Hits And Misses

The Dying Breed

The tennis season is in full swing Down Under. As the searing sun burnsMelbourne Park, in what is one of the hottest and driest summers Australia hasever seen, men and women with lithe bodies and huge reservoirs of oxygencontinue to wield rackets like guns and fire tennis balls from the backcourt asif there’s no tomorrow. For some, there really might not be. Consciously andunconsciously, these baseline-hugging sharpshooters are quietly writing anepitaph: of serve-and-volley tennis and its practitioners.

Halfway through the tournament and hardly a player has followed his or herserve to the net in a singles match. Things are expected to be much the same thenext week too. And that’s not even the bad news. The bad news is that this ispretty much the shape of things to come, except for those three weeks on grassin June and July. Even there, the signs are ominous.

Last year, Lleyton Hewitt became the first man since Bjorn Borg almost twodecades ago to win Wimbledon without venturing to the net. The already-thinserve-and-volley club is on the cusp of extinction. Rafter’s retired, Samprasis battling time and searching for motivation, Henman and Rusedski have beenlaid low by injuries. And let’s face it, these guys are not the future oftennis.

Hewitt, Safin, Ferrero, Blake, Srichapan and Roddick are. And they are allbackcourt belters, who come to the net to shake hands with opponents or to havea chat with umpires over line calls. Let’s not even talk about the women’sgame, where serve-and-volley became passé long ago.

Blame it on the trappings and choices of modern tennis. Playing surfaces aregetting slower and slower. At the beginning of the Open Era, grass courtsstarted being replaced by hard courts. And today, the surface of choice is aslow hard court. Balls have been made heavier to slow down the big servers.Rackets have improved, as has the quality of groundstrokes, with more and moreplayers hitting the ball on the rise. All this gives the baseliners preciousextra milli-seconds to pounce on a ball and send it back like a guided missile.Where’s the incentive for coaches to encourage their wards to learn thispoetic, two-step dance?

Sure, baseline slugfests are engaging, such is the speed and quality ofstrokes on offer. But the problem is, after a while, it all becomes tooone-dimensional. One match is no different from the other. At the back of themind, there remains the nagging feeling that one is seeing just one-half of thepossibilities of this game being played out. For variety, we are left to indulgein some goofy laughs with players like Andrew Ilie or Fabrice Santoro, who gofor absolute broke and try to pull of some audacious shots. It’s greatentertainment, but hardly qualifies as great tennis.

Sport is coloured by contrasts, in playing styles and human temperament. Inhockey, there’s the open, flowing Asian style versus the more tight,programmed approach of the Europeans. Steve Prefontaine believed the way to wina middle-distance race was by setting the pace right from the start, while LasseViren would keep a lot in reserve and hold back his kick till the last lap. LosAngeles Lakers feed of their two main men, Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’ Neal,while arch-rivals like the Dallas Mavericks and Sacramento Kings play a fast,mobile offense that demands involvement of all five basketball players in theirteam at all times. Such differences in style is what makes sport interesting.

Likewise, in tennis. An essential ingredient of some of the most enduringrivalries in the game over the past two decades has been a contrast in playingstyles. Navratilova-Evert, Borg-McEnroe, Lendl-Becker, Agassi-Sampras. Each halfof that crack coupling had a game that was diametrically opposite to that of theother. And the best part was, whatever the surface, they stuck with theirnatural games and backed themselves to win with it. Says Agassi, one of thegreatest baseliners the game has seen: "It (serve-and-volley) brings alivemany aspects of the game. One of the great joys playing Pete, or playing Rafter,was you're going to see how the game can be played in many different ways.That's always a lot of fun."

That Hewitt won Wimbledon last year says as much for his exceptionalbackcourt skills, as it does for the growing vacuum of natural serve-and-volleyersin tennis. The game of the average modern day player has two pivots: a big serveand hard, accurate groundstrokes. No approach shots, no volleys. When thrown onto a grass court, he tries to adapt, and usually ends up looking like a stiff.Remember Lendl. But grass is just three weeks in a year, and why try to learn anew skill just for that.

For the rest of the year, there are the slower courts to work and win on.Sadly, this single-minded approach is making tennis poorer. Says Navratilova:"Variety is the spice of life and it is the spice of tennis. If youstandardise the surfaces, you won't see the variety of the game. The beauty ofthe game is how well can people that really don't want to play on clay, how canthey adjust to that? Same token, how well the baseliners do when they play ongrass? Then how do they match up on the faster courts, slower courts? I think weneed all the surfaces." And players with diverse playing styles.

One thing that doesn’t change much among professional tennis players isdisputes over line calls. Every one thinks they are getting a raw deal, andoften make sure to drill home the point to linespersons and umpires. Watchingthem throw a rant, though, one can’t help feel that sometimes, rightfully, theverbal flow should be the other way around.

Player run-ins with officials over line calls have become part and parcel ofthe game, all expected in a day’s work. For sheer entertainment value, theyare right up there with everything else that’s beautiful on a tennis court.Such moments also offer a deep insight into human behaviour. In these moments ofcandour, when players strip their mask of control, they reveal facets of theircharacter to the world.

Players react in many ways when they feel they are being hard done in by theofficiating. With most, the lapse of concentration and deviation from purpose istemporary, something that is shrugged off, sooner than later. The good playersfeed off such incidents, get all fired up and find ways to channelise the angerback into their game.

And then, there are some who fly into a rage and go right out of orbit. LikeMardy Fish, the young American with a surname headline writers dote on, did inhis third-round match against South African veteran Wayne Ferreira.

Fish won the first two sets easily (2 and 3), lost the third (at 1), led 4-1in the fourth only to lose it 6-4. He should have been cooling down in thelocker room by now; instead, he found himself in a do-or-die situation, with themomentum -- and the crowd -- against him. In the first game of the fifth set,Fish, on his serve, lost it after a backhand of his was called out. It made thescore 15-40, two break points, instead of 30-30. He exploded, andself-destructed.

For the next two games, he kept going back to that call, giving a mouthful tothe chair umpire and the linesperson who made the call. It started up the crowdtoo, who became headline writers in their own right, right from Ferreira’ssupporters ("C’mon Wayne, you got him by the hook") to hecklers("Mardy, you son of a fish").

Across the court, Ferreira had a wry smile on his face. Later, when asked asto what went through his mind when he saw a guy melting down like that, he wouldreply tongue-in-cheek: "It's great, absolutely fantastic. The best joy youcan get, actually." Fish lost the set 6-0, and the match. A match he shouldhave easily won. Fish let the call get to him when he should have been feedingoff it.

For players on court, the heat at this time of the year in Australia iskilling. Surface temperatures consistently hover around the 40 degrees mark, anddoes funny things to the rubbery Rebound Ace surface. The surface somewhat losesits evenness and develops bumps, so that when players slide on the run, theysometimes trip. Some of the nastiest leg injuries have been acquired atMelbourne Park, invariably during times when the mercury was soaring.

There’s no respite from the heat for spectators as well, as few portions inthe stands are covered. But such is the enthusiasm for the sport and the eventamong the Australian public, they flock to the courts all through the fortnight.In high spirits.

For one boisterous lot of 100-odd spectators from a cold, far away landcalled Sweden, though, this cussed heat is manna from heaven. Every year, abunch of boisterous Swedes (mostly men) descend on Melbourne to cheer for theirplayers and generally have a whale of a time.

They strut around with little or nothing above the waist, viking hats ontheir heads, flags in their hands, faces and body parts painted blue and gold(the Swedish colours), and with songs and slogans on their lips. So loud andrhythmic they are that they can outshout a stadium full of people. Referred toas Swennis (rhymes with ‘tennis’), they are tennis’s version of theEnglish Barmy Army, except that Australia is their only stop in a year.

The Swennis love to get away from the biting cold wave sweeping their nativeland at this time of the year, and the Australian Open gives them a great excuse-- and the perfect weather -- to do just that. Their yearly sojourns startedwith the second wave of Swedish players. The likes of Mats Wilander, JoakimNystrom and Stefan Edberg would give Swennis plenty to cheer about and keep themin business right through the fortnight.

Since then, there has always been a strong Swedish flavour in the draw. Andthough the current crop of Swedish pros are hardly in the same class as theirpredecessors, there are plenty of dangerous floaters. In the first round, anout-of-shape and languid Magnus Larsson, on the comeback trail, stretched topseed Lleyton Hewitt to five sets, giving the Swennis on Centre Court plenty toshout about. And they did happily. Back home, they are dismissed as crazy andweird; in Australia, they are embraced because they are crazy and weird, and anintegral part of the Open.