House of Laver

Much of the hardcore tennis talk Cliff Drysdale and I engaged in during my recent visit will have no place in my story about him for Tennis magazine, so I'm going to sift it out and publish some of it here. I know that some of you are not well-schooled (and perhaps not particularly interested) in technical matters, but you ought to know a little bit about the various "grips" in tennis to fully appreciate this discussion, so here's a link that may help - oddly enough, I found it via Google, and it's taken from an article Patrick McEnroe and I co-wrote on Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal a year ago for the New York Times sports magazine, Play.

Anyway Cliff and I spent some time talking about his career. He was a U.S. Open doubles champion, and in his best year (1965), he made the semis of the French Open and Wimbledon and the final at Forest Hills (the de facto U.S. Open), and earned a year-end ranking of No. 4. Drysdale was acknowledged as a great natural talent who had never been pushed or molded, and who never even dreamed of making his living in tennis. He merely enjoyed the game, and one thing after another more or less fell into place for him. He's a smooth, laid-back guy, too, and while he devoted a lot of energy to some seminal battles in the emerging Open era, he also knew how to enjoy life. I felt obliged to ask him if he felt he'd made the most of his talent and career.

Cliff told me that he could have worked harder (following the lead of fitness-monster Roy Emerson), and explained:  "But that just wasn't part of my make-up, I never had anyone pushing me, going all the way back to my childhood. It's too bad, because even today, the life of a tennis player is such that you actually do have a lot of time to do things. . .

"I wasn't that great a player - I had a generally successful second-tier career, ending up in the top 10 in about seven of the 20 years I played. I could have been a heck of a lot better, though, if someone at some point early on had just put a racket in my hand and said, 'Look, you have to hold it like this.' "

It's funny, but I didn't even have to look at the hand gesture Drysdale was making, because I knew what point he wanted to convey. He was the product of an era in which almost everyone, himself included, played with the  continental grip, which lives on as the preferred grip for the one-handed backhand and, for many, for serving and also volleying. If you look at the grip guide I linked above (better yet, if you have a racket handy and adopt the grips I'm talking about), you'll get an idea of what an awkward grip the continental can be. Yet it was the grip of choice because, as Cliff explained, "With three of the Grand Slams on grass, and pretty bad grass at two of them (the Australian Open and Forest Hills/U.S. Open), all we really wanted to do was chip the ball and get to the net."

There's an interesting sub-text here, having to do with the degree to which tennis has been liberated from technical constraints that could almost be described as Victorian. Broadly speaking, the grips at either end of the four-option spectrum (the continental and western) are the most extreme,  yet one (the continental) is not natural at all, while the other is. In fact, the continental grip, for all its advantages as a foundation for the backhand, is about the least natural way a human being would ever hold a tennis racket.

Think of it this way: If you threw a racket on the ground or laid it on a table, the most natural and only sensible way to pick-it up would be with what amounts to a Western grip - a grip that is also known, for obvious reasons, as the "frying pan grip."

It's always been interesting to me that the more radical stylists and clay-court experts - Bjorn Borg and Rafael Nadal come to mind immediately - are the ones who appear to play tennis in the most natural, technique-and-theory free way. In keeping with recent thoughts I posted on Nadal, this impression that he plays like a kid who just picked up a racket, never bothered to find out  how to hold the danged thing, then cut a swath to the top, is part of the larger whole. And let's not forget that while the western may be the most natural, it is neither the most elegant nor, necessarily, the most fruitful forehand grip. There is something intrinsically unschooled about those who use the Western grip, despite all the hard work and discipline such players may invest in their games.

By contrast, Roger Federer has a refined and modulated game that is fairly aglow with technique and theory. His own forehand grip, a semi-western one - is the soul of prudence, as well as a refinement on the extreme, full-blown western. If you set out to build a perfect, balanced tennis champion, you would undoubtedly arm him with the semi-western forehand. There may still be some advocates of the eastern forehand grip (I think John McEnroe was the last great player to champion it), which is also called the "Handshake" grip (because it's what you end up with if you were to try shaking hand with your grip, provided the rim of the racket head is at a right angle to the ground). But by and large the eastern is dead; it probably was never much more than a refinement that made the continental easier to use on the forehand side.

The eastern seems to be following the continental into the dustbin of history. This weeding out over the past few decades tells us something about the history of the game. Both the surfaces that have come to dominate (and it's easy to forget that we've undergone a major change in that regard) and the way the game is taught and played have changed at a bedrock level. Partly as a result of that, comparing the games of Laver and Federer is a little like comparing an open-cockpit, bullet-shaped race car from the 1950s to one of today's low-slung, sleek Indy cars.

Drysdale believes that while cross-generation comparisons are futile (that is, the open-cockpit Rod Laver of 1966 would have been an Indy car in 2008), Federer "probably would have eaten any past players for lunch." And he agreed when I suggested that, lineage-wise, Federer seems much more of the House of Laver than does, say, Pete Sampras. Federer does not have great power or size, yet he can trade punches with the best of them - probably because superior mobility gives him that little  bit of extra set-up time, to get his weight behind his shot.

When I asked Drysdale about this Federer-Laver comparison, he said: "Federer has great power, but his game isn't based on power, and to that degree he is a lot like Laver. But you have to remember that Laver was very powerful - for our day. This was at a time when the pre-ponderance of grass courts meant that almost everyone played slice, and some just chipped the forehand. Laver was a exception. He liked to come over the backhand, with big swings that made lots of topspin. There was a kind of sad joke for us when Laver was at his peak, which was that whenever Laver got in trouble, he would just  hit his way out of it. And he couldn't have done that if he didn't have outstanding power."

Drysdale also pointed out that if you look at the tournament results and round-by-round scores, nobody has dominated like Federer. Laver, he said, struggled, and often, even though he almost always finds a way to win. "Federer wins more easily, no doubt about it." And while Federer has not yet come close to matching Sampras's six consecutive years at No. 1, he's accomplished something that even Sampras had not during that spell - he's never dropped below No. 1 since he earned that ranking.

Drysdale had a pretty good record against Laver. It was because Drysdale had a potent weapon that was somewhat unusual at the time - a two-handed backhand. In fact, he was the first player using that stroke to make the U.S. Open final. Because of that weapon, the natural advantage lefthanders enjoyed against righties like Drysdale (the lefty's serve naturally goes to the righty's backhand) was negated. Drysdale liked nothing more than drawing a bead on those serves to his two-hander.

The player who gave Drysdale fits was the 1966 Wimbledon champ, Manolo Santana, who beat Drysdale in the U.S. Open final of 1965.  Santana, a Spanish player, was a real anomaly: his game was loaded with touch; he was one of the few players who liked to come over the ball on the backhand side, and he also employed the full arsenal of spins, chops, and drop shots. Yet he played with a Western forehand grip, enabling him to hit with topspin firepower off both sides.

They broke the mold after they made Santana, but perhaps one day we'll see a player of his ilk once again. It is, in the end, tennis is a game in which the individual always finds a way to express his talents and impulses, regardless of technique and theory.