Afternoon, folks. Things are easing up here at the office, and I look forward to focusing on the upcoming Masters 1000 combined event at Indian Wells. Bobby Chintapalli will be back by popular demand, probably tomorrow, with a women's preview.
Meanwhile, a remark left in the comments at a recent post on how Nick Bollettieri helped shape the contemporary game stuck in my mind and had me thinking a bit in the ensuing days. I think it was Aussiemarg who wrote the comment, in which she expressed her appreciation for the approach shot, which once was the second- or third-most important tool in the box of the serve-and-volley expert.
It occurs to me that if the serve-and-volley game has indeed gone belly up, at least until more promoters make an (unforeseeable) commitment to faster surfaces, it's partly because the approach shot was already going the way of the carrier pigeon. There's certainly a chicken-or-egg riddle at the heart of this issue, but does anyone else share the opinion that the approach shot was one of the first casualties of the New World Game (the power baseline game, if you prefer)? And that the development only made serve-and-volley tennis that much less tenable?
Note here that serve-and-volley tennis is not synonymous with approach-and-volley tennis. If you're courageous (or crazy) enough to serve and charge the net, you'll be hitting fewer rather than more approach shots than if you play an all-court or even baseline game. To my way of thinking, the demise of the approach shot drove one of the largest of nails into the serve-and-volley game, because once the approach-and-volley game was no longer effective, an entire area of skill and strategy based on the use of the volley began to dry up.
Only a contrarian would suggest that a serve-and-volley player would survive on today's tour on a week-to-week basis. If it were possible, someone out there would be doing it - of that I'm convinced. And even if we all agree that serve-and-volley tennis is on life-support, there's no automatic linkage there with approach-and-volley tennis. If the latter strategy were more productive, we'd be seeing a lot more that, too. Maybe we should be seeing a lot more of it, because it isn't like the approach shot/volley combination has been proven insufficient (hail, there isn't even enough data to make that claim with any empirical evidence). It's just that the approach shot appears to have been swept into the dust bin of history, either for solid, game-based reasons, or as a matter of prejudice (in which case the trend might yet be reversed).
What happened, I think, is fairly simple. The new, muscular baseline ball bangers, with a load of help from the evolution in equipment, decided that the risk/reward equation of the approach shot was no longer favorable. The approach shot is a set-up shot, and it usually requires a conscious decision by a player to sacrifice pace and even power for placement, for which the reward is excellent court positioning to end the point with a volley. The problem is that in today's game, players just can't afford to hit a shot as basically prudent as the typical, pretty approach (I think especially of a John McEnroe or Stefan Edberg's backhand slice). What passed for a textbook approach shot as few as 15 or 20 years ago is answered today by something like a resounding shout of: Get that crap out of here! Ka-Boom!
Unless an approach shot is hit with the opponent in a hopeless position to begin with, today's versatile, make-power-from-anywhere players are apt to treat it with scorn. The shot is too. . . neutral, and therefore too much of an invitation for the player receiving it to take the offensive. You need a surface with very particular playing properties (low bounce and, preferably, medium to fast speed) to even think of hitting an approach shot that basically says: I'm betting that my volley can beat your passing shot.
Unless, of course, you feel that you can pressure your opponent into missing shots he's ordinarily expected to make. But that's a whole other story. . .
So in today's game, the approach is a defensive-offensive shot; it's intended to end the point on the deferred payment plan, but it's also hit (usually) with a measure of prudence - something for which there is increasingly little place in the contemporary game. The alternative to the approach shot is the purely offensive shot, and that's where the changing game has made the approach shot even less appealing. Where Rod Laver might have hit a certain backhand down the line with resolve but restraint, setting up his volley, Roger Federer pulls the trigger and blasts a monstrous winner. Where an Ilie Nastase once moved forward to hit a rolling forehand to the backhand corner of his opponent, daring him to come up with a good pass or lob, a Rafa Nadal today punishes the ball, going for the out-and-out winner. At worst, he settles for driving his opponent even further back off the baseline.
The player who first and still perhaps most conspicuously deleted the approach shot from his hard drive was Jim Courier, a Bollettieri protege. Granted, Courier's volley was less than a work of art. But more important, Courier's big, inside-out forehand was one indeed.
There's a popular expression in football: when you throw a forward pass, three things can happen, and two of them are bad (the only good one is a completed pass; an incomplete or interception represent failure). It's a little like that with the approach shot; you miss it (or don't hit it well enough) and you're toast; you make it but get passed, you're out of there. You make it and win the point with your volley, you've completed the task - unless, of course, you miss the volley. And your opponent has something to say about which result you get.
By contrast, you take that ball for which you're well set up and go for the killing shot and you're (at least in theory) working on a 50-50 proposition; and you have some cushion in there, because a fiercely hit ball that doesn't go out or produce a clean winner can be more effective than any calculated approach shot, and it sets you up for you next big forehand or backhand.
No matter how I add it up, the answer seems the same. The approach shot has outlived its usefulness. Only a renaissance of attacking tennis - which is different from serve-and-volley tennis - can make it relevant again. Pat Rafter was the master of the approach shot and we're not likely to see his likes again anytime soon, even if we wish we would. He paid dearly for basing his game on the approach (even moreso than on the serve-and-volley) at a time when the game was already in transition to its present state.
But as tennis is a game of motion, in motion, it will be interesting to see what happens next.