WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—What does quality grass-court tennis look like these days? Many people might say that such a thing isn’t possible here anymore, since the turf was made hardier and the players began to let the ball bounce on it. Until 10 years ago, Wimbledon tennis was synonymous with serve-and-volley tennis, and in many people’s minds that’s the way it always should be.
If that's the case, what are we to make of the third-round match that Petra Kvitova and Venus Williams played on Centre Court today? It certainly had the look, the feel, and the atmosphere of vintage Wimbledon tennis. In their all-whites, Kvitova and Williams could have been just about any of the women who have done battle on this same patch of green, under the same late-afternoon sun, before the same enthusiastic packed house, for decades.
More important, the match also had the unique tension of an old-fashioned grass-court match. It comes from knowing that, as routine and inevitable as most holds of serve will be, each set will likely be decided by a single shot, a single mistake, a single moment of brilliance, a single, minute-long mental slip. The winner will be the player who is ready for that moment, but no one in the building will have any idea when it will come. A sense of danger lurking just beneath the safe surface of things is what defines tennis on grass, not whether the players are hitting volleys or ground strokes. Often, it seems that someone will win a match simply because a match must have an end, and it must have a winner.
And that’s the sense that Kvitova and Williams gave us today. The Czech’s 5-7, 7-6 (2), 7-5 win was controlled by the shot that has controlled so many matches on this court in the past: The serve. There were a total of three break points in 46 service games, and each woman was broken just once, at the end of the first and third sets. Kvitova hit 11 aces, Venus six, and each won three-quarters of points on their first serves.
Yet this wasn’t just a rock fight, it wasn’t a return to the one-and-done days of Krajicek and Ivanisevic. Kvitova and Venus engaged in high-quality, brass-tacks rallies; every opening for a winner was taken, and more points were decided by good shots than bad. The average ground-stroke speed was 72 M.P.H. for both women; that was exactly the same as the average ground-stroke speed of the two men who played on Centre Court before them, Novak Djokovic and Gilles Simon. Yet neither Kvitova nor Venus suffered any of the extended spells of erratic play that have doomed them in the past. These were two former Wimbledon champions playing on their favorite surface. When Li Na, the highest seed in their section, lost before they went on, the stakes became even higher.
“I think the match just showed how great was the battle from both of us,” Kvitova said. “I really wanted to win today, definitely. I mean, I was very nervous before the match. I knew that she’s a five-time champion here and she loves to play on the Centre Court as well as me.”
“Today I did the best I could,” Venus said. “I think she played well at every single moment. There weren’t a lot of opportunities for either one of us. She played well, I gave it my all. Sometimes it’s not enough.”
“In those matches, it’s just the percentage,” Venus continued. “Just trying to figure out how to hopefully come out on top, take your chances. There really weren’t any chances ever, so...”
Is there a better definition of a grass-court match, and a grass-court mentality, than that? To find a chance when there are no chances.
