours and three minutes more than the second-longest match, a Davis Cup doubles rubber between the Czech Republic and Switzerland in 2013.

8 hours, 11 minutes: Time taken to play the fifth set. You have to go to a different sport entirely for a comparison here. The longest baseball game ever played was eight hours and six minutes.

138: Games in the fifth set. That’s 26 more than have been played in any other match

215: Aces. Isner hit 112, Mahut 103. The previous record had been 78 by Ivo Karlovic

183: Total games played. That’s 71 more than the second-highest total at Wimbledon, in Pancho Gonzalez’s five set win over Charlie Pasarell in 1969

63: Times that Mahut served to stay in the match

3: Service breaks

After three days on court, Mahut's determination began to look more like despair. (Getty Images)

At 68-68 in the fifth, Mahut went up 0-30 on Isner’s serve, but the American came back to hold. Maybe Mahut was still thinking about that opportunity when he came out to serve the next game, because he missed an easy volley that would have won him a point. Isner, who had been on his last legs for the better part of 24 hours, finally took advantage, first with a forehand pass and then, on his fourth match point, with a down-the-line backhand pass winner. All 6’10” of Isner dropped to the grass, before his legs caromed back up nearly as high in celebration.

Isner and Mahut were suddenly famous, and they struck up what might have been an otherwise unlikely friendship. Some thought their epic had been a bore, as well as a good argument for a fifth-set tiebreaker at Wimbledon (you’ll get no disagreement on the latter point from Isner), yet this match was about more than just its surreal length and statistics.

When it was finally over, Isner celebrated with the largest shoulder stand pose in tennis history. (Getty Images)

There was something more fundamental that made people around the world tune in. It was Mahut, at 50-games-all in the fifth set, leaping, diving, flinging his racquet at the ball, and landing face down at full stretch. It was Isner whiffing on a backhand, standing with his hands on his knees and his hat askew, utterly gassed, yet still laboring on for 40 more games. It was Mahut enduring a heart-breaking defeat, but still winning more points in a single match than any other player in history—except Isner. It was all the times that each of them could have dropped their guard—it would only have taken a bad point or two—but didn’t.

The fact that this was a first-round match played on an obscure court between two players who weren’t stars only added to the appeal. What mattered was that, whatever the stakes, neither man gave in. Isner-Mahut wasn’t the most thrilling tennis match ever. But it’s one of the greatest ever because, for a longer period of time than any other, it represented what’s at the heart of every tennis match, and of every sport: The fight.

Tennis, anyone? On UTS, Adria Tour, Battle of the Brits and Charleston

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 18:05:00 +0000

For a sport that has had its season suspended, there sure is a lot to talk about in tennis these days, isn’t there?

This week the US Open confirmed that it will go on as scheduled, and the ATP and WTA tour announced that they’ll return in August. Last weekend two events made waves in different ways. Both will be back on Saturday, and next week they’ll be joined by two more. By that point, a fair number of the sport’s top players will have returned to the courts this spring.

Here are a few thoughts on the events that will return in France and Croatia this weekend, and a look ahead at the ones that will be joining them next week in London and Charleston.

*****

Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS)

Location: Nice, France
Dates: June 20-21
Surface: Hard court

Players Include: Dominic Thiem, Stefanos Tsitsipas, David Goffin, Matteo Berrettini, Alexei Popyrin, Dustin Brown, Feliciano Lopez, Corentin Moutet

Patrick Mouratoglou’s Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS) seems determined to ask a fundamental question: What is tennis? By which I mean, how many rules and assumptions about the sport can you change and still have it be recognizable as tennis? In his quest to modernize the sport, Mouratoglou challenges some of our most cherished ideas about it.

“You have to rely on yourself in tennis”—not in UTS, where a coach can call a timeout and give you advice anytime he likes. “You can’t run out the clock in tennis”—you can in UTS, which is played like a basketball game, in timed quarters, rather than in sets. “An error is as good as a winner”—not necessarily in Mouratoglou’s world, where players are allowed to pull out a “UTS card” and make their winners count for three points each.

Richard Gasquet and David Goffin head to sudden death to decide their UTS match:

After one weekend, I’d say that UTS is an experiment worth watching. I liked the suspense of the timed quarters more than I thought I would, but it took some time to figure out what was happening with the UTS cards. Best, I thought, was the chance to hear second-tier stars like David Goffin and Benoit Paire talk during their matches. It made me realize how much it means to connect with a player’s personality, rather than just his game, and how much it helps if the players take on some of the responsibility of promoting the sport, rather than just playing it.

We won’t know the ultimate fate of Mouratoglou’s Ultimate Showdown for a while, and it doesn’t help that there are no fans to watch it live in Nice. But the sport shouldn’t hesitate to learn from his ideas. This weekend UTS will get a boost from a new entrant, Dominic Thiem. Of all the players who have returned from their lay-offs, he has looked the best.

*****

Adria Tour

Location: Zadar, Croatia
Dates: June 20-21
Surface: Clay

Players Include: Novak Djokovic, Alexander Zverev, Marin Cilic, Borna Coric

If UTS gave us a glimpse of a possible future in Nice, the Adria Tour took us back to the past in Belgrade. As in, the days when people gathered in public places and filled every seat in the stands at sporting events. The days when no one wore masks. The days when players shook hands.

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It was thrilling and alarming in equal measure. Neither Serbia nor Croatia has been hit as hard by the coronavirus as the U.S. or Western Europe; Serbia has had 258 officially recorded COVID deaths and Croatia 107. But I still cringed at the sight of all that togetherness. Let’s just hope these events don’t lead to more cases there.

Last week Thiem and Grigor Dimitrov joined Djokovic in Belgrade. This week they’ll be replaced by Cilic and Coric. Alexander Zverev, who played in Serbia, will be back for more in Croatia.

*****

Credit One Bank Invitational

Location: Charleston, S.C.
Dates: June 23–28
Surface: Clay

Players Include: Sofia Kenin, Sloane Stephens, Victoria Azarenka, Amanda Anisimova, Monica Puig, Ajla Tomljanovic, Danielle Collins, Alison Riske, Genie Bouchard

Have you wondered what a women’s Laver Cup might look like? Next week’s Credit One Bank Invitational in Charleston should give us an idea. In the biggest event of the lockdown so far, 16 women will gather at the facility on Daniel Island that normally hosts the Volvo Car Open, and break off into teams of eight. Instead of naming them Team Europe and Team World, as Laver Cup does, Credit One will go with something both more ambitious and more easygoing: Team Kindness (captained by Keys) will take on Team Peace (captained by Bethanie Mattek-Sands).

Highlights from Thursday's Credit One Bank Invitational press conference, featuring Madison Keys and Bethanie Mattek-Sands:

The rules won’t be as radical as UTS, but there won’t be fans, and players will call their own lines and get their own towels. While the field is by necessity American-centric, it’s a strong one, and with a few days to build momentum, the event should feel closer to a regular tournament than most of what we’ve seen this spring. Keys, for one, is ready to get back on court.

“I think we all really just take for granted how much we love competing,” she said on Thursday. “Now we’re all like, please put me on a center court, break points down in the third, because I would love to have that feeling again.”

*****

Schroders Battle of the Brits

Location: LTA National Tennis Centre, London
Dates: June 23–28
Surface: Hard court

Players Include: Andy Murray, Jamie Murray, Kyle Edmund, Dan Evans, Cam Norrie

If you were like me this past week, you might have wondered why you kept seeing a video of Jamie Murray getting a swab stuck up his nose—way up his nose. Now we know: Murray is one of the organizers of the Schroders Battle of the Brits charity event, which starts on Tuesday, and he was getting his COVID-19 test. Though he wasn’t making it look like much fun.

Don’t watch if you’re squeamish! ????@jamie_murray gets tested for COVID-19, behind the scenes at the #battleofthebrits ???????????? pic.twitter.com/GKzk30Ttup
— Schroders Battle of The Brits (@BattleofTheBrit) June 16, 2020

Starting Tuesday, Murray the Elder will join his younger brother in an event that will be just what it says it is: an all-British team competition, with singles and doubles events. Like the tours’ year-end championships, the BOTB will begin with a group stage, and the survivors will advance to the semifinals. For most of us, the major point of interest will be seeing how Murray the Younger fares in his first outing of 2020.

Bouncing Off the Walls: An ode to the backboard (and 5 practice tips)

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 04:00:00 +0000

For more on recreational tennis during this unprecedented time—including the best quarantine workout; a guide to improving your ball toss from your couch; what the pros have done to stay active; nutrition tips, advice on how to cope with COVID-19; and drills while hitting against a wall (of any size)—click here.

It’s the only opponent in tennis history that has never been beaten, but it may have taken 150 years for it to be properly respected.

I’m talking, of course, about the wall. Over the last few months, we’ve seen Roger Federer put on a hat and go toe-to-toe with one at home. We’ve seen Leander Paes use a frying pan against his. We’ve seen Sofia Kenin pound hers into submission. Chances are, if you’ve been itching for a tennis fix during the coronavirus shutdown, you’ve pulled out a racquet and taken up arms against one of your own walls; or, if you’re lucky, against the backboard at your local club or park. At least you don’t have to worry about staying six feet away from it.

But hitting against a wall shouldn’t be a last-ditch option. Even when we’re not keeping our distance from each other, a backboard is the ideal foe to face when you’re looking to improve your game. Control, form, footwork, reflexes, stamina, consistency, concentration: you’ll progress in all of these categories and more when you hit against the wall.

Fortunately, YouTube is a gold mine for ideas about putting together an effective practice session with a backboard. We’ve culled five drills from Simon Konov at Top Tennis Training, Peter Freeman at Crunch Time Tennis and Nikola Aracic at Intuitive Tennis that will help you take advantage of what a backboard has to offer. But first, a few ground rules.

—Think control, not power. If you hit too hard against a wall, you won’t be ready for its reply.
—Commit to getting each ball on one bounce.
—Play with intensity. A backboard workout is fast-paced, and you need to be ready for its counter-barrage. Aim to work out for 30 minutes at a time.

1. Hit and Catch

Freeman recommends starting a practice with a simple but deceptively demanding drill that will help you with precision, consistency and technique.

Hit a medium-pace ball against the wall so that it comes directly back to you, and catch it; you shouldn’t have to move more than two steps to track it down. Once you can do that, try to hit two balls in a row, and catch the ball again. Continue to progress one ball at a time—three in a row, then catch; four in a row, then catch, and so on. If you’re forced to move more than two steps to get to any ball, or can’t catch it, you must start over.

“If you can do that all the way up to 10,” Freeman says, “you’re going to feel that when you play your matches, you’re controlling the ball much better.”

2. Crosscourt to Inside Out

Hitting against a wall shouldn’t be about doing the same thing over and over. It’s the perfect opportunity to create drills that target specific shots and tactics, and simulate live-match situations.

Konov recommends alternating between crosscourt and inside-out forehands. Try to hit 10 of each in a row, on one bounce. The key is to give yourself time to get to the ball and, in particular, to get all the way around for your inside-out forehand. Hit your shots high and at a medium pace, and aim for the middle of the wall.

“This is a great drill to improve your movement around your forehand,” Konov says.

That includes the backpedaling and adjustment steps needed to prepare to hit the ball inside out. If you can cover this much court against a wall, it should make it seem that much easier against an opponent back at the baseline.

3. Two-Touch Volleys

Volleying against a wall isn’t easy, because the ball comes back quickly. But that’s what makes it such a good place to practice the shot. You need to be ready for the backboard’s response right away, which will force you to keep your racquet stable, use a short swing, and aim for control rather than power.

To improve your feel around the net, Konov recommends the twotouch volley drill. Hit one volley against the wall, and then hit the next ball to yourself, by tapping it gently upwards. When it comes down, volley it into the wall, and then repeat the two-step process.

“This is a great way to develop the feel on your volleys,” Konov says, “and also to get rid of the excessive backswings. Because if I have a big backswing, the ball is going to fly on that first touch.”

4. Overheads

Overheads, against a backboard? It’s hard to imagine, but no opponent can put lobs back into the air more consistently than a wall.

“One of my all-time favorite drills is the overhead drill on the wall,” Aracic says. “If you can master this drill, you can definitely master the overhead on the court.”

Toss a ball up and hit it down into the ground in front of the wall at a medium pace. The ball will pop up like a lob and give you a chance to hit an overhead. Hit your overhead into the same area—into the ground, in front of the wall—and continue from there, as in a warm-up.

Start slowly and easily, and gradually increase the pace as you try to make 10 overheads in a row.

“Make sure the feet are moving,” Aracic says.

Just like in a match, the key to the overhead is anticipating where the ball is going to come down and getting yourself there quickly, so you have to time to set up and make adjustment steps before you swing.

5. Top Hand Drill

Players with two-handed backhands normally think of their arms as a single unit. But each has a specific job, and one is stronger than the other. Your top hand is the one that will lead the shot; it will help you pull the ball crosscourt and whip up on it for topspin. But your top hand is also your weaker, less-utilized off-hand.

How can you strengthen it? By hitting against a wall.

Hit a normal two-handed backhand. On the next ball, take your bottom hand— the right hand for righties—off the racquet and swing with your top hand only. Use the same grip you use on your backhand and make a full stroke. Continue to alternate between the two shots.

“This is a great way for you to really develop that top hand,” Konov says, “and to make you feel that it is really leading the shot—that it’s the boss on the two-handed backhand.”

What survived? Who'll play? Five takeaways from tennis' reopening day

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 01:00:00 +0000

In the space of 24 hours, we’ve gone from no tennis to…all the tennis. At the same time that the US Open was holding a press conference on Wednesday to declare that the tournament will go on as scheduled (or nearly as scheduled), the ATP and WTA laid out their revised 2020 calendars. It was typical tennis overkill. But after three months with no play at all, I’ll take too much of the sport over too little.

There’s a lot for a fan to be excited about, or at least hopeful for. Madrid, Rome, the Citi Open, the Western and Southern Open, the US Open, the French Open: All of these events that were postponed, or that once seemed destined to be cancelled, have been resurrected. September, which will have two Masters 1000 events bracketed by two Grand Slam events, promises to be a head-spinning month.

Is it an overreach? Players who are desperate to make money again will welcome the sport’s return. The big names, on the other hand, may feel like they’re being unnecessarily put in harm’s way. Only the virus knows what will happen next, and right now its signals are mixed. New York, which will host the Western and Southern Open and the US Open, has experienced a dramatic decline in cases. At the same time, the persistence of the virus elsewhere shows that the crisis is obviously not over. By August, when tennis returns, the situation will almost certainly look different than it does now. We can only hope it’s better, rather than worse.

Here are five takeaways from tennis’s reopening day.

1. The US Open loosens up

The Open has a new tournament director, former WTA chief Stacey Allaster, and she seems to have heard the top player’s complaints about the strict protocols that were floated last week. Today some of them were eased.

Players can now travel to New York on their own. Entourages will be allowed outside the grounds, and three people can accompany the players inside the grounds. Private houses, along with hotel rooms, will be available outside of Manhattan, complete with a realtor to help the players negotiate the New York real estate market (have fun). Prize money will only fall eight percent, despite a potential 80 percent drop in tournament revenue. And while the qualifying, juniors and mixed doubles tournaments have been cancelled, and the doubles draws have been reduced, the Open is setting aside $6.6 million for lower-ranked players to help make up for it.

Jen Pottheiser/USTA

We’ll see whether that’s enough to entice high-profile fence-sitters like Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal and Simona Halep to cross the Atlantic. Halep left the door open a little wider today than she had before, and it’s hard to envision a Grand Slam tournament right now without Djokovic. Fortunately, we don’t have to envision one without Serena Williams, who announced that she’ll be playing the Open. And practicing for it, too.

“I can confirm,” Allaster said today, “that the surface provided by Laykold for the US Open and Western & Southern Open was shipped to Serena’s house. She has a new court in her backyard, so she has been training.”

Now that’s player friendly.

2. Tennis won’t return to the heartland

The men’s schedule begins with the Citi Open on August 14. As Australia's John Millman has pointed out, this is an odd way to start, because only then do the players enter the so-called coronavirus bubble at Flushing Meadows.

Why are we going into a bubble for Cinci/US when we have a lead in tournament in Washington DC? We may as well have played Cinci in Cinci if we are no longer doing the bubble isolation tennis thing.
— John Millman (@johnhmillman) June 17, 2020

As for the rest of the U.S. summer circuit, Winston-Salem and the Rogers Cup events in Toronto and Montreal have been cancelled, and the Western & Southern Open, which is owned by the USTA, will be played at Flushing Meadows just before the Open, rather than in Mason, Ohio. Nothing about the new tennis schedule is ideal, but losing Canada and Cincy, and summer-vacation vibe they exude, may hurt the most.

3. Roland Garros sits pretty

Is there a French equivalent to the phrase, “You snooze, you lose”? This could be Roland Garros’ official slogan at the moment. When the coronavirus hit, the tournament didn’t waste any time shifting its dates from the end of May to the end of September, and unilaterally claiming two weeks on the calendar as its own, tour events be damned. Since then, nothing has come along to uproot it; on the contrary, the tours have followed RG’s lead and moved their two big clay tune-up tournaments, in Madrid and Rome, to September. Now, unlike the US Open, Roland Garros can count on Nadal’s presence, and likely Djokovic’s; it will be able to stage a qualifying event; and there may be even be fans in its seats.

4. The WTA returns to Asia

While the ATP’s official schedule ends with Roland Garros, the WTA has detailed its plans through November. The fall Asian circuit, which seemed sure to be cancelled a few months ago, is on. In fact, it makes up a bigger percentage of the women’s calendar than ever. The WTA starts back up in Seoul even before Roland Garros is over, and continues through November 23. The season will be three weeks longer than originally planned, and the putative year-end finals in Shenzhen will be followed by two tournaments, in Zhuhai and Guangzhou.

Getty Images

5. So…can we call this is a real season?

With the return of the 2020 calendar, and in particular the presence of the US Open and Roland Garros on it, we confront a new set of questions. Namely, should those Slams count as Slams? Should they go on the winners’ records like any other major, or should they—officially or unofficially—come with asterisks?

We can start by admitting that neither of these events will be normal. Roland Garros won’t be played at its usual time. Arenas will be empty, or nearly empty. And several top players may skip the US Open.

How seriously we end up taking the Open may depend on how many big names enter. In 1973, 80 prominent men boycotted Wimbledon. Jan Kodes won the tournament, and while there’s no asterisk next to his name, we all recognize that it was “the boycott year.” But I’m guessing that won’t happen to the Open this time. Serena’s presence alone legitimates the women’s draw, and the presence of either Djokovic or Nadal would do the same for the men’s.

Whoever is there, you’ll be watching, won’t you? For now, the prospect of live Grand Slam tennis is enough for me.

What survived? Who'll play? Five takeaways from tennis' reopening day

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 21:59:00 +0000

Here are five takeaways from tennis’s reopening day.

1. The US Open loosens up

Jen Pottheiser/USTA

Now that’s player friendly.

2. Tennis won’t return to the heartland

Why are we going into a bubble for Cinci/US when we have a lead in tournament in Washington DC? We may as well have played Cinci in Cinci if we are no longer doing the bubble isolation tennis thing.
— John Millman (@johnhmillman) June 17, 2020

3. Roland Garros sits pretty

4. The WTA returns to Asia

Getty Images

5. So…can we call this is a real season?

Whoever is there, you’ll be watching, won’t you? For now, the prospect of live Grand Slam tennis is enough for me.

Can tennis help destigmatize discussions of mental health in sports?

Tue, 16 Jun 2020 04:00:00 +0000

Cliff Richey had done just about everything a tennis player could do.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he had been ranked No. 1 in the United States, and as high as No. 6 in the world. He had led his country to a Davis Cup title. He had reached the quarterfinals or better at all four Grand Slam tournaments, and twice made it to the semifinals at the US Open.

Nicknamed The Bull, this wiry, no-nonsense native son of West Texas was one of tennis’ tough guys. On court, despite being just 5’9”, he was a hard- charging serve-and-volleyer; off court, he drank as hard as an athlete’s lifestyle would allow. In a mid-match confrontation that pitted two hot-heads of different generations against each other, Richey even succeeded in getting a young John McEnroe to shut up.

So why, Richey wondered as the ’70s progressed and his 30th birthday approached, was he more on edge than ever? Why, on so many nights, did he find himself going well past his old limit of four beers? Why had he suddenly developed the yips on his backhand? Why couldn’t he sleep until he’d downed 40 milligrams of Valium? Why, one morning before a match in Atlanta, was he still so high he “couldn’t feel his feet when they hit the carpet”?

“I didn’t know what was wrong,” Richey, now 73, says today from his home in San Angelo, Texas. “My brain was in a storm for five or six years. I was self-medicating with alcohol and basically a functional depressive, but I didn’t have that term.”

Richey thought his malaise was just part of life on tour, where loneliness and jet lag are the norm, your friend one day is your opponent the next, and slumps can crush even the most iron-willed player’s soul. Few people, and even fewer male professional athletes, talked about depression in those days. And that went double in tennis, a sport with a strong ethos of self-reliance. Among Richey’s peers, Arthur Ashe was one of the few who expressed concern about his work-hard, play-hard lifestyle.

“I always had bad anxiety, even in the juniors, but I wrote it off,” Richey says. “I didn’t know it wasn’t normal. In my family, it was nothing but tennis, and I’d always worried about how good I was compared to others.”

Richey was a highly accomplished player, but his toughest battle had nothing to do with forehands and backhands. “Cliff is my friend and his crusade to draw more attention to depression will not be easy,” wrote Jimmy Connors in Richey’s first book, Acing Depression: A Tennis Champion’s Toughest Match. “But he has never been afraid of a fight. With his energy and focus, it is a challenge that can be met.” (Getty Images)

For Richey, tennis was a double-edged sword for his anxiety. On the one hand, the sport heightened it; on the other, his nerves served as a motivator.

“I like things that are clear cut, and I liked that in tennis you either won or lost,” he says. “But there’s also nowhere to hide. Whatever you did, it was in the newspaper the next day. “The one thing I could fall back on was my skill. I could always count on that to get me where I wanted to go.”

Until he couldn’t. By 1979, Richey’s skill was no longer enough to keep him on tour. But even as his tennis game was declining, his golf game was improving, and by the early 1990s, he had joined the Celebrity Player’s golf tour. It didn’t take long for the old demons to follow him from the court to the course.

“Two years into the tour, I was losing my [golf] game, replaying my horror of losing my tennis game,” Richey says.

For a second time, Richey’s safety net—his athletic ability—had been pulled out from under him. This time depression hit harder. Richey plastered black garbage bags on his windows—”my mind became dark.” He says he was largely “non-functional” from 1994 to ’97. Yet it wasn’t until 1996, when he visited his dermatologist, who was also a family friend, that Richey understood what was happening to him, and what he needed to do about it.

“I laid my heart out,” Richey says.

After his dermatologist helped secure him a prescription for an anti-depressant, Richey quit drinking, got therapy, and started taking Zoloft. “I’m happy to be on it,” he says, while reiterating that he isn’t “cured” of depression. He returned to the golf tour and retired from his second sport in 2007.

“I always knew from tennis that you change a losing game, and it was time for me to change,” Richey says. “Once I understood what was happening to me, I made depression my ultimate opponent.”

Rubin won the Wimbledon junior title in 2014, but hasn’t reached the second round there as a pro. His rocky transition to the ATP tour began a downward spiral that, eventually, inspired him to create something that helped not only him, but other struggling pros. (Getty Images)

It has been nearly 50 years since Richey’s “brain went into a storm” while he was on tour. Has anything changed in tennis during that time?

Earlier this decade, Mardy Fish talked openly about his struggles with an anxiety disorder, and Serena Williams has done the same about her postpartum depression. But the stigma around discussing mental health has stubbornly endured.

“You see it written about more now,” Richey says, “but it hasn’t changed nearly enough.”

Noah Rubin, a 24-year-old player from Long Island, wants to do something about that. Unlike Richey, a baby boomer born in 1946, Rubin, a Millennial born in 1996, is already well-versed in the subjects of anxiety and depression. He has experienced them first-hand, and sought professional help. During his five years on tour, he has also observed the symptoms of them in his fellow players.

“I’m passionate about mental health,” Rubin says. “I’m passionate about knowing my feelings and sharing what I feel.”

In the juniors and college, Rubin met with little but success. When he was a student at John McEnroe’s academy in New York, McEnroe called him “the most talented player we’ve come across.” Rubin won the boys’ title at Wimbledon in 2014, and reached the NCAA Division I final as a freshman.

But as it has been for so many other talented young players, the pro tour was a steeper hill to climb. Despite making improvements to his game, and pushing Roger Federer hard at the 2017 Australian Open, Rubin has never been ranked higher than No. 125. The low point came at a Challenger event in Spain in 2018, when he found himself alone in a dark and near-empty club at 11 at night, having just lost his fifth straight match, “with tears slowly dripping down my face.”

But Rubin also discovered that he wasn’t the only player who felt alone. The life of the rank-and-file pro, and the struggles he or she faces, hadn’t changed much since Richey’s day. The travel was just as arduous, the jet lag just as debilitating, the slumps just as devastating, and the money worries just as vexing.

“You’re by yourself most of the time, and you’re dealing with failure most of the time,” Rubin says. “You’re struggling financially. It has a snowball effect.”

According to Rubin, something else hasn’t changed since Richey’s day: alcohol as a survival tool.

“I know a lot of players who, to cope and to get ready for the next week, spend 12 hours drinking,” Rubin told The Daily Telegraph last year.

To Rubin, tennis’ structure only exacerbates these problems. The season is too long, the best-of-five-set matches too grueling, and the chase for money and ranking points too frenzied.

To help shine a brighter light on his fellow players’ lives, Rubin did what any social-media-savvy Millennial might do: he created an Instagram account. Called Behind the Racquet, it’s a place where pros of all levels can share their stories. In part, Rubin sees the site as a way to advertise the game to a generation of fans who are accustomed to knowing everything—the good, the bad, and the ugly—about their favorite celebrities.

“I feel like there’s a disconnect between tennis players and fans,” Rubin says. “The way the sport is promoted, fans can’t relate to players at a deeper level.”

Traditionally, tennis players have been leery about broadcasting their vulnerabilities to their fellow pros. “I’m not here to make friends” has always been an acceptable, even admirable, philosophy on tour. Rubin calls those concerns “antiquated.”

“If I’m in a third set, I’m not thinking about something my opponent revealed about himself in the past; it doesn’t work that way,” Rubin says. “There’s this toxic masculinity in sports, that you have to be the alpha male, but I don’t think that’s relevant in a match.”

If the response from his fellow players is any indication, Rubin is onto something. Behind the Racquet now features the personal and sometimes painful stories of more than 100 people from across the sport. Women and men, Top 10 players and Challenger players, active pros and retired pros, 40-somethings and teenagers, fans and announcers: Rubin tries to offer a space where everyone can open up.

In April, 16-year-old Coco Gauff caused a stir when she posted that she had been “really depressed” in the year leading up to her 2019 breakthrough. (Coco’s father later clarified her comment, and Rubin believes he made an error in editorial judgement.) If it’s startling to hear a young superstar talk about depression, Rubin hopes his site will make it less so.

“I wanted Behind the Racquet to be a form of therapy,” Rubin says, “to start the conversation and get people to at least think about how they’re feeling. We need to normalize talking about anxiety.”

For Behind the Racquet, Roberto Bautista Agut tells the story of how he dealt with the deaths of his parents, and Madison Keys talks about being judged for her weight at 15, by people who saw her on TV. “Eventually, that truly got into my head,” she says. (Getty Images)

Can tennis, a sport that rewards stoicism, be a pioneer in advancing the discussion around mental health?

That revolution came too late to prolong Richey’s career, but he has seen the benefits since. In 2010, he teamed with his daughter, Hilaire Kallendorf, to write Acing Depression: A Tennis Champion’s Toughest Match, a memoir of his peaks and valleys on tour.

“As you can probably guess, I wasn’t the world’s greatest father when I was a player,” Richey says. “But doing this book really brought my daughter and I closer.”

Along with personal healing, the book gave Richey an identity far removed from that of most former professional athletes. He became a regular speaker at mental-health conferences, and has helped counsel hundreds of fellow sufferers over the years. In 2017, he published a second book, with Mary Garrison, Your Playbook for Beating Depression.

Like the net-rusher he once was, Richey has fought his demons by understanding his opponent, and going to battle with it.

“So many people still don’t know what the signs are for depression,” Richey says. “I tell them, ‘Know what loss is getting to you. Read up on the disease. Address the issue.’

“Tennis is a selfish sport. Everything’s about you. So it means something to me to think that I could help save some people. I’d like to be known as a pretty darn good tennis player, and a mental health advocate.”

“I love kicking depression’s ass any chance I can get.”

Does tennis need to be disrupted? Patrick Mouratoglou thinks so

Thu, 11 Jun 2020 19:06:00 +0000

With Roger Federer hanging up his racquet until January and the US Open debate raging on, maybe the best thing a tennis fan can do right now is put the future aside and concentrate on the present. That’s where this weekend’s special events come in. Three of them will be held in Europe—in France, Serbia and the Czech Republic—and all will feature Top 10 players in non-traditional formats.

Below is a look at who’s playing, and what scoring systems they’ll be using. Each exhibition will be held outdoors, with no fans in attendance—aside from the Adria Tour, which has sold a limited number of tickets—and social-distancing rules in place, and each will be broadcast either on Tennis Channel or Tennis Channel Plus.

*****

Ultimate Tennis Showdown (UTS)

Location: Nice, France
Surface: Hard court
Dates: Each weekend from June 13–14 to July 11–12
Live Streaming: UTSlive.tv

Players include Stefanos Tsitsipas, David Goffin, Benoit Paire, Richard Gasquet, Dustin Brown, Lucas Pouille, Matteo Berrettini, and Feliciano Lopez. Dominic Thiem will join UTS next weekend.

There’s an old saying in U.S. politics: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Patrick Mouratoglou seems to have heard it, because he has taken the opportunity afforded by the coronavirus lockdown to launch what he hopes will become an entirely new professional tennis league—and frankly, an entirely new approach to playing and presenting the sport. It’s called UTS. Its first series of events starts Saturday, and will continue each weekend until the middle of July.

If you believe Mouratoglou, “tennis is in a danger zone” today, because the average fan is 61 years old and “increasing with each year.” The game, he believes, “desperately needs to reinvent itself.” Unlike so many others who make the same complaint, Mouratoglou is taking the reinvention process into his own hands.

“Someone has to do it,” he told reporters on Thursday.

Mouratoglou and his UTS colleagues want to take tennis back to what they consider its glory years, the 1980s, when bad boys roamed the courts and there was more than one way to play the game.

“If [Nick] Kyrgios is filling up a stadium, there’s a reason for it,” Mouratoglou said. “We need Kyrgios, but we also need David Goffin,” he adds, emphasizing that a broader variety of personalities on court will appeal to a broader variety of fans.

The UTS mantra is “Diversity. Emotion. Modernity.” Mouratoglou wants to promote younger players, and encourage them to show more emotion. He thinks that, since the '80s, the game’s code of conduct has made it harder for players to be themselves. In UTS matches, new-school irreverence will be in, and old-fashioned decorum will be out—within reason, of course.

“I’m not asking them to do crazy things,” Mouratoglou said, when he was asked if he thought it would be hard for the players to shift emotional gears for UTS. “I just want authenticity. I want them to be themselves.”

That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the changes we’ll see in UTS. Coaches will be on the court, and they’ll be able to call timeouts (they also must coach in English). Players will receive a set number of “UTS cards” that they can use at their discretion, and which will allow them to, say, take away an opponent’s first serve, or make one of their winners count for three points.

Most radical of all may be the scoring system. Matches will be timed, and divided into four 10-minute quarters, like basketball games. Whoever is ahead in points at the end of each quarter will win that quarter; whoever wins more quarters wins the match. If players are tied at 2-2, there’s a sudden death tiebreaker—the first player to win two straight points wins. Matches shouldn’t last more than an hour.

“A lot of people are going to be against it, but that’s OK,” Mouratoglou said with a smile. Judging by the early social-media reaction, many fans already are.

WATCH: Mouratolgou on the Ultimate Tennis Showdown

Mouratoglou says tennis needs to be “disrupted.” That’s not easy to do; just ask Gerard Pique, who has taken sharp criticism for overhauling the Davis Cup. What’s interesting about Mouratoglou’s ideas is that he’s not just thinking of tennis as a sport; he’s thinking of it as a media product. In planning UTS, he says he didn’t just look at how fans watch sports today, he looked at how they consume various forms of media.

Instead of watching two-hour movies, we watch one-hour TV shows. Instead of reading articles, we look at tweets. He thinks the same will be true for tennis: Instead of watching best-of-five, or even best-of-three, people will sit down for a match they know will end in an hour. This TV-centric (or streaming centric) focus reminds me of how WCT became successful in the early 1970s. With the coronavirus keeping us out of arenas and inside our homes for the foreseeable future, it makes more sense than ever.

But Mouratoglou also knows tennis well enough to know that he’s not going to displace the Grand Slams or the tours.

“We can have two leagues,” he says.

For now, his league will be for men only, but he wants to make it dual-gender as soon as he can. By the end of this year, he’d like to have 50,000 subscribers to the UTS stream.

“The first goal is to have people like it,” he says.

The Mouratoglou vision for the future will begin on Saturday, on a hard court at his academy in Nice, where 10 players will gather for the next five weekends: Tsitsipas, Goffin, Paire, Gasquet, Brown, Pouille, Popyrin, Berrettini, Lopez and, starting next weekend, Thiem. That’s a decent mix of the high-quality (Thiem, Tsitsipas, Goffin) and the entertaining (Paire, Brown). They’ll play round-robin matches for four weekends, with the winners advancing to a knock-out stage to be held July 11th and 12th.

“UTS will inevitably provoke disruption,” Mouratoglou says.

Does tennis need a disrupter? It’s safe to say that Wimbledon isn’t going to turn into a UTS event any time soon, but it’s also safe to say that there’s a place in the game for more irreverence and shorter matches, and the desire for both is probably only going to grow. For now, UTS will give us something to talk about. That’s about all we can ask for in 2020.

*****

Adria Tour

Locations: Belgrade, Serbia, and Zadar, Croatia
Surface: Clay
Dates: June 13–14 and June 20–21

Players include Novak Djokovic, Dominic Thiem, Alexander Zverev, Grigor Dimitrov, Borna Coric, Marin Cilic

UTS isn’t the only experimental game in town this weekend. The Adria Tour, which will be played in Belgrade this weekend, and Zadar the following weekend, will use the Fast4 format. Matches will be best-of-three; sets will be first to four, with a tiebreaker at 3-3; and games will be no-ad.

Adria also has a strong field, especially for the first weekend. Among those scheduled to appear in Belgrade are Djokovic, whose foundation is involved in staging the event, Thiem, Zverev and Dimitrov. In Zadar, Thiem and Zverev will be replaced by Coric and Cilic.

Adria will give us a lot of tennis: Eight matches on the two Saturdays, and five more on the two Sundays. It may not have the futuristic flash of UTS, but I’m guessing that the competitive juices will flow. Typically, exhibitions are a break from the tour, a chance for the players to relax. This will be the reverse. These guys will finally have a chance to get off the couch and do what they do best again.

*****

Tipsport Charity Cup

Location: Prague
Surface: Clay
Dates: June 13–15; June 29–July 1; July 11–13; July 25–27

Players include Petra Kvitova, Karolina Pliskova, Marketa Vondrousova, Karolina Muchova, Barbora Strycova, Katerina Siniakova

The UTS and Adria Tour events envision a tennis future with shorter matches and chattier players. But the Tipsport event in Prague may be more realistic. Its future is one where the pros spend much of their time inside their own national borders, competing with and against their countrymen and women.

That the nation in question is the Czech Republic, and that the players are from the WTA makes sense. The Czech Fed Cup team has been a juggernaut over the last decade, and few players anywhere relish the team-tennis experience as much as Kvitova, Pliskova or Strycova. This event may be part reunion, and part intra-squad scrimmage. Either way, it will be good to see them all on one court again.

Tournoi de France winners channeled champion courage into WWII combat

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 04:00:00 +0000

World War II has been a hot topic among tennis historians in 2020. This year not only marks the 75th anniversary of the conflict’s end, it’s also the first time since the conclusion of the war in 1945 that any of the sport’s Grand Slam events have been postponed or canceled.

In casting our eyes backward, we’ve been reminded that not all Slams suffered the same fates during the war. At Wimbledon, Centre Court was bombed, and the tournament was abandoned from 1940 to 1945. The Australian Championships were also canceled while the country’s soldiers fought in Europe and the Pacific. The U.S. was involved in both of those theaters as well, but its national championships continued through the war. The Roosevelt administration saw sports as a morale booster. “We will gladly eliminate tennis if it interferes with winning the war,” USTA president Holcombe Ward said in 1942. “But our government doesn’t want us to abandon tennis.”

What happened at Roland Garros? As with everything else about France during the war, the story of its national tennis tournament, and the players who competed in it, is complicated.

The war came to French soil on May 10, 1940, when Germany invaded and began a monthlong march to Paris. With the city under siege, Roland Garros was canceled that spring. But the site had already played a role in the struggle. From fall 1939 to May 1940, the French government set up an internment camp on the grounds, for anti-Nazi political prisoners and foreign nationals. In his memoir, Arthur Koestler, a Jewish communist from Hungary and author of Darkness at Noon, described his time there.

“At Roland Garros, we called ourselves the cave dwellers, about 600 of us who lived beneath the stairways of the stadium,” Koestler wrote. “We slept on straw—wet straw because the place leaked. We were so crammed in, we felt like sardines.”

Rather than bring a halt to all sporting events during wartime, France’s new German-aligned Vichy government tried to promote physical fitness among its citizens by keeping its national competitions alive, just as Roosevelt did in the States. In 1941, tennis returned to Roland Garros, in a more limited, nationalistic form. Instead of a Grand Slam, the site hosted a tournament for French players only. (Foreign nationals from Belgium, Switzerland, and Luxembourg also participated.)

Now known as the Tournoi de France, the event was held from 1941 to 1945. Because it happened during the occupation, though, the results aren't recognized as part of the history of Roland Garros, and the winners aren’t included in the honor roll of major champions. (This stands in contrast to the French Championships that were held from 1891 to 1924; those were also limited to players from France, but the winners are considered Grand Slam champs.)

French tennis players Marcel Bernard (second from left) and Yvon Petra (right) arrive for a match of the French International Championships of Tennis, in July 1946 at the Roland Garros stadium in Paris. (AFP vis Getty Images)

Of course, in those days, tennis players in France had a lot more to think about than their major-title counts. Everyone’s life had been upended, and everyone had life-or-death decisions to make.

Bernard Destremau, winner of the Tournoi de France in 1941 and 1942, escaped from France to North Africa during the war, commanded a tank for the Free French forces, was shot in the back, and received the Legion of Honor. Destremau lived to become a diplomat, politician, and an ambassador for France.

Yvon Petra, winner of the Tournoi in 1943, 1944, and 1945, was wounded and taken prisoner. In 1946, he would become the last Frenchman to win Wimbledon. (For more on Petra, please read our 2016 story on his father, as told to us by the French Hall of Famer.)

Raymonde Veber Jones, winner of the women’s Tournoi de France in 1944, saw her brother captured and held by the Germans for seven years. During the war, she fled Paris with her mother and sister after their apartment complex was bombed. Later the family hid a Jewish player in their house for six months. (For more on Veber Jones, see Robert Weintraub’s 2015 profile of her here.)

If the war-time drama of French tennis had a leading man, it was Jean Borotra. As part of the country's fitness push, the legendary Bounding Basque was named First Commissioner of Sports by the Vichy government. After seeing the new regime up close, Borotra quit his position and vowed to join the fight against the Nazis. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1942 and imprisoned in Germany. At the end of the war in 1945, he vaulted a wall to escape and, after a dash across an open field, helped alert U.S. forces of a prisoner camp that was subsequently liberated.

While Borotra switched sides mid-war, there wasn’t any question about his fellow player Simonne Mathieu’s allegiances. After winning at Roland Garros in 1938 and 1939, she headed up the women’s volunteer branch of the Free French forces, and marched with Charles De Gaulle through Paris when the city was liberated in August 1944. A month later, Mathieu helped mark the end of the war era in French tennis by presiding, in her army uniform, over the “Liberation Match,” an exhibition at Roland Garros between Petra and Henri Cochet. The tournament honored Mathieu first by naming the women’s doubles trophy after her, though her first name is misspelled, with one “n.” In 2019, officials tried again—and spelled her name correctly—when they named their new Greenhouse Court for her.

Roland Garros has given Mathieu and her war efforts their due, but the tournament doesn’t acknowledge the event that was played on its grounds in those years. Officially, the French Open was canceled after 1939, and its history doesn’t start again until 1946, when the Germans had been expelled and the tennis world was invited back to Paris.

Simmone Mathieu, in 1926. (Wikimedia Commons)

Fans happily filled the stands at Roland Garros that summer. Food was scarce, oil shortages continued, and U.S. G.I.s remained a presence in Paris. But after six years, peace time had come, and life could begin again.

“Having been deprived of tennis during the war years, we had a real hunger to play,” Destremeau said. “We burned with an intense passion for the game, which I personally never knew at any other moment in my life, before or since.”

The women’s events were dominated by players from the U.S., where the sport had never stopped. Margaret Osborne beat Pauline Betz in the singles final, and teamed with Louise Brough to win the doubles. Betz and Budge Patty, who had fought with the U.S. Army in Italy two years earlier, won the mixed.

But the French men rose to the occasion. They were led by an old hero of the pre-war days, Marcel Bernard. Now 32, Bernard initially believed he was too rusty to play singles. But he entered at the last minute and ended up winning his first and only major singles title, much to the delight of the crowd. Bernard defeated Petra in five sets in the semifinals, Jaroslav Drobny in five sets in the final, and came back the next day to team with Petra to win the doubles, 10-8 in a fifth set. (Go here to read more about the event, and see a video of the men’s singles and doubles finals.)

“It was a [perfect] scenario and one that people liked,” Bernard remembered. “There had been the war, and the French Open was forced to stop. And along comes a Frenchman who battles back from two sets down. When I won in the end, there was such an ovation.”

Bernard had not only survived the war, and three five-set matches in three days, he had also beaten the heat. That year, Roland Garros switched places with Wimbledon on the calendar, and finished in July. Because of the sweltering conditions, many of the men left their traditional long trousers behind and opted for shorts for the first time. Soon after, this long-delayed fashion innovation was the norm at all of the Grand Slams. The post-war era, in France and in tennis, had begun.

Rewatch, French Open 2010: Djokovic's career-changing loss to Melzer

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 02:00:00 +0000

“In 2010 I lost to Jürgen Melzer in the quarterfinals of Roland Garros," Novak Djokovic told Sky Italia last month. “I cried when I left, that was a bad moment. I wanted to stop playing tennis and saw only black. But it was also a transformation. Because after this match I freed myself.”

In those days, Djokovic said, “I knew I could do more, but I lost the important matches against Federer and Nadal. After this match [against Melzer], I took the pressure off to start playing more aggressively. That was the turning point for me.”

This isn’t the first time Djokovic has cited his 3-6, 2-6, 6-2, 7-6 (3), 6-4 loss to Melzer as a career-changing moment. Viewed from a 2020 perspective, you can see why he thinks of it that way.

Getty Images

As of June 2010, Djokovic was 23, he’d been a pro for five years, and he had just one major title to his name. As good as he was, and as hard as he tried, he was still the third wheel in his three-way rivalry with Rafa and Roger. For most players, of course, that would be a dream career, but Djokovic wasn’t most players. His goal, from the moment he broke onto the tour, had been to become No. 1; he didn’t care who he had to step over to get there. Listening to Djokovic today, it sounds as if his loss to Melzer at Roland Garros finally made him stop worrying about overtaking Federer and Nadal, and just play tennis.

The results didn’t come right away. At Wimbledon a month later, Djokovic suffered another painful and baffling defeat when he went out to Tomas Berdych in straight sets in the semifinals. But at the US Open that September, he saved two match points to beat Federer in the semis, before losing to Nadal in the final. When Djokovic led Serbia to its first Davis Cup title at the end of 2010, the transformation was complete. He wouldn’t lose again until Roland Garros in 2011.

Djokovic’s defeat to Melzer would be a milestone in another way: He hasn’t blown a two-set lead since. During that time, the Serb has remade himself from a player with a reputation for pulling the mental ripcord early into a master of the marathon victory. With the anniversary of Melzer’s win upon us, we take a look back at a match that looms larger today than it did at the time.

Highlights—Melzer's five-set stunner over Djokovic:

At first, 26 minutes of highlights seems like it might be overkill, but this clip gains momentum as it goes, and especially as the bullets start to fly off Melzer’s strings over the last two sets. Aside from being a famous upset, this was a terrific shot-making session.

It’s also one that looked like it was going to be exceedingly routine for two sets. Djokovic comes out firing in his usual way—not with his serve and forehand, but with his return and forehand. Time and again, he stretches out for a return, drops it at Melzer’s feet, and finishes the point with a forehand winner. But everything else is clicking, too. Djokovic closes out the second set by knocking off a confident overhead. There’s no sign here of the shaky smashes in his future.

But this video makes clear that there’s one element of Djokovic’s game that has improved markedly since 2010, and it’s his serve. Back then, he was using a straight-over-the-head motion, like a cricket bowler or a slingshot. For a guy ranked No. 3 in the world, it was highly unnatural. I’m not sure when Djokovic fixed it, but it seems clear that upgrading his serve was a big part of why he has upgraded his game in the years since 2010.

When Djokovic goes up a break early in the third set, at 1-0 and again at 2-1, the match looks all but over. But this is where Melzer makes his stand. After snapping a topspin lob winner over Djokovic’s head, the Austrian finally relaxes and finds a groove from the baseline. He breaks with a forehand pass for 4-2, runs out the third set, and hits bigger and better from there. Big serves, big backhands, big forehands, and lots of drop shots: Melzer’s racquet turns into a Howitzer—with touch. Djokovic fights hard to hold for 4-4, and celebrates as if he has finally broken his opponent’s will. Instead, it’s Melzer who stays on top of the baseline, and the rallies. All Djokovic can do, after a certain point, is throw his hands in the air as he watches another winner scream past him.

Getty Images

It doesn’t appear on this clip, but the final game of the match included a controversial call. Djokovic went up 0-15, and appeared to go up 0-30, when his forehand passing shot was ruled a winner. But Melzer signaled that the ball had landed wide, and chair umpire Carlos Bernardes agreed—much to the chagrin of Djokovic. Hawk-Eye agreed with the Serb; the replay technology showed the ball catching the tape. (This video captures that scene.)

After squandering two break points and saving two match points, Djokovic finally succumbed. As usual, though, he was quick to offer Melzer (who shares a birthday with him) a congratulatory hug, and to shake Bernardes’ hand.

Later, Djokovic criticized Bernardes—“I don’t know what was going on with him”—but he didn’t use it as an excuse. “I can’t blame him for losing this match,” he said. “That’s one call.” He also refused to call for Hawk-Eye to be installed at Roland Garros just because of this one incident.

Why did Djokovic become a champion he did after this match? He might tell you it was because he felt free. Someone else might tell you it was because he improved his serve. But the way he took this defeat—with perspective rather than petulance—showed that there was a champion inside of him all along.

George Floyd: Coco Gauff and Naomi Osaka take strong, admirable stands

Sun, 31 May 2020 01:55:00 +0000

Was it just five months ago that Coco Gauff danced her way into 2020? It may be hard to remember now, but at the end of her off-season training block in Florida, Gauff and her hitting partners—one of whom was Serena Williams—celebrated the start of a new tennis season by choreographing a dance routine and recording it for Instagram. The video ended with Williams doing a split, and quickly went viral. Gauff, a teenager who wasn’t even part of the tour at the start of 2019, had obviously come a long way in a short time.

Like the rest of us in this year of pandemic and protests, Gauff has come a lot farther in 2020—but not to a place she wanted to be. Last week, the 16-year-old posted a new Tik Tok video that was a far cry from her December dance with Serena. In her new clip, Gauff dons a black hooded sweatshirt, turns to the camera somberly, and asks “Am I next?” Dramatic music plays, while images of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and other African-American victims of violence at the hands of law enforcement, or self-proclaimed law enforcement, appear on the screen. Gauff closes with a challenge: “I am using my voice. Will you use yours?”

#blacklivesmatter pic.twitter.com/WEZEmtHH8k
— Coco Gauff (@CocoGauff) May 29, 2020

The impetus for Gauff’s TikTok was Floyd’s death. After watching police officer Derek Chauvin grind Floyd’s head into a Minneapolis street last week, something seemed to snap in Gauff, too.

“I am in tears watching this video,” she wrote on Twitter. “Everyday innocent people are dying because of our skin color. No one deserves to die like that. I just can’t believe this. This needs to stop.”

As recently as May 17, Gauff was tweeting, “I flew a kite for the first time today and it was really fun. Just wanted to tell you guys that. OK bye.”

As Deadspin’s Carron J. Phillips wrote, “Gauff probably went to bed Tuesday night tired and mentally exhausted, like most of Black America. But that’s the norm for us in this country. It’s an emotional war, and we’re all veterans…On Tuesday night, Coco Gauff, the black girl, first, and tennis star, second, was enlisted. At the tender age of 16.”

Yet just as Gauff was ready for her pro debut at Wimbledon at 15 last summer, she seems to be ready to take on this historical moment as well. So far in her young career, she hasn’t shown any fear of politics, or any desire to “stick to sports." Last year, Gauff posted about Juneteenth and Black History Month, and pledged her allegiance to Greta Thunberg.

“My generation has just decided it was time to speak up on our own about things,” Gauff told The Guardian last fall. “I do follow the [climate] movement, and I’m learning about ways we can better change, at least my lifestyle and the way my family live.”

By engaging with politics, Gauff is following in a tennis tradition that may not be well-known to casual fans. Last week, in an article about Gauff, The Guardian described her as “a 16-year-old sensation in a sport where top players have traditionally avoided speaking out on social issues.”

It’s true that tennis is not known as a hotbed of radicalism. It began as an upper-class pastime and has never shaken that reputation. It was segregated in the U.S. until 1950, and was largely the province of private clubs until the ’70s. But that conservatism also inspired a strong progressive reaction. This is, after all, the sport of Althea Gibson, Billie Jean King, Arthur Ashe and Martina Navratilova, of the Original 9, the WTA, and equal pay at the Grand Slams.

By this point, there’s also a strong African-American tradition in women’s tennis, one that descends from Venus and Serena Williams to Sloane Stephens to Gauff. While Naomi Osaka plays for Japan, her father is Haitian, and she has lived most of her life in the U.S.

None of these women have been afraid to speak up or take leadership roles. Venus was instrumental in making equal pay at the majors a reality. Serena has spoken out about police shootings—“I won’t be silent,” she said after Philando Castile was killed by Minnesota police in 2016. Stephens is a member of the WTA player council and has broken new ground by working across the gender aisle with the ATP. Her peer, Madison Keys, is an advocate for Fearlessly Girl, which focuses on combating bullying and negativity among young women. And over the last week, Osaka has put Floyd’s killing at the center of her social-media universe.

“Just because it isn’t happening to you,” Osaka tweeted, “doesn’t mean it isn’t happening at all.”

On Saturday, Osaka posted a photo on Instagram from the Minneapolis protests, with the caption, “If you stand for nothing you fall for everything.”

View this post on Instagram

If you stand for nothing you fall for everything.

A post shared by 大坂なおみ (@naomiosaka) on May 30, 2020 at 7:58am PDT

Gauff has made her stand. She has seen too much in 2020 to be content with just swinging a racquet and making dance videos. “I promise to always use my platform to help make the world a better place,” she wrote on Twitter on Thursday.

That sounds like an innocuous statement, but the reality is, speaking up about anything, and especially about race and politics, rarely comes without controversy. Gauff may be criticized for her “Am I next?” video, and it may alienate some of her fans. Yet the fact that she’s willing to risk that criticism to show her solidarity with her fellow African-Americans is the most important reason yet to support her. Here’s hoping Gauff’s and Osaka’s platforms keep getting bigger, and that they never stop using them.

Rewatch, French Open 1990: Agassi almost flips wig in first Slam final

Wed, 27 May 2020 13:59:00 +0000

Is there a tennis player from the 1980s and ’90s who could hold a nation’s attention for 10 hours, the way Michael Jordan just did in The Last Dance? With all due respect to Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf and all of the other greats of that era, the figure who comes to my mind first is Andre Agassi.

The early hype, the flashy game, the catchy ad campaign, the bumpy road to the top, the eventual, joyful breakthrough: Like Michael, Andre experienced them all. While he didn’t become the dominant player of his era—that honor would go to Sampras and Graf—Agassi was the most-colorful and obsessively discussed player of that period.

For anyone looking to do a multi-part documentary on Agassi, the material is all there in his autobiography, Open, which was released in 2009 and is among the best-selling tennis books and athlete memoirs of all time. Even more so than The Last Dance, Open revealed a star player in all of his flawed glory. Agassi talked about hating tennis, taking meth, drinking before big matches and, most comically, losing a Grand Slam final because he was worried that his hairpiece would fall off in front of the world.

It has been 30 years since that final, which Agassi lost in stunning fashion at the French Open to Andres Gomez, a veteran who had never been that far at a major before, and never would be again. Since this is Roland Garros week, and since many of us might not have been ready to stop reliving the 1990s when The Last Dance ended, we’ll make Gomez’s 6-3, 2-6, 6-4, 6-4 win over Agassi our Rewatch of the week. Let’s roll the videotape.

Before Open, Agassi’s 1990 Roland Garros campaign was best known for its primary color: Pink. “Agassi in the Pink” was a common headline during that fortnight, referring, of course, to the compression pants that the 20-year-old was wearing under his shorts. Jordan helped end the short-short era in the NBA, and Agassi helped do the same for men’s tennis. Thirty years later, I wouldn’t say Agassi’s outfit looks sublime, exactly, but it doesn’t seem as ridiculous as it once did. According to Andre, his shorts weren’t even pink.

“I tell reporters: It’s not pink, it’s technically Hot Lava,” Agassi remembered. “I’m astonished by how much they care. I’m astonished by how much I care that they get it right.”

Despite the look-at-me clothes, though, Agassi was all business that year in Paris. The food, the sites, the art, the romance of the city? He and his brother Phil and his new trainer Gil Reyes spurned them all. Instead, they “lock ourselves in my hotel room, turn up the air conditioning, and send out for McDonald’s and Burger King.” When his coach, Nick Bollettieri, makes some noise about visiting “the frickin’ Louvre,” Agassi says, “I don’t want to see anything or anyone. I just want to win this f—-ing thing and go home.”

By the middle of the first week, it’s hard to see how Agassi won’t accomplish that goal. Three-time champion Ivan Lendl has skipped Paris to prepare for Wimbledon, and the top two seeds, Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker, have both lost in the first round. That leaves No. 3 Agassi as the highest seed in the draw. In the fourth round, he beats Jim Courier, and in the quarters he grinds down Michael Chang.

“I play with a chip on my shoulder, because I still can’t believe he has won a Slam before me,” the newly fit Agassi says of Chang. “I envy his work ethic, admire his court discipline—but I just don’t like the guy.”

With his win over Jonas Svensson in the semis, Agassi reaches his first major final. But no one thinks he’ll stop there.

“I’m facing Gomez, from Ecuador, whom I just beat weeks ago [in Key Biscayne],” Agassi says. “He’s 30, on the verge of retiring—in fact, I thought he was retired.”

Then, as Agassi says, “catastrophe strikes.”

Catastrophe, in this case, strikes in the shower. That’s where, the night before the final, Agassi feels his hairpiece “suddenly disintegrate in my hands…the weave is coming undone, the thing is falling apart.”

The next day, Agassi’s brother goes on a wild goose chase across Paris in search of bobby pins. After finally finding some, they use 20 of them to tie his hairpiece in place. According to Agassi, though, he spends the match worrying that it’s going to fall off and “land on the clay, like a hawk my father shot from the sky.” He pictures millions of incredulous fans leaning closer to their TVs and asking, “Did Andre Agassi’s hair just fall off?”

If Agassi’s wig was his worst enemy that day, Gomez also made for a formidable opponent. At the time, this was considered one of the biggest upsets in tennis history, because (a) everyone assumed Agassi was going to be the next great men’s champion, and (b) in those days, 30-year-old first-time Slam champs were pretty much unheard of. In reality, though, the result shouldn’t have been a huge surprise.

Gomez was the No. 4 seed, one spot behind Agassi. That spring he had won clay-court titles in Barcelona and Madrid. And in the semis in Paris he had dispatched an even better clay-courter, Thomas Muster. With Lendl absent and Edberg and Becker gone after Day 2, Gomez knew this was his chance, and he was determined to take it. As for Agassi’s wig issues, Gomez was quick to dismiss them as an excuse.

“Hey, I had my own problems,” Gomez told journalist Charlie Bricker in 2010. “I was 30 and playing a 20-year-old guy who was talking all tournament about how he was going to take on everybody.”

But Gomez had a game plan—keep the points short—and he stuck to it. In these highlights, we can see him trying to break up Agassi’s rhythm with high-bouncing topspin forehands and biting slice backhands; I’d forgotten what a sweet slice stroke Gomez had. He was also a more natural clay-courter than Agassi, and more adept at sliding into the ball.

By the third set, Gomez had abandoned the baseline and begun to rush the net. With perfectly placed drop volleys and stretch volleys, he made that fast-court tactic work on slow red clay. To Agassi’s dismay, Gomez’s serve only grew stronger as the match progressed.

As for the American, his strategy, to keep Gomez out there for hours and wear him down, never stood a chance.

“My game plan was fatally flawed from the start,” Agassi remembered. “Pathetic, really. It couldn’t work, no matter how long the match, because you can’t win the final of a Slam by playing not to lose, or waiting for your opponent to lose.”

It’s a lesson Agassi would eventually put to use in his eight Grand Slam victories. But it was a painful one to learn, and it will be two more years before he finally breaks through at a major. Afterward, he watches Gomez exult.

“He weeps. He waves to the cameras. He knows he’ll be hero in his native Ecuador,” Agassi says. “I wonder what it’s like in Ecuador. Maybe I’ll move there.”

Then he imagines the headlines: “Image is Everything, Agassi is Nothing.” “Mr. Hot Lava is a Hot Mess.”

Jordan’s last dance was a triumph, and Agassi’s would be as well, when he finally retired, clean-shaven and hair-piece free, 16 years later. But Andre’s story wouldn’t be as sweet, or as entertaining, if he hadn’t flipped his wig in his first one.

Tennis is viable—one of three takeaways from the UTR Pro Match Series

Sun, 24 May 2020 19:34:00 +0000

You forgot about the rain delays, didn’t you?

Unfortunately, as we discovered this weekend at the UTR Pro Match Series in West Palm Beach, Fla., the return of outdoor tennis also means the return of the elements and their destructively unpredictable ways. In this case, the rain in West Palm lasted for so long on Saturday and Sunday that the event was canceled before the finalists could even be determined. Danielle Collins and Ajla Tomljanovic walked off the court with a set still to play in their last round-robin match on Saturday, and never walked back on.

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

That non-ending aside, the players involved—Collins, Tomljanovic, Amanda Anisimova, and Alison Riske—did get two days of tennis in, and each of them recorded at least one win in the round-robin, Fast4 format. As for fans, we had a chance to remember what it’s like to have the pro game as part of our weekend routine again. The sports world is inching open, and tennis is inching along with it.

What was notable about this second fan-free Florida exhibition? Here are three takeaways.

1. Tennis is still possible

Major League Baseball has put out a long list of new coronavirus-related rules that will need to be followed by players if and when that sport returns. There are so many—including “no spitting allowed”—that you might wonder whether it’s worth bringing the game back at all. I had thought the same thing might be true of tennis. What would we do about balls, towels, handshakes, changeovers, lines people? After the first two UTR series weekends, though, it seems as if these on-court obstacles can be hurdled.

The lines people sat on the other side of a fence, and the players made some of their own calls; this didn’t result in any arguments, though who knows whether that would be true in a real tournament. The players used their own sets of balls when they served, and they weren’t allowed to touch their opponents’. From what I could see, this potentially tricky change went smoothly. The women also picked up their own balls, and fetched their own towels. This meant we spent a lot of time watching them walk around the court between points, but I was never bothered by the delays. As for the post-match handshake, none of this weekend's four players seemed heartbroken at not having to do it. They mostly skipped the racquet tap, too.

“There’s going to be a lot of new adjustments, a lot of new rules that take shape when pro tennis goes back to playing,” Tennis Channel’s Lindsay Davenport said. “This was a test run.”

No one would ever say these changes are ideal, but they do seem doable, and that’s about all we can ask right now.

2. Competition is competition

As Andy Roddick said at the start of the weekend, put a camera on a court and some money on the line, and the competitive juices will start to flow. And that was true, especially for Collins and Anisimova.

Many of us wondered if Collins—sometimes known as Danimal—would be her old fiery, vocal self even in these low-stakes conditions. She was. She slammed a ball into a fence, banged her racquet on the court, screamed at herself after squandering big points, and generally pulverized the ball whenever she had a chance. In her intensity, she was a watchable as ever.

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

The return to competition manifested itself in a different way for Anisimova. The teenager was tight and off her game to start. She lost her first two matches, and appeared to be on her way to losing her third as well. But as so often happens in real competition, once Anisimova won a couple of big 3-3 points and put herself on the scoreboard, she relaxed, swung freely, and became herself again.

It’s these types of reactions to pressure—inner-directed in Anisimova’s case; outer-directed in Collins’s case—that make tennis so compelling, whether it’s played at Wimbledon or on a backyard court in Florida.

3. Fan-free zones are…going to be an adjustment

“The biggest challenge for these players going forward is going to be no fans,” Davenport says. “Getting used to creating that atmosphere, creating that energy on the road.”

If others are like me, it’s also going to be a challenge for those of us watching at home. With no applause to punctuate points, I found it easier to be distracted and to lose track of exactly what was happening in a match. Was that an amazing shot? Was that an important point? Did I really see what I thought I just saw? We don’t realize it, but we take so many of our spectating cues from the people who are watching a match live. When we sense tension in the arena, we feel it more acutely at home.

Can we, like the players, learn to create that tension and atmosphere on our own? We’re probably not going to have a choice for quite some time. But like Roddick said, if there’s a camera on a court and something on the line—money, ranking points, a Grand Slams title—you’re going to get the old juices flowing. That goes for fans as much as it does for players.

UTR Pro Match Series preview: Anisimova, Riske, Tomljanovic, Collins

Wed, 20 May 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Tennis players are staying in the game longer than ever, and making their breakthroughs later than ever. Yet the lifespan of the average pro career remains brutally short—imagine having to find an entirely new line of work in your 30s. Players need to make their money while their legs are still fresh, and to do that, most of them are willing to climb onto airplanes and crisscross the globe for 11 months a year.

Now, for the first time in living memory, they’ve been grounded. As of today, the players have lost a little more than two months to the coronavirus—doesn’t it feel more like two years?—and they won’t go back to work until late August at the earliest. That’s a bummer no matter what you’re ranked. If you’re Roger Federer or Serena Williams, you might feel like you’re watching your last chances to add to your Grand Slam totals slip by. If you were on a roll right before the break—like, say, 20-year-old Elena Rybakina, who was 21-4 in January and February—you’re going to have to start that roll all over again.

For four women—Amanda Anisimova, Alison Riske, Ajla Tomljanovic, and Danielle Collins—this period of enforced idleness will come to a temporary end over the weekend, when they participate in a MyUTR exhibition in Florida. It’s not a tour event; the scoring system is experimental; they’ll have to retrieve their own balls and towels; and the only fan in attendance may be a cow. But it’s a chance to play tennis, a chance to get off Zoom, a chance to earn some money. For us, it will be a chance to re-connect with their games and personalities.

None of these four are currently worrying about their Grand Slam totals, and none were on a hot streak right before the lockdown. Ranked from No. 19 to No. 56, they represent the WTA’s vast, ever-shifting middle ground. They’ve all had ups and downs, breakthroughs and setbacks—some more serious than others—over the last few years, and all are at slightly different stages of their careers. Judging by their social-media accounts, they’ve all been going through the same emotional phases—a mix of fear, boredom, and goofiness—as the rest of us during the lockdowns.

Tomljanovic, the only non-American in the event, may feel the urgency of time more acutely than the other women right now. Two weeks ago, she turned 27, which takes her from her mid-20s to her late-20s—still a big shift, psychologically, for a tennis player. Highly touted a decade ago, the rangy Australian has lacked the consistency of the top players for most of her career. In 2019, though, she had something of a surge, reaching a final in Thailand, beating Aryna Sabalenka in Miami, and topping out at a career-high No. 39. Since then, she has fallen back to No. 56, and her best shot of 2020 may have come during a press conference at the Australian Open. Asked about being ATP player Matteo Berrettini’s “fiancée,” Tomljanovic rolled her eyes and denied that she was any such thing. When she was asked if she preferred to be called Berrettini’s “girlfriend” instead, she said, “I guess. Ajla would be great, too.” Personally, I’ve always thought Tomljanovic had Top 20 potential. She says she’s happy off the court; maybe that can start to translate on the court when the lockdown is over.

Like Tomljanovic, Collins is a year removed from a career-best result. The 26-year-old American started 2019 with a stunning run to the Australian Open semifinals. But instead of conquering the tour, she found herself suffering from mysterious aches and pains. Finally, last October, the mystery was solved when she was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. “It has been somewhat of a relief and completely validating to understand the cause of my pain,” Collins said. After reaching a career-high No. 23 last year, the Florida native has drifted back to No. 51. That doesn’t mean Collins has lost any of her famous confidence or competitive moxy. She must have a few—or a few thousand—“Come on!”s bottled up in her by now.

If any of these four women looked destined for bigger things in 2020, it was Riske. Last year, at 29, she reached the quarterfinals at Wimbledon and ascended to a career-high No. 18. Her flat-hitting style, which had looked disjoined at times in the past, began to click. How has the newly married Pittsburgh native been spending her quarantine? If you go by her Twitter account, she’s had a pretty relatable spring: She has spent it watching Tiger King and The Last Dance, and compulsively browsing realtor.com. Last week, Riske was back on the court, trying to find her timing again. She said it wasn’t easy, but that’s what exhibitions are for, right?

If anyone could have used some time away from the tour to collect herself and clear her head in 2020, it was Anisimova. Last summer, just before the US Open, the teenager’s father and longtime coach, Konstantin, died of a heart attack at 52. Anisimova pulled out of the Open, but couldn’t leave the court behind for long. “The only thing that helps is just playing tennis,” she told The New York Times. “That’s what makes me happy.” But mixing training with grieving was hard, and Anisimova ended up in tears after an early loss at the Australian Open in January. In March, she split with her new coach, Carlos Rodriguez, after two tournaments together. “No one can beat you up more than yourself,” the introspective Anisimova wrote on Twitter this spring. Maybe being away from the tour will give her a chance at a fresh start and a new perspective. She was a Grand Slam semifinalist at 17; nothing should hold her back for long.

Rewatch, 1992 Rome: Sabatini's crowd-pleasing victory over Seles

Wed, 13 May 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Gabriela Sabatini turns 50 on Saturday. Are you shocked? I wouldn’t blame you if you were. She doesn’t look much older now than she did when she retired in 1996, at the incredible age of 26.

In the 24 years since, Sabatini has drifted off the sport’s historical radar a bit. To the fans who followed her every stylish move during her heyday, this has probably come as a surprise. The Argentine’s good looks and mix of artistry and athleticism—the tweener was originally called the Saba-tweeny—made her one of the most prominent and popular players of the 1980s and 90s. I can remember, on a couple of different occasions, asking male sports-fan acquaintances in New York if they ever went to the US Open, and getting the same answer: “Oh yeah, my buddies and I always go out to see Sabatini.”

But the record books don’t keep track of your fan base or award extra credit for style points. Despite winning more than 600 matches and reaching the semifinals or better at the majors 18 times, Sabatini won just one Slam, while her primary rival, Steffi Graf, won 22. Sabatini was also never ranked higher than No. 3, and she retired early not because her body broke down, but because her game and her confidence did. By 1996, she was down to No. 31 in the world. These days, if you’re not in the GOAT discussion, you’re lucky to be in the discussion at all.

Still, Gaby reached the sport’s summit and stayed there for nearly a decade. She beat Graf in the 1990 US Open final, and served for the Wimbledon title twice before losing to the German in a three-set final in 1991. Her 11-29 record against Graf was obviously not a good one, but nobody else beat Steffi that many times.

For her birthday, we’re going to rewatch another of Sabatini’s career highlights, one that may qualify as her final hurrah: Her 7-5, 6-4 win over Monica Seles in the 1992 Rome final. Like Graf, Seles was a problem for Sabatini. She won just three of their 14 meetings, and at the French Open in ’92, a month after this match was played, the Argentine led Seles 4-2 in the third set before surrendering the final four games. That said, not many women were beating Monica in those days. The spring of ’92 may have been peak Seles: She was No. 1 in the world, had won four of the last five Grand Slams, and was in the middle of one of the great three-year runs in tennis history. From 1991 to ’93, Seles reached the finals of 33 of the 34 tournaments she played—has that ever been matched? This was one of the few finals that she lost during that time. So let’s roll the videotape on this momentous occasion.

Sabatini vs. Seles Rome final highlights:

If you’re looking to get an idea of how popular Sabatini was, this clip is a good place to start. Rome was a special city for her; as her names suggests, she had Italian roots on her father’s side, and in 2003 the country granted her citizenship. The connection obviously helped on the court. Sabatini had won Rome three of the previous four years, and a packed house at the Foro Italico helped will her to a fourth title in ’92.

At 16 minutes, this is an exhaustive highlight reel, but it gives you an idea of how Sabatini constructed and won points on clay. She liked to use a little, Federer-esque backhand crosscourt chip to draw Seles forward and force her to bend, and she liked to close out points with her down-the-line forehand. I had no memory of how well she hit that shot, but she devastated Seles with it in this match. Time after time, Sabatini found the opening down the line, and despite the riskiness in going over the high part of the net, she hit that forehand with an easy confidence. Maybe the key was that she didn’t seem to feel the need to blast it as hard she could. Placement was enough.

I talked to a pro coach once who said that no WTA player could play like Sabatini anymore because if they tried, they would “get blown through the back fence.” And it’s true, Sabatini’s serve, particularly her second serve, would be a serious liability these days. And you can see that Seles, whose power game is much closer to what the women do today, had an easier time hitting winners with her two-handed strokes than Sabatini did. Instead, Sabatini wins with a Graf-like one-two combination: She hits a low backhand slice, forces her opponent to hit up, and knocks off the forehand.

I had also forgotten that Sabatini knew her way around the net. She began as a rail-thin baseliner sending up high-arcing topspin ground strokes from 10 feet behind the baseline. That was good enough to get her to the semifinals at Roland Garros when she was 15 in 1985, but it didn’t turn out to be good enough to beat Graf. So, much like Mats Wilander at around the same time, Sabatini added a net game to her arsenal, and it helped her win the US Open. On Italian clay, she comes in sparingly, but she pulls off at least three brilliant touch-volley winners that would make Mansour Bahrami proud.

By the end, Sabatini looks like she’s floating. She breaks at 4-4 and fist-pumps as the crowd roars. Then she closes out the world No. 1 by coming over her backhand and hitting a rare winner with it. It took a lot to beat Monica Seles in 1992; Sabatini did it, as always, with style.

Bud Collins's writing helped show the progressive potential in tennis

Mon, 11 May 2020 13:44:00 +0000

Who’s the GTWOAT—the greatest tennis writer of all time? These days, in the eyes of some, the list of contenders is an exceedingly short one. It consists of one name. Actually, it consists of three initials: DFW.

In the 12 years since his death, David Foster Wallace’s personal reputation may have taken a hit, but the five essays he wrote about tennis remain sacred texts among lovers of sports literature. I’m one of those lovers, of course, and I’ve sung the praises of the holy DFW oeuvre many times.

But I’ve also wondered what Wallace’s work would have been like if he really had been a tennis writer. If he had, in other words, needed to come up with a new story each day. I can hear his editor telling him, “OK, ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’ was a fun way to cover Fed’s third-round match. Now what’s the angle going to be for his fourth-round match?” I’m guessing even DFW would have had his off-days, like the rest of us.

I want to take the opportunity to recommend another tennis writer whose words on the page have long been overlooked. If you’ve memorized the DFW essays, put him down for a few hours and pick up ABC—Arthur “Bud” Collins—instead.

I can hear the reaction, especially from fans under 40: “You mean the pants guy?” Yes, the pants guy. At first, Collins may seem like an odd fit for “underrated” status. He is, after all, the only tennis journalist to become a household name. But Bud’s reputation rests on his TV work; he was a tireless proselytizer for the pro game for 50 years on NBC and CBS. Even if you’re aware of his writing, it’s probably through the tennis encyclopedias that bear his name. They’re essential reference books, but they’re composed by a committee of authors.

AP Photo

From the early 1960s on, Collins was also a daily journalist—he really did have to come up with a new story each day. I came to appreciate his reportorial work while researching my book about the men’s game in the 1970s and 80s, High Strung. Bud’s Boston Globe columns from that era inevitably revealed a behind-the-scenes detail or two that the writers from the other major papers didn’t have. No one knew the players as well as Bud, and it paid off in a clearer, more informative picture of the sport for his readers.

While reading those columns, I was also reading—for the second or third time—Bud’s 1989 memoir, My Life with the Pros. This is where his writing style and worldview come through most clearly, and the book’s relative unavailability is a big reason why Collins’ writing isn’t better appreciated. Unlike DFW’s modest tennis-related output, which has now been collected in two separate books, My Life with the Pros has never been reissued, and isn’t available for Kindle. The original cover—a close-up of Bud wearing a trademark multi-colored tie and red-fringed game-show-host jacket—is probably less than enticing for a Millennial audience. Trust me, though, it’s worth the 37 cents you can pay for it on Amazon right now.

My Life With the Pros is, as the title suggests, a story that links Collins’s life and evolution with the life and evolution of the pro tours, and the characters he encountered there. Flipping through the many short chapters—47 in all—it becomes clear that Bud was a tennis Zelig. If there was a crucial event in the sport’s modern history, he was there.

The first important men’s pro tournament, at Longwood Cricket Club, in 1963? Bud helped get it financed. The Newport event in 1965 where Jimmy Van Allen introduced the tiebreaker? Bud had a front-row seat. The first open tournament, at Bournemouth, in 1968? Collins crossed the pond to cover it. The first CBS broadcasts from the US Open, and the first Breakfast at Wimbledon broadcasts for NBC? Bud was in the booth for both. The advent of WCT, Virginia Slims, World Team Tennis, Flushing Meadows, and Andre Agassi’s hair—Bud gives us first-person accounts of them all. At a certain point, you start to wonder whether the history of tennis is really just the history of what Bud Collins saw. Today we call Steffi Graf “Fraulein Forehand,” Billie Jean King “Mother Freedom,” and a shot that’s hit high in the air a “moonball” without bothering to acknowledge that Collins came up with all of them.

Jon Wertheim on the naming of the US Open media center after Collins in 2015

Of course, just because Collins was a pioneering reporter doesn’t mean he was a great tennis writer. For that, you need two other things: a style and a worldview. Bud had them both, and both hold up well 30 years later.

Judging by his TV persona, you might suspect that Collins’s writing would be glib and cutesy. It’s true, a lot of the chapter titles in My Life With the Pros do end in overzealous exclamation points, and he does refer to his childhood self as a “barefoot boy with cheeks of freckle.” But for the most part, Bud brings a friendly, upbeat, humorous poetry to these pages.

Here he is on his first view of his personal Mecca, Forest Hills, after making a three-day pilgrimage with a pair of friends from his native Ohio:

“Two men in white were still playing to a congregation of perhaps two hundred. The minarets of the Forest Hills Inn and the groves of Forest Hills Gardens, the comfortable residential pocket in which the club nestles, stood confidently in the gloaming, sturdy defenders of the faith, gray against an azure evening. Laughter and the crystal-and-ice melodies of the terrace bar drifted from the distant clubhouse.”

On the debut of a demure killer, Chrissie Evert, at the 1971 US Open:

“Ponytailed and prim, although a delinquent cutting high school classes, the 16-year-old from Fort Lauderdale swooshed into the Forest Hills stadium like a Florida hurricane.”

On his first sighting of an 18-year-old Jimmy Connors in 1970:

“Here was Raggedy Andy in tennis costume, a rag doll throwing himself into every shot with such exuberance it couldn’t possibly last beyond 1990 or so. Hair, arms, legs flew with plenty of fur as Connors bashed his way in a game he so obviously loved.”

Getty Images

So Bud could turn a phrase and set a scene. But perhaps more relevant today is his worldview. A small-town kid, he was, like many of us, a bumpkin drawn to the elegance and cosmopolitan nature he saw in tennis. But once he made it behind the sport’s country-club walls, he wanted to bring as many people along with him as he could. Collins always lamented the snobbishness that had made tennis, in his words, a “secret sport,” for so long. He was a democratizer with a live-and-let-live attitude.

What may be most notable about reading My Life With the Pros today is how casually progressive Bud was. He loved the game’s history, but he also loved to see that history move forward. He was thrilled to have a chance to cover Althea Gibson’s US Open victory, and to follow Arthur Ashe on his pathbreaking journey in the 1960s. He loved the dual-gender theatrics of World Team Tennis, a league that he described as a “delightful sexual aberration.” And, unlike many sportswriters of his era, he treated the men’s and women’s tours as equal attractions. If anything, Bud was more closely associated with WTA stars like Evert and King than he was with the top men.

In that sense, Collins’s writing helped highlight the progressive potential that has always existed in tennis. That might not make him the GTWOAT, but it’s an attitude that the sport’s readers, and leaders, could still learn from today.

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The old normal isn’t coming back any time soon: how tennis moves ahead

Sun, 10 May 2020 02:25:00 +0000

We all want to think positively about the immediate future. We all want the lockdowns to end and the coronavirus to disappear. We all want our lives back. So on one level it’s understandable that sports leagues—which are, let’s face it, a big part of many of our lives—continue to act as if normality is just around the corner.

In the U.S., the NFL has released its full 2020 schedule, which is still set to begin in early September. The NBA and Major League Baseball keep churning out (mostly implausible) schemes for truncated seasons. In tennis, the US Open is still scheduled to begin in August, despite the fact that all gatherings in New York City are currently canceled, and the National Tennis Center is serving as a temporary hospital for COVID patients. Roland Garros recently caved in and changed its new September dates—by a week.

When each of these plans has been announced, I’ve asked myself the same question: Why do we think we’re going to be safer in the fall, when the virus is still here and a vaccine isn’t? The rate of new cases in the U.S. has leveled off, but it hasn’t declined much. It seems as if Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal have been having similar thoughts. Murray said recently, “Let’s try and get things back to normal first, and then we can think about playing sport again.” Last week Nadal admitted that he had all but given up on the 2020 season, and started to look forward to 2021.

These sounded like reasonable words from thoughtful athletes. New year, new beginnings, right? Not so fast, said Craig Tiley. This past week, the tournament director at the Australian Open came along to give us a preview of what he had in mind for the first Grand Slam of 2021. It was a cold bath of real talk.

Craig Tiley, at the 2020 Australian Open. (Getty Images)

Australia has had as much success at containing the virus as any country in the world. But according to Tiley, its national tournament will still be significantly compromised—it’s a just a question of how much. In an interview with the Australian AP, he said the Aussie Open is considering four contingency plans.

“Worst-case scenario, there is no AO,” Tiley said. “Our best-case scenario at this point is having an AO with players that we can get in here with quarantining techniques and Australian-only fans.”

That was the best-case scenario? No fans from outside Australia, and only international players who had been quarantined, presumably for two weeks? This obviously wasn’t what any of us wanted to hear. Which is exactly why we needed to hear it.

We needed to hear it because we need to get past the idea that everything is going to go back to normal at a certain magical date in the near future. It’s probably not going to happen this fall, and it’s probably not going to happen when the calendar says a new tennis season is supposed to start. It may not happen for years. The sooner we understand that and internalize it, the better. Only then can get down to the business of figuring out what actually is possible and building from there.

The tennis world may gradually be coming to that realization. Along with the recent comments from Murray, Nadal and Tiley, the sport has been experimenting with no-spectator exhibitions, first in Germany, and this weekend in Florida. A single private court in Florida, with no bleachers, no handshakes, and lots of disinfectant, is a far cry from Wimbledon, but it’s a start. There’s also talk of holding national championships and single-nation tours, in countries like Australia that have the virus under control.

Many of us were ready to watch any kind of pro tennis this weekend, and we didn’t particularly care what the atmosphere was like. So the hunger is obviously out there, and we’ll need to keep thinking of safe ways to feed it, if we’re ever going to find something approaching a new normal for tennis. We’ll only be motivated to do that if we know the old normal isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Underrated Traits of the Greats: Daniil Medvedev and reading the room

Fri, 08 May 2020 11:00:00 +0000

Welcome to Underrated Week! From May 4 through 8, TENNIS.com is focusing on the most overlooked aspects of the sport, from stats to achievements to tactics, and beyond. We're also featuring 10 players because of something they do extremely well, but which isn't their signature quality. It's a series we're calling the Underrated Traits of the Greats.

On most nights, tennis and pro wrestling don’t have much in common. In tennis, the players are expected to be reserved, and the audience is expected to maintain a polite silence during the action. In wrestling, they are…not expected to do either of these things.

It isn’t often that these two polar-opposite activities cross paths, but if there’s any place where it’s going to happen, it’s probably going to be New York City. That’s where, at last year’s US Open, Daniil Medvedev made Louis Armstrong Stadium into his personal wrestling ring. After chucking his racquet, ripping a towel out of a ball kid’s hands, and covertly giving the chair umpire the finger on camera, Medvedev was booed by the night-session crowd during his third-round match.

Instead of hanging his head in shame, Medvedev, like any good wrestling heel, reveled in the abuse. After coming back to win, he motioned for the fans to keep the boos coming, strutted his way to the net for the handshake, and trolled the crowd in his post-match interview.

“If you were not here guys, I’d probably lose the match, because I was so tired, I was cramping yesterday, it was so tough for me to play,” Medvedev said, as boos continued to rain down. "So I want all of you to know when you sleep tonight I won because of you.”

A star, or anti-star, had been born.

Medvedev’s heel turn was the high point of a summer in which he put men’s tennis on his back and carried it for a few months. The 23-year-old Russian reached finals in Washington, D.C., Montreal and at the US Open, and won titles in Cincinnati, St. Petersburg and Shanghai. By August, he was ranked in the Top 5; by October he was looking like a future No. 1.

What may have been most interesting about Medvedev’s breakthrough run was watching him learn how to read a room, and react to the moment. In New York, he played the bad guy when it suited him, before turning back into a good and gracious loser after his close final-round defeat to Rafael Nadal. In Cincinnati, down a set to Novak Djokovic in the semifinals, Medvedev suddenly began to go for huge, risky second serves; the strategy disrupted Djokovic’s return rhythm and helped Medvedev come back to win. The next day, against David Goffin in the final, Medvedev went in the opposite direction. He played the percentages, stayed patient through 20- and 30-shot rallies, and wore Goffin down from the baseline. That tactic worked, too.

As a player, Medvedev has a mature court sense for someone so young. He can win with consistency, by throwing in backhand after backhand until the other guy finally breaks down. Or, if his opponent comes in, Medvedev can shift to shotmaker mode and win with a brilliantly precise passing shot. He can give his opponent no pace to work with during one rally, and then turn around and rocket a forehand winner past him to end the next one.

As a person, of course, Medvedev has not always read the room so well. At a Challenger event in 2016, he appeared to accuse Donald Young and an African-American chair umpire of being “friends” and working against him (he was defaulted). At Wimbledon the following year, he tried to have chair umpire Mariana Alves removed from his second-round match; after he lost, he took out his wallet and threw coins at her chair.

“In the heat of the moment, I did a bad thing,” Medvedev said. “I apologize for this.”

There may be more outbursts in Medvedev’s future, but he has made an effort to control himself. His all-around showing at last year’s Open can be a seen as a clever way to transform a potentially disastrous tirade into a winning performance. By the end of 2019, Medvedev had left his villain persona behind completely and removed all outward emotion from his demeanor. Even after big victories, he kept his poker face intact.

Will Medvedev be able to maintain that impassive facade when the tours return? Is that even the best way for him to play? Chances are, he’ll continue to evolve, continue to throw different looks at his opponents and his audiences, and continue to be a fascinating player to follow.

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Underrated Traits of the Greats: Novak Djokovic's forehand versatility

Thu, 07 May 2020 04:00:00 +0000

On the whole, the various elements of Novak Djokovic’s game seem to be properly rated. We know his return of serve is among the best in history. We know his two-handed backhand is among the best in the game today. We know that he has improved his serve and made it an important weapon. We know that, while he once had a reputation for pulling the plug and retiring from big matches, he has long since reinvented himself as the king of the epic five-set victory. We also know that if he has a weakness, it’s his net game. In a recent Instagram chat, Djokovic himself asked the public for tips on how to hit better overheads.

But there’s a shot of his that I didn’t mention in the paragraph above: the forehand. When you describe just about any other top player today, and especially his two major rivals, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, their forehand is the first thing you mention. Roger and Rafa’s games are designed to give them a chance to finish as many points as possible from the forehand side. With Djokovic, his backhand has always been seen as the difference-maker, and for good reason. It’s what has always allowed him to counter Nadal’s and Federer’s ground-stroke attacks so much more effectively than anyone else. The Serb had no weakness they could exploit.

But in emphasizing Djokovic’s lack of weaknesses, we’ve underrated the strength of his forehand. No, he doesn’t rely on it the way Federer and Nadal do, and he doesn’t hit as many jaw-dropping inside-out winners with it. In part that’s because he doesn’t need to; he can do that almost as well with his backhand. But Djokovic’s versatility with his forehand is the equal of theirs.

When he hits it crosscourt, it’s heavy and spins away from his opponents, pushing them wide. It’s also a repeatable shot that doesn’t involve a lot of risk. That may not sound all that exciting, but when he’s feeling confident, Djokovic will add a little sidespin mustard, hook the ball at a more acute angle, and send his opponent scrambling beyond the double alley.

Even more underrated is Djokovic’s straight down-the-line forehand. There are few in the game who hit it more cleanly or with more confidence. On this shot, Djokovic, normally the most pragmatically efficient of players, allows a little more flair and swagger to shine through, as he lines the ball up, lifts himself upward, and sends the ball high over the net and deep into the corner.

For most players, going down the line, and thus over the highest part of the net, is a dangerous proposition. But the topspin that Djokovic generates allows the ball to clear the net safely and be propelled forward after it bounces. When he first arrived on tour, Djokovic called his down-the-line backhand his “secret weapon.” Fifteen years later, his down-the-line forehand may be the shot that deserves that name.

In part, that’s because his focus has shifted. In 2017, Djokovic hired stat guru and analytics expert Craig O’Shannessy as his “strategy analyst.” O’Shannessy is a big believer in the power and importance of the forehand, and its superiority over the backhand a weapon. “The forehand is your sword; the backhand is your shield,” O’Shannessy likes to say.

While O’Shannessy understood the quality and reputation of Djokovic’s backhand, he still encouraged him to run around and hit forehands whenever he could, and to create patterns of play—like serving wide in the deuce court—that would help him get more of them.

“Even the players with the best backhands in the world should be looking to hit more forehands,” O’Shannessy says.

With O’Shannessy in his his corner, Djokovic revived his career after a two-year lull and won four of the eight Grand Slam tournaments played in 2018 and 2019. Even after they stopped working together in 2020, Djokovic kept pounding his forehand, and won the first major of 2020 at the Australian Open.

At the start of his career, we talked about the brilliance of Djokovic’s backhand. Maybe, by the time his career is over, we’ll be talking about his forehand the same way—or at least giving it the respect, and the rating, it deserves.

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