Past Strokes

TWO WAYS. GRADUALLY AND THEN SUDDENLY.”

This is the now-fabled answer given by Mike, a character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, when asked by Bill just how he went bankrupt. The reason the quote strikes such a chord is because one could easily replace the word bankruptcy with any­thing that was once spectacular and isn’t anymore—be it a species (dinosaur), civilisation (Roman empire) or artform (rock music). The demise is always gradual at first and then all at once. The fall of perhaps the greatest artform in all of sport, the single-handed backhand in tennis, which is the closest physical representation of grace in any contest of power, often compared to poetry, or an oil-painting, has unfailingly followed the same pattern in its once-slow-then-rapid hurtle towards failure.

Before we scan the professional tours for the leftovers of this once great and thriving art­form, I feel compelled to begin this narration with an incident I happened to observe at the amateur level. For the health of any sport is best tested at the grassroots, hence the following experience is all revealing, even if one didn’t watch a single match all year on the television. This is how it went. On a typically sultry evening in the midst of the brutal Chennai sum­mer this year, I found myself seated just beyond the perimeter of Besant Nagar Tennis Club’s practice court, curtained away by a large net from the two main courts, on whose occupants my gaze lay as I awaited a vacancy.

That gaze shifted soon enough to the practice area in front of me, as a private coach and a child took their positions beside a trolley-on-wheels filled with tennis balls. The child’s mother—her face hidden behind extra-large sunglasses—seated herself beside me, held her phone upright on her lap and began recording her son’s progress. The kid, no older than six and armed with a racquet nearly as long as his upper torso, smacked a few forehands that the coach fed him from close proximity. Then he shifted the trolley to the boy’s backhand side and on dropping the first ball, smiled to himself.

“One hand aa?” he said, in a tacitly rhetorical way. The child nodded in earnest and awaited the next stroke. It was a clean single-handed swing, but the ball barely travelled beyond his half of the court. The backhand drill continued for a few minutes, before the coach walked up to the boy and assisted him in wrapping his tiny left palm just below the neck of the racquet. And, in Tamil, he said this: “Let’s try with two hands for some time, OK?”

When the tutorial ended and the boy busied himself with picking up the vast spray of tennis balls, laboriously loading it into the trolley, the coach spoke to the mother almost exclusively about the child’s backhand, wanting to know why he chose to employ the single-hander in the first place. “His father is a fan of Roger Federer,” said the mother. “He makes him watch Federer on YouTube.” The coach smiled again, this time sadly. “Very difficult, madam. If he wants to play tennis at a serious level, he must use two hands on the backhand. It is his choice, of course, but he also realised how much more control he has when I made him switch for a short while,” the coach said, before saying something so implicitly untrue, yet brilliant, that I will never forget it.

“You cannot make a Roger Federer. He is either born with his skills or not. But if he is willing to work hard enough and play the percentages, including in style of play, then he can be made into a Nadal.” It brought to mind the fundamental differ­ence between the two greatest superheroes of the fictional kind: Superman is born, not made, while with the right resources (millions of dollars) and a specific bent of mind (vigilante justice), anyone can become Batman.

Akin to music’s tragic proclamation of “rock is dead” (which first ‘died’ in the 1950s when Elvis Presley enrolled in army, then again in the 1970s when The Beatles broke up, to when it died after all at the turn of the century), the one-handed backhand in tennis has had its obituary written since the sport got rid of its wooden racquets, and in turn its embrace of touch-play. Daily it dies a thousand deaths in tennis clubs and academies around the world, like the one in Chennai, thanks to well-meaning coaches, yet somehow managed to survive by the skin of its teeth at the professional level, mainly due to the existence of the odd wizard in each era since wood gave way to the evolution of graphite racquets: John McEnroe in the 1980s, Stefan Edberg in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Pete Sampras through the 1990s, who passed the baton on to Federer in the new millennium, who held on to it for the next 20 years or so.

But the newest era, brought upon by the rise of Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, has no one special or mad enough to match their two-fisted dominance with a lone hand. So much so that the few remaining practitioners of the great artform on the ATP tour recently made a parody video, declaring in jest what the watch­ing world already fears: the end of their kind. “Hey guys, as you must have heard already, the single-handed backhand is dead,” says Grigor Dimitrov to begin the sketch, before fellow single-handers in Denis Shapovalov, Stefanos Tsitsipas and Dominic Thiem try us­ing two hands for daily activities that need only one, such as holding a toothbrush, chucking a dart or twisting the knob-handle of a door. The video ends with Dimitrov making a phone call, of the SOS kind, to Federer.

Bulgaria’s Dimitrov, long known as Baby Fed, is, incidentally, the only single-handed backhand player in ATP’s current top-10 rank­ings, punching in at No 10. The percentages fall even lower as the sample size gets wider, with only eight single-handed players in the top-100 of 2024 (which is still relatively better than the women’s side of the tour, which recorded a total of three one-handers in the year-ending WTA top-100). Half of these men didn’t win a title this year; and the only one among the other half to have won more than a single title was Giovanni Mpetshi Perricard, with two. Perhaps, then, the prophecy of a death foretold finally came true this year?

The year gone by also saw the retirement of Austria’s Thiem at just 30 years of age, who just happened to be the last single-handed back­hand player to win a Grand Slam, all the way back in 2020. That made Stan Wawrinka the last surviving Grand Slam winner among his tribe; the Swiss won the last of his three Slams back in 2016. He is currently ranked well out of the top-100 at No 161 and will be 40 when the new season begins.

More lasts: Tsitsipas was the last exponent of the single-handed backhand to make a Grand Slam final, at the 2023 Australian Open, which he promptly lost to Novak Djokovic, just as he had in the 2021 French Open final. When the Greek, ranked as high at No 3 during his glory days, dropped out of the top-10 in 2024, it made even the usually optimistic guardians of the artform sit up and take notice. “That’s a dagger right there. I felt that one. That one was personal. I didn’t like that,” Federer said in an interview with GQ. “But at the same time, how do you say, it makes the one-handers— Pete Sampras, Rod Laver, me—it makes us spe­cial as well that we’ve carried the torch, or the flag or whatever, for as long as we did.”

Laver played at a time when the single-hander was the norm. But by the time Sampras, then Federer, began dazzling the masses, everything about the game had changed rapidly: the surfaces had become slower, the balls heavier, the racquets lighter, stronger and wider, enlarging the sweet-spot, and the strings technologically sturdier, all of which gave birth to a power-baseline game where the application of top-spin became key to keep the bludgeoning hits within the painted lines. Top-spin also ensured that a single-handed backhand became all but obsolete, what with even the great Federer struggling to tame Nadal’s hits that always jumped and spat somewhere near his left shoulder.

While Federer will now be looked at as the last great employer of this stroke, at one point he was seen as the usherer of the artform’s revival, a renaissance even, as chronicled by the late, great David Foster Wallace, in the mid-2000s, right at the beginning of the Federer era. In his magnificent essay for the New York Times titled ‘Roger Federer as Religious Experience’, written from the 2006 Wimbledon final, where the Swiss met Nadal for the first of three straight finals on those hallowed lawns (eventually losing the crown to the double-hander by 2008), Wallace ob­served: “Subtlety, touch, and finesse are not dead in the power-baseline era. For it is, still, in 2006, very much the power-baseline era: Roger Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner… He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable.”

Four years into his retirement, that future is pretty predictable now, giv­ing us all enough time and space to allow the realisation to sink in that it was Federer’s singular genius that allowed him to not only survive, but also thrive in an unforgiving era for the one-handed backhand. Perhaps Wallace knew it too, for in the same article, he compares him to a near-mythical and God-like figure when he says that Federer is “a creature whose body is both flesh, and, somehow, light.” Then, what chance did the mortals who followed him really have?

2025 New Year Issueone-handed backhandRoger FederersportsStan WawrinkaStefanos Tsitsipastennis player