Baseline metronomes

Lawn tennis was once enjoyable to watch because of the serve and volley facet. Now that has been lost partly due to technology.

Part of the reason why Bjorn Borg is rated so highly is that in three consecutive years from 1979 to 1980, he won both the French Open and Wimbledon — the first played on slow, red clay, and the second on fast, skidding grass. To win in Paris, you needed to spend most of your playing time several feet behind the baseline, hitting ground strokes with heavy top spin. To win in London, you needed to be a master of the serve-and-volley style, in which you rushed to the net in the wake of the serve and dictated the point with sharp angles.

At the Australian and US Opens, both of which moved to hard courts, you needed a clever middle-path, mixing things up and covering the courts well. That is why it was considered an enormous feat to win all four even in different years, which has come to be known as a career grand slam. But Roger Federer has just done it and Rafael Nadal needs to win only the US Open to do it. Nadal won both the French and Wimbledon last year and Federer might do it today. It is becoming less and less of a big deal.

All the current players grew up hitting the ball with high-technology racquets. Even a generation ago, say the generation of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, the players grew up on wood and adapted to the modern racquets. The current crop had them on their first day on court. Naturally, that has influenced their playing style.

Even with wood racquets, the good servers could propel the ball at above 130 mph. With the modern ones, the returns have become far better — faster and more precise. The new technology, which has made racquets light and powerful, allows players to return even the hardest serves despite being out of position. To compound matters, Wimbledon has deliberately made its courts slower and the balls heavier, catching the serve-and-volley players on the wrong foot.

Thus, we have not seen a pure serve-and-volley exponent since the retirement of Sampras seven years ago and may never get to see the exciting, attacking play that dominated the game through the racquets of Jack Kramer, Lew Hoad, Rod Laver Rosewall, McEnroe, Becker, Edberg, Sampras and Rafter. Even those with good serves these days, such as Roddick, are content to stay back even after firing in the first serve. Federer, who grew up idolising Sampras and Becker, has become almost exclusively a baseline player. And we are condemned to watching a generation of baseline metronomes. The serve and volley, which was a fascinating facet of the game, has lost the match.