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by Pete Bodo
Good afternoon, all you screen-based life forms.
I was struck by a two-pronged complaint at yesterday's "Long Knives" post, and I think it's worthy of exploration in a separate story. It's the notion that Nick Bollettieri, his academy, and his teaching philosophy are somehow responsible for the decline of American tennis, as well as the death of serve-and-volley tennis. This caught my eye, because it leads to some conclusions and unavoidable facts that might surprise the authors of those comments, or at make them feel less comfortable in their prejudices.
Let's start with this: If Bollettieri ruined American tennis, did he also at the same time shape and corrupt, at long-distances and with the use of enormous telepathic powers, the games of such stars as Novak Djokovic, Marin Cilic, Juan Martin del Potro, David Ferrer, Rafael Nadal, Fernando Verdasco, Nikolay Davydenko and Marat Safin? I mean, those players are not American, yet each of them plays a lot more like Andre Agassi or Jim Courier (both Bollettieri proteges) than like Pete Sampras (who never had anything to do with Nick).
And if power baseline tennis with an emphasis on the forehand is such a bad thing, why has it become coin of the realm throughout tennis? Someone cited Roger Federer and Justine Henin as more appropriate models for, as I take it, the way tennis ought to be played - as if Bollettieri somehow single-handedly prevented a flood of American Federers and Henins from entering the game. Tell you what: You take a dozen promising juniors and try to shape them into Federers and Henins and check in when they're 16 to let me know how the project is coming along.
Even more stunning, to me, is the implication that Bollettieri is somehow a force merely in American tennis. Are Monica Seles, Agassi and Courier, Anna Kournikova, Tommy Haas, Kei Nishikori, Nicole Vaidisova, Maria Sharapova, Max Mirnyi, et al Americans? And does nationality mean anything at all in tennis anymore? I don't believe so. Those players - in fact, all promising pro players - are part of a group I'd call the International Tennis Elites - the community of players cherry-picked from all over the globe for their talent at a strikingly early age.
So I would say that instead of "ruining" the American game, Bollettieri has been very successful in helping to establish what I often have called the New World Game (double-entendre intended). And I don't for a moment believe that American tennis interests would be better served if, instead of Bollettieri, we had some guy running around trying to make players play serve-and-volley tennis in an environment increasingly dominated by fit, cradle-to-grave, European and South American pros who have developed a largely similar game that works on the most commonly used surfaces, and even on present-day grass. You're entitled to be sentimental about "the good old days," or something like that, but I think it's an error to say that the only reason the game of the past won't work today is because nobody is playing it.
Let me digress: Bollettieri hasn't taken a single player naturally inclined to play serve-and-volley and tried to transform him into a baseliner. Not a one. And try this experiment: go out to a local tennis center or public park and check out how the game is being played by dedicated 3.5-and-better recreational players who have neither the talent nor desire to make it on the pro tour. I think you'll find a preponderance of baseliners, and a small number of players who serve-and-volley (more, in fact, than on the pro tour). And you know what? It has always been thus. I hope some of you avid players weigh-in on this issue. So, did Nick Bollettieri somehow shape those baseliners, too? Deny them the joys of playing serve-and-volley tennis?
Of course not. The baseline game simply is the way most players - amateur and pro - find success. And trust me on this: no player enjoying a satisfying level of success in the competitive world of junior tennis is going to stray too far from that base. What Bollettieri has done - what any decent coach does - is take the clay of a six- or nine- or 11-year-old talent and tried to find the most efficient, successful game buried in it. He could no more turn a natural serve-and-volley player into a baseliner than he could perform the transformation the other way around.
What Bollettieri did do (and the Spanish have done this very well, too), is focus on strength maximization, and that was an important step forward - perhaps even the genie in the bottle of the modern game of tennis. Up until about the time that Nick got involved in the game, tennis was taught in a very by-rote way: you turned sideways to the net (no longer true), you stepped into the ball (no longer true), you followed through over your opposite shoulder (no longer always true), you tried to take the net (the Jack Kramer influence, also no longer true). You didn't swing too hard (no longer true). I simplify, but not by that much. The notion that there is a right way to play has been supplanted by the desire to play a successful way.
And at about the same time, because of the growth of professionalism, younger and younger kids all over the world were whacking a million balls daily (think Agassi) long before they would even have recognized the name Bollettieri. The reality is that the players who ended up at Bollettieri's academy, and most other elite academies anywhere in the world, were already semi-developed products. The idea that a player is a tabula rasa for a high-performance coach is nonsense. Besides, would anyone suggest that Agassi would have had a better career if, having arrived at Bollettieri's academy, Nick had said: Okay, kid, the first thing we have to do is work on your serve-and-volley game!
I somehow doubt it.
Much the same kind of evolution was taking place at the same time in Europe, although more subtly because of the Europeans predisposition to baseline tennis (Adriano Panatta and Stefan Edberg nonwithstanding). I'll leave that discussion for another time (Patrick McEnroe has some very interesting thoughts on that subject, but I don't want to steal the thunder from the forthcoming book I helped him write, Hardcourt Confidential).
Suffice it to say that it's really outdated to think of tennis in parochial, nationalistic terms, in any sense whatsoever. The general muting of the difference between surfaces is but one proof of that. And I'm sure that it's a mistake to think of development as a style-driven process. Spain gave us Juan Balcells at the same time that it gave us Alex Corretja. Balcells was a serve-and-volley player, even on clay. Spain will continue to give us such players, and so will the U.S.( or Argentina, or Thailand) - but only as long as there's a kid with a natural, effective serve-and-volley game out there. So there's been no more of a conspiracy to kill serve-and-volley tennis as there was in the NFL to replace the T-formation with the shotgun-style offense (sorry, non-Americans) - the latter once being almost exclusively the domain of the lesser, college game.
The way I see it, the keyword in tennis for the past two decades has been "globalization." And with the accelerated pace of digital communication, cable television, and international travel, a specific approach to development has quickly emerged, producing a basic, practical, global style that translates well on various surfaces. The number of players who pursue that style is borderline astonishing, yet players with other proclivities still pepper the ranks (does the name "Federer" mean anything you you?). This process has been aided and accelerated by the extent to which players are developed long before any formal coach gets his hands on them. That may suppress the development of serve-and-volley players, but not in a final way. Every coach I've ever observed at work has paid attention to the volley game, and kid with a knack for it pursue the style as far as it takes them. It just doesn't take them as far anymore.
We have a wonderful example of this entire evolutionary process in the form of Rafael Nadal, who in some ways truly is the anti-Federer. Now, does anyone think that Rafa would have been much better off if Toni had taught him to be a different kind of player, stylistically? Had tried to make him more like Roger? I'll hazard the guess that if Toni Nadal had shipped young Rafa off to Bollettieri's to put the finishing touches on his emerging game, some people would be ripping Nick for making Rafa develop a workmanlike, high-effort, relatively un-aesthetic game. Which begs the question, Is Toni Nadal just as bad for tennis as some of you think Nick is?
In my opinion, tennis in the past few decades has been liberated from stylistic formality (is there anything in tennis quite as formal as the serve, followed by the split-step, followed by the volley?). The bar for playing effective serve-and-volley has been raised to a dizzying height, partly because of the superior athleticism of today's baseline players. I find it hard to describe that as a net negative - and most of you know that I'm a big fan of the attacking game.
What are we to do, pass legislation against the smokin' hot forehand service return? Make all baseliners hit one-handed backhands? The one thing you can't teach people is talent, which is why Federer and Henin can not only survive but flourish. And good luck teaching that, on either side of the Atlantic.