And again: Krrräng! That awful sound that you don’t even have to look at to know: the backhand is torn, the ball was shaved with the strings of the tennis racket and maltreated with the frame in a one-handed version; depending on the length of the “rrr” it just sails out or to the spectators in the first three rows. Please don’t confuse the noise with the backhand thud; then the ball flies into the net, with a short “l” it even jumps up before it.
But then of course there is also fffapp, one of the most beautiful sounds in tennis; to be heard with a fully drawn and perfectly hit one-handed backhand – one of the most beautiful movements, across all sports; however, threatened with extinction: none of the 16 men who took part in the round of 16 have them as a fixed tactical tool in their core repertoire. All that can be heard is the zzappp of the two-handed shots.
If you want to know why the one-handed virtuoso Stefanos Tsitsipas failed in the second round of the US Open, where he had served in the fourth set to win the match: It made Krrräng three times and Plllopp once, not a single Fffapp in these five minutes; Tsitsipas kept snapping his backhand in the important moments – just like Stan Wawrinka, whose backhand movement may be immortalized as a statue after the end of his career, experienced Krrräng too often against Jannik Sinner on Saturday and after the 3: 6, 6: 2 , 4: 6, 2: 6 said: “I don’t hit them as well as I did when I won the Grand Slam.” Because what is easy to forget: one-handed backhand was Wawrinka’s most important weapon to win three of the four Grand Slam tournaments – during the 20-year dominance of Federer, Nadal and Djokovic. Wawrinka’s backhand longline was poetry.
The moments like in the second set against Sinner, when he sent his backhand down the line on the journey and thus defused a tricky situation or went on the offensive himself, they have become rarer: “I’m trying, the level is good, I’m happy, but it doesn’t work that often anymore.”
Open detailed view
“I often had to play slice because Zverev deliberately played high and with a lot of topspin on my backhand,” said Grigor Dimitrov after his defeat: “It’s difficult to exert pressure then.”
(Foto: Matthew Stockman/Getty)
Another example from the US Open: Grigor Dimitrov made far too many slight mistakes with the one-handed backhand in the third round defeat against Alexander Zverev (7: 6, 6: 7, 1: 6, 1: 6); especially when he ran out of air from set three and was often wrong about the ball. “I often had to play slice because Zverev deliberately played high and with a lot of topspin on the backhand,” Dimitrov said afterwards: “It’s difficult to apply pressure then – especially cross. You can throw in a stop every now and then to Breaking the rhythm, but following through is extremely risky in those moments.” That’s why the round of 16 duel is on Monday: Sinner against Zverev.
There are three reasons people watch sports: Because they don’t know how it’s going to turn out. Because someone does something that you wouldn’t believe, you wouldn’t see it with your own eyes. And because of Oscar Wilde’s unforgettable sentence from his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”: “To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders.” The one-handed backhand is to tennis what gravity-defying moves are to gymnastics, figure skating, and high diving; uppercut in boxing; Side kicks in football. But what can be clearly seen at the US Open: It is threatened with extinction.
Youth trainers advise: Better learn the two-sided backhand! It’s safer and easier
This is mainly due to Dimitrov’s reasoning for the problems against Zverev; in the Australian Open final, Novak Djokovic chose exactly the same strategy against Tsitsipas: high and with a lot of topspin on this one-handed backhand. Sounds easy; it is. And that’s exactly why the player, equipped with the most beautiful one-handed backhand in recent history, honed it again after his 30th birthday: Roger Federer had noticed that he would only have a chance against Rafael Nadal’s topspin attacks if he could trains a more aggressive slice or takes the topspin earlier and just blocks. That means: the one-handed virtuosos need an answer to this simple attack by the opponent.
Due to the evolution of racquets and strings, the one-handed backhand of Wawrinka, Tsitsipas, Dimitrov and Dominic Thiem only has the term in common with what John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova once conjured up over the net. On the wooden pans you had to hit the ball exactly in the middle of the string combination in order to avoid cringing and popping, even with perfect execution you only heard a bonk. Heavy spin was out of the question – both with the backhand and as a strategy against the one-handed version.
The one-handed backhand is punk; ambidextrous is mainstream
Blows today are harder, more cut; So youth coaches advise: With all due respect to the beauty of the backhand of Federer, Pete Sampras, Navratilova, Boris Becker and Rod Laver (perhaps the most beautiful in history) – it’s better to learn the much easier to master variant, which also requires a shorter backswing! It’s quite simply the safer shot, easier to control. There’s something punk about it, that one-handed backhand; two-handed is mainstream: more successful, of course, but never cool. The one-handed backhand is a work of art of timing: it has to be perfect to be beautiful. If it’s not perfect, then it is, and you can hear it immediately: terrible.
Open detailed view
Hardly anyone swings the backhand as beautifully as Stefanos Tsitsipas. But recently his rise has stalled.
(Photo: Sarah Stier/Getty)
Children have always imitated the stars of the scene. “Federer’s one-handed backhand was so incredibly beautiful,” says Chris Eubanks, for example, one of the few remaining one-handed players; but even he says, “If I knew then what I know now, I probably would play HT.” In the top ten, Tsitsipas is currently the only one with a one-handed backhand, he says: “It’s my signature, my shot that defines me. It’s a matter of the heart because I want to be like Federer and Sampras. I don’t want to die out of this tradition let.”
So that doesn’t happen, you need players who show: It’s possible – you can be cool and successful, like the Foo Fighters in rock music. The 21-year-old Italian Lorenzo Musetti could be one of them, currently ranked 18th in the world. And of course Tsitsipas, who has already reached two Grand Slam finals in his career (in addition to the Australian Open last February also in 2021 at the French Open – where he lost to Djokovic). With these successes, however, it had made Fffapp much more often than Krrräng and Pllopp.
2023-09-03 11:54:04
#Open #onehanded #backhand #threatened #extinction
