Serve-and-Volley, Anyone?

It is difficult to describe the serenity one attains from striking a tennis ball with authority. Gravity, geometry, and all the forces of nature collaborate, and the fuzzy yellow orb spins as it should. Intent becomes action, and action becomes reality. That is the high. For some, tennis is a hobby; for others, it is a compulsion. For the most stricken, like me, it is a religion that, like Buddhism, allows devotees to transcend time and space and glean insight into the true nature of existence. The most fanatical of us are known as “serve-and-volleyers.” Too impatient to sit at the baseline waiting for enlightenment, we seek purity by serving big and rushing the net, hoping for an easy volley. Success often feels like equal parts hard work and good karma.

“It seems risky, but serve-and-volleying is the opposite of gambling, if you know what you’re doing,” twenty-seven-year-old Matt Klinger, a professional player and former member of Canada’s Davis Cup team, tells me as we stand on a court under the midday heat. “As a serve-and-volleyer, you’re putting all your cards on the table. You’re saying, ‘I’m coming in and if you can pass me consistently, you’ll win. If not, you’re finished.’?” For five months, Klinger has been working with me to polish my net-rushing game. When you follow your serve to the net, you force the player opposite you to make a difficult passing shot. The objective is to set up a volley — a shot in which you return the ball before it touches the ground — that will either be an outright winner or set up an easy finishing volley. While it sounds simple, volleying is an immensely difficult feat that requires lightning agility, intense concentration, and instinctive hand-eye coordination. Tennis is a game of time: you must take time away from your opponent. If you succeed, your adversary will make more mistakes, and you will hit more winners. “Serve-and-volley can be unbelievably tough to play against,” says Dean Coburn, the Tennis Canada coach who works with Peter Polansky, one of the country’s top male prospects. “They just keep coming. It is demoralizing. Of course, in order to serve-and-volley well, you have to be mentally tough. Resilient. You have to have a ‘next’ mentality, a belief that your opponent is going to break down at some time under the pressure.”

The strategy was the dominant style of play in men’s tennis from the fifties through the seventies (but was not fully embraced on the women’s side until the sixties). As recently as ten years ago, serve-and-volley was still fairly prevalent; the average men’s tennis rally was said to last three strokes. “Pistol” Pete Sampras won fourteen Grand Slam titles charging relentlessly forward, applying pressure, driving himself into his opponents’ psyches, crushing their hopes.

Yet today, the art of serve-and-volley is on the verge of becoming a relic, atrick to be employed once in a while to keep an opponent off balance. “In college tennis,” says Coburn, “a lot of top players believe in serve-and-volley, but few guys on the professionaltour are doing it.” In fact, you’ll find only a handful of pure serve-and-volleyers among the top one hundred players on the men’s Association of Tennis Professionals (atp) tour. In coaching circles, there is a drift away from cultivating the idiosyncratic genius of serve-and-volley players such as John McEnroe, Stefan Edberg, and Patrick Rafter, and toward fostering the overwhelming efficiency and consistency of Spanish phenomenon Rafael Nadal, or the versatility of today’s dominant player, Swiss right-hander Roger Federer, who is happy to pack a lunch and camp out at the baseline. “Ten years ago there were a lot more serve-and-volleyers. No one now is going to come in,” a defiant Sampras, who still plays the occasional game on the World Team Tennis tour, told reporters during Wimbledon in 2006. “I will die serving and volleying. It’s my natural instinct.”

The demise of the serve-and-volley style of tennis could be dismissed as a curious sports footnote were it not for the game’s resonance. Tennis is a barometer of modern culture. When things are on the boil, tennis is on the boom. It has experienced two explosions in popularity, both during periods of social upheaval. The first occurred during the tumultuous twenties, while the latter began in the wake of the Summer of Love and culminated in the early eighties. Throughout these eras, the classic struggle — whether it was Tilden versus Borotra in the late twenties or Borg versus McEnroe in 1980 — always pitted a wily, rock-solid baseliner against a slashing serve-and-volley virtuoso. In essence, it was steady nineteenth-century values (baseline) against streamlined, unsentimental modernism (serve-and-volley). The net rushers were the barbarians at the gate, throwing up skyscrapers, dreaming in Bauhaus, and stomping pastel landscapes.

“Most serve-and-volleyers are wild men,” Klinger tells me during a drill. “It’s like they say, ‘Your game has to reflect your personality.’?”

“But I’m not a wild man.”

“But you were, man, you’ve just got a family now and shit. But inside you’re still fucking crazy. You’ve got to be a little crazy to come to the net, man. If you weren’t crazy, you wouldn’t like it so much. You wouldn’t want to be up there daring people to rip one by you.”

This screw-loose, wild-man-within theory is what led my editor to assign this story. “I want you to bring yourself into it,” he tells me over the phone as we discuss the piece.

I steer the discussion to history. “I can bring it back to the sixteenth century. There are poems extolling the virtues of coming to the net.” I quote sixteenth-century French poet Guillaume de la Perrière: “?’Whoever prefers the bounce to the volley has never been considered a good player...’”