Last of the one-handed wonders, Roger Federer

Time was when the two-fisted backhand had more going against it than for it. The courts were faster and the balls lighter; so you needed the extra reach that a single-handed stroke gave you. Imagine trying to get to a swinging John McEnroe service skimming off the surface at Wimbledon with a two-handed backhand. Jimmy Connors, Bjorn Borg and Andre Agassi did it, making up for what they lost in reach by the agility of their movement across court. But they were in a minority, especially at Wimbledon.

Most players preferred to use the single-handed backhand to not only drive the ball but also quite often to chip or slice it and charge the net in the 20th century’s serve-volley era.

It was on the slower clay courts that the two-fisters began to thrive initially. The ball sat up nicely after landing, however hard it was hit, giving them time to reach it and bring the full power of their two-handed stroke into play. The service didn’t skid out of reach either, so they could jab it back in double-quick time to catch the server off-balance. It was harder to do that with a single-handed grip.

Now we are seeing the same thing happening at Wimbledon. Sure, it still has the fastest surface among the major venues for tennis, but the gap has narrowed in the past six or seven years. And this is mostly by design, rather than natural changes in the game.

While the serve-volley, chip-and-charge game might have provided a refreshingly different spectacle at Wimbledon, it also meant the points were much shorter than at competing venues such as the French and Australian Opens, where long rallies kept audiences glued to their TV sets for hours on end, match after match, much to the delight of advertisers, channels and organisers.

Wimbledon capitulated. The grass may look as green as ever but it’s different in texture and the ball no longer skids off it the way it used to; the ground underneath the grass too is much harder than before, which makes the ball bounce up for the baseliners to do their stuff with short backswings.

The ball itself is heavier than the ones used earlier, which again favours those who hang back, because a shot will not fly out of reach after landing and a service will not be so hard to handle that a serve-volleyer can’t be easily passed at the net. Combine all that with racquets that have a wider sweet spot and superfit players who can keep running from one side of the court to the other, pounding the ball relentlessly, and it’s no surprise to see that Wimbledon today is in essence not that different from the other Grand Slams. Baseline rallies are what we get now, even if they’re not yet as prolonged as the ones on the clay courts of the French Open. The serve-volleyers have disappeared from the game altogether, and Roger Federer is the lone top-ranked player wielding the single-handed backhand.

That Federer still manages to reach the finals of a Grand Slam is a testament to the sheer talent of the man who beat the seven-time Wimbledon champion Pete Sampras way back in 2001 when it was still a serve-volley game on a grass court. Sampras in fact had a two-handed backhand to begin with, but switched to the single-handed style which was more suited to the courts at Wimbledon. This is no longer so on the slower courts with heavier balls, and Federer’s backhand is a handicap which his opponent in Sunday’s final, Andy Murray, can try to exploit. If they get into long backhand rallies, you would have to back Murray’s two-fister to prevail because it packs a bigger punch and is less prone to error than a single-handed backhand topspin. But then, Federer can be counted on to bring all the subtleties of his game into play to compensate for that handicap, as he did against Novak Djokovic in the semi-final.

For a tennis connoisseur, however, this may well be the last time we see the grace of a full, flowing backhand stroke in a Wimbledon final. Clearly, just like the serve-volleyer, the single-hander will soon be extinct too, and we will only have automatons pounding away with jerky motions from the back of the court in all the Grand Slams. Wimbledon will be indistinguishable from Roland Garros except for the colour of the surface, as it completes its Orwellian transformation to become like an Animal Farm where “the creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”