Serve-and-Volley, Anyone?

“Yeah,” he says, interrupting. “That’s great, but I want to know, I mean it’s odd, don’t you think...” I hear him draw a breath, choosing words. “Don’t you think it’s odd that you prefer this hyper-aggressive style of play?”

“I guess.”

“Well, I find it strange. You don’t exactly try to dominate conversations.”

“I guess not,” I say, proving his point.

Out on the court, I am hitting serves while Klinger, who stands beside a basket of balls, lets them go by and hits mock-return shots that I must volley and follow in. It is thirty-seven degrees Celsius and sweat is pouring off me. On the courts next to us, players look at me as if I were an exhibit at the zoo. I am the only serve-and-volleyer at my club. It was always in my nature to “come to net,” as they say. As a kid, I would watch McEnroe play Borg, then head out, wooden Dunlop Maxply in hand, and stand in front of a school wall volleying like Johnny Mac. The goal was to hit the ball as many times as possible without letting it hit the ground.

But McEnroe was not the prototype. Jean Borotra (“the Bounding Basque”) was the first truly world-famous serve-and-volleyer, one of France’s “Four Musketeers,” who dominated tennis in the late twenties and early thirties. Borotra started playing while serving in the French army and developed a style in which, according to tennis histor-ian Arthur Voss, “he sought [the net] at every opportunity.” Borotra was followed by Pancho Gonzalez, who grew up playing on the concrete courts of South Central Los Angeles and was never embraced by the wasp tennis establishment. A loner with an explosive temper who only grew more effective when angry, Gonzalez played a serve-and-volley game so devastating that tournament organizers briefly changed the rules in order to prevent him from coming to the net immediately after serving. Legendary Australian player Rod “the Rocket” Laver, though skilled from the backcourt, came in incessantly and won all four of the major singles titles (Wimbledon and the Australian, French, and US Opens) twice each, becoming the only double Grand Slammer in the history of the game. Laver’s style inspired the generation of great serve-and-volley players led by McEnroe, Edberg, and Boris Becker.

Starting in the midseventies, however, technological advances and the popularization of tennis set the stage for the demise of the serve-and-volley ethos. In 1976, Howard Head, an engineer with the sporting goods–manufacturer Prince, introduced an oversized metal tennis racquet with almost sixty-five more square centimetres of hitting surface than the standard wooden racquet of the day. At first, pros laughed at it, dubbing it the “flyswatter,” but club players embraced it. Prince’s sales rose from $3 million in 1976 to $60 million in 1982. The metal racquet was soon replaced by the stronger and lighter “graphite” racquet, made from carbon and other materials, which also sported a large face. The bigger sweet spot on these new racquets made it possible to hit with more force, and the result was a crop of players who had one or two main weapons, such as a big serve and a killer forehand. In the late eighties, players such as Michael Chang were using the bigger racquet to add topspin, playing high-percentage tennis (involving, for instance, hitting cross-court over the low part of the net). This made it easier for baseliners to pass serve-and-volleyers as they charged forward.

Tennis courts have changed, too. Originally, tennis was played indoors, on hardwood floors, but in 1873, in an attempt to make the sport more accessible, an English army officer patented “lawn tennis.” Similarly, in the seventies, as the sport became more popular in North America, hard courts made of asphalt and concrete, which were easier and cheaper to maintain than grass, began to take over. Professional tennis reflected this shift. In 1974, three of the four Grand Slams were played on grass, which favours the serve-and-volleyer. Today, Wimbledon is the only major tourney played on turf. Both the US Open and Australian Open are played on hard courts, the French Open on snail-slow red clay. In recent years, tournament organizers have taken steps to slow down their courts even further and are experimenting with slower balls in an attempt to eliminate the big-serve game and encourage longer ral-lies, which spectators are said to prefer.

Dean Coburn believes that while the serve-and-volley strategy will not live on as a single-minded way of life, it will survive as a facet of the game. He sees a shift to the all-court mastery perfected by Federer. “You’ll see eight or nine guys trying to play like Roger. The philosophy is to try and dictate, but to be able to do it in a different way each point,” says Coburn.

In other words, a pragmatic, flexible approach for a pragmatic, flexible era. Today there are three main types of player: the grinder (Nadal), who hits everything back with heavy topspin, the aggressive baseliner (Agassi), who takes the ball as it rises from its bounce and looks to control play, and the all-court player (Federer), who can stay at the baseline but is comfortable making the occasional foray to the net. But something has been lost with the decline of the serve-and-volley game?—?honesty, perhaps. The pure serve-and-volleyer wasn’t hiding anything. He was coming in. He was going to apply pressure.