Can tennis really get by without the one-handed drive backhand?
The unfortunate answer is that of course it can. You can be nostalgic, like yours truly, but the reality is that sports and tennis march on in perpetual search of the optimal.
Exit wooden rackets, gut strings and line umpires. So if the one-hander is slowly fading to black, as this week’s ATP rankings certainly suggest, it is disappearing for a good reason.
For the first time since the rankings were launched in August 1973, there is no player in the top 10 with a single-handed backhand. But that 50-year window does not quite do the news justice.
The ATP was hardly the first to publish rankings. Governing bodies, national associations and journalists like British writer Lance Tingay and American multimedia star Bud Collins were ranking players for decades before the ATP became the standard. I can guarantee you that none of those unofficial top 10 lists from the more-distant past were without a one-hander.
So, to be clear, what we should really note about this week’s ATP rankings is that they mark the first time in the nearly 150-year history of competitive lawn tennis that none of the top 10 men’s players has a one-handed backhand.
Bigger news, right?
I think so, and it will come as no surprise to anyone who knows my work or knows me personally that I am downbeat about it. I switched from a two-hander to a one-hander in my teens, because it better suited my net-rushing style and admittedly limited skill set. I grew up watching the likes of Rod Laver, Arthur Ashe, Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe, all of whom had one-handers. Like many who love the game, I love the shot: for its elasticity and symmetry; its natural sweep and elegance.
“Aesthetically, the one-hander is more beautiful obviously,” Navratilova told me quite a few years back. “Just because it’s free flowing. With two hands, you’re all crouched up and limited by the other hand on the racket. With one hand, you can go all the way around. It’s much nicer looking.”
Agreed, even if a sliding, open-stance, full-split two-hander from Novak Djokovic is no doubt a wonder to behold.
But very shortly after Navratilova made that artistic judgment she also made it clear that she was, above all, a pragmatist.
“But really, if I was teaching someone to play these days, I would teach the two-handed backhand and one-handed slice and one-handed volley,” she said. “The two-hander is just a more secure ball.”
Navratilova would still favor the one-hander if players were serving and volleying consistently. But that tactic has become nothing more than a rare changeup in the men’s game: the equivalent of a blitz in American football, as tennis coach Angel Lopez aptly noted. In the women’s game, serve and volley is even rarer, although Karolina Muchova has put it to good use in recent seasons.
So Navratilova’s vision has become the rule. The two-handed backhand drive has eclipsed the one-handed backhand drive while the one-handed backhand slice continues to thrive on both tours. The slice was once an afterthought for many two-handers: an acquired taste if it was acquired at all. But now aspiring pros learn to master both strokes from an early age. Consider Carlos Alcaraz or Ons Jabeur, who rip the two-hander but can also hit biting single-handed slices and feathery backhand drop shots.
That, to be fair, is not a bad tradeoff for tennis aesthetes.
The two-handed backhand drive has been a factor since the 1930s, when the Australian men’s stars Viv McGrath and John Bromwich first deployed it at the elite level. But it remained an eccentricity, and the one-hander reigned supreme until the 1970s when Chris Evert, Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors popularized the two-hander during the tennis boom.
Creative destruction took time. When the ATP rankings were launched on August 23, 1973, the first nine men in the rankings all had single-handed backhands with Connors at No. 10.
Ten years later, in late August 1983, there were still only two players with two-handers: Connors and Mats Wilander. Ten years later, that had doubled to four players: No. 1 Jim Courier, Sergi Bruguera, Michael Chang and Andrei Medvedev. But by late August 2003, the trend had accelerated with nine of the top 10 using two-handed backhands and with newly crowned Wimbledon champion Roger Federer the only exception.
There have been periods of revival since then for the one-hander with Stan Wawrinka and Dominic Thiem joining Federer as Grand Slam singles champions and Grigor Dimitrov and Stefanos Tsitsipas winning the ATP Finals. There has also been a new wave of Federer disciples like Tsitsipas, Lorenzo Musetti and Denis Shapovalov. But Tsitsipas dropped to No. 11 this week; Musetti is at No. 26 and Shapovalov, once in the top 10, has plummeted to No. 121.
The shot is far from extinct. There are 11 players in the ATP top 100 this week with single-handed backhands. But the crème de la crème now rely on two-handers even if it is far too soon to relegate the 25-year-old Tsitsipas to the second tier for good.
On the women’s side, the disparity is far greater. There are currently no players in the top 50 with one-handed backhands and only three in the top 100: 36-year-old Tatjana Maria, 21-year-old Diane Parry and 31-year-old Viktorija Golubic. In total, only 11 women in the top 500 use one-handers, which is just over two percent. The last woman to win a major singles title with a single-hander was Francesca Schiavone at the 2010 French Open, which came just a few months before the retirement of Justine Henin and her gorgeous, Federesque one-hander.
It is easy to get sentimental, but tennis is not and should not be a beauty contest. The two-hander provides a more secure platform and is superior, by most accounts, on the service return, allowing players to better counter high-bouncing balls and major power (Musetti might rank 14th on tour in the percentage of return games won at 24.1 percent, but Tsitsipas is a distant 54th at 19.4 percent).
“I think that’s really where you feel the two-hander is a big advantage,” said Ivan Ljubicic, the retired Croatian star who had a one-hander and later coached Federer. “Because you can hold the forehand grip with the right hand and the backhand grip with the left, so it’s much easier to react and hit the ball. But other than the return, I wouldn’t really take the two-hander over the one-hander. You can hit the ball harder with one hand, crazy as it might sound. And usually you have a better slice if you hit a one-hander, and it’s easier for the volleys. There are advantages and disadvantages, but I think one of the reasons the two-hander took over is the game became faster and it’s easier to change grips when you use two hands.”
Players’ ability to stretch and slide while hitting two-handers also has negated some of the advantage in reach that goes with a one-hander.
Did Federer merely hold off the inevitable? His kids, after all, hit two-handers: like their mother Mirka.
“I don’t think Roger saved it,” Ljubicic said. “I think players will play one handers definitely for some more time, but I think there’s definitely a danger that it’s going to disappear eventually.”
That would be a pity in part because it would deprive the game of variety and a contrast in styles. Navratilova vs Evert, McEnroe vs Borg, Sampras vs Agassi and Federer vs Nadal were not just attack vs defense but one-hander vs two-hander.
The sport’s governing bodies do bear their share of responsibility. The decision not to rein in string and racket technology and to push for slower, higher-bouncing courts to facilitate longer rallies has created a more uniform playing style, one in which consistent net rushing gets punished. But it is also true that the International Tennis Federation and some national federations have rolled out age-appropriate balls for beginners and juniors that are lighter and bounce lower and could, in theory, have encouraged more youngsters to develop one-handed backhand drives.
Perhaps there is time and room for another renaissance, for more youngsters who saw Federer in his later years to choose the now-unconventional path or for Tsitsipas, Musetti and Shapovalov fans to take the hint.
But the wind is certainly blowing hard in a different direction. Best to enjoy the one-hander taking our breath away while we still have it.
CC
P.S. I go deep on Federer’s one-hander in my best-selling biography The Master, newly revised and re-released after his retirement. You can find it here or at independent bookstores. Thank you!
There is an elegance to the backhand motion – think drawing a sword – and as I recall it's part of why Arthur Ashe loved his backhand, as reported in McPhee's 'Levels Of The Game'. Mr. Frank X. Brennan, Sr., Billie Jean's first coach outside of California, told us to keep in mind that it's the more natural stroke compared to the forehand; no one would deal cards with a forehand motion, and it's how we all first learn to throw a frisbee. (And, perversely, (not from Mr. B), it's also the more insulting way to slap someone; the dismissiveness is at once both explicit and implicit.)
Your references to both court speeds and equipment hit the mark. Until such time as there are more fast courts, and a ban on poly strings for the pros*, the one-handed backhand's values will be ineffective while the amount of topspin available without having to step in or take a sizeable backswing will surely make the two-hander the backhand of choice. (*This could be like no aluminum bats allowed in MLB, or golf's banning some balls and the belly putter on its tours, but it's highly unlikely at best.)
1/ RF’s upgraded backhand performance in 2017^ (stepping in to take the ball on the rise and playing agressive in the opponent’s ad side) confounds coaches who don’t hedge their player development bets by mastering the one-handed drive backhand technique.
Since Djokovic, Sinner and Alcaraz are also adepts at taking the ball on the rise when they control the rally, it proves the game is increasingly geared towards shorter rallies — which pays the dividend of an increased likelihood of body preservation throughout a player’s career.
^ won Australian Open, Indian Wells, Miami, Halle, Wimbledon, Basel, Shanghai)
2/ Even if Tsitsipas sticks to his father as a coach until the end of his career, he still has a chance to be no. 1 in a declination of the ATP league — the illusory, for now, league of one-handed drive backhand players which only allows four-shot rallies (the player who serves and does not win the point in the four-shot rally loses the point). ;)