Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez: It sounds a little like the Spanish equivalent of John James Smith Jones. You don't differentiate your name by originality, but by sheer volume.
But if Martinez Sanchez isn’t an entirely original player, she is unique by today’s standards. The 27-year-old Barcelona resident does a lot of things backwards. She’s left-handed, for one. She follows her serve to the net, for another. She hits her backhand volley with two hands. If a ball floats down the middle of the court, she’ll run around her forehand and attack it with an inside-out backhand to the corner.
Martinez Sanchez’s strokes have their quirks, and flaws, as well. She punches at her backhand and makes contact with it close to her body. She opens up on her forehand and hits it falling backward; kick serves and high topspin trouble her mightily on that side. At the same time, Martinez Sanchez can hit any shot at any time. She owns that rarest or rarities, a slice forehand that she can use during a rally or as a drop shot. On Tuesday, I saw her slide this shot crosscourt beautifully within inches of the sideline, where Yanina Wickmayer struggled to reach it with her two-handed backhand. Martinez Sanchez also has the hands to play the net, and can even pull off the natural net-rusher’s trick of moving in one direction and poking a short-angle forehand volley crosscourt in the other.
Martinez Sanchez lost a reasonably close, sporadically entertaining match on Thursday to Sam Stosur. I wondered, sitting in sunny, sleepy center court, could a player with more talent use her type of game to do real damage on tour? Is there still room anywhere in the sport for it? There doesn’t seem to be a consensus answer. There is agreement that volleying today’s baseline bombs is an adventure at best. And it was true for Martinez Sanchez today. Late in the first set, she took a diving Stosur backhand off her sneaker-tops and angled it for a winner that was, dare I say it, Johnny Mac-like in its deftness. But on other points, when a return got down at her feet, she was inevitably a sitting duck on the next ball. The odds, overall, weren’t in Martinez Sanchez’s favor, and aren't in the favor any serve and volleyer when they have to face modern topspin. There’s still only one Johnny Mac.
But you can count Nick Bollettieri, the man who may have done more to bring about the demise of serve and volley than anyone, as a believer in its continued potential, provided a young player devotes himself to it very early. He coaches at least one young girl with a professional net-rushing future in mind, but he says that the roadblocks are often the parents, who don’t have the patience that it takes to allow this style to mature. “You have to lose for a while if you go that way,” Bollettieri says, “and who wants to do that?” It would likely require a Pete Sampras situation, where a kid scraps his (very good) two-handed backhand for a one-hander and takes a flying leap of faith off the baseline.
For now, Martinez Sanchez, who is ranked No. 33 and has stuck with that punchy two-handed backhand, remains an oddity rather than a harbinger of possibility. She has a fragile game that’s by turns frustrating and refreshing. On one point, she may construct a rally with subtle efficiency only to blow the easy putaway. On the next she’ll roll a serve down the T and follow it up with a winning volley to the corner—vintage stuff. Other than Radek Stepanek, few, if any, players today can connect the serve and the volley like that. There’s a reason the phrase makes these two shots sound like one. You have to hit your serve with the belief that it alone won’t win you the point.
There’s no question serve and volley can be reconnected into a style of play, a way of life. Despite her struggles today, Martinez Sanchez won two of the most important points of the afternoon using it. Down match point at 5-6 in the second-set tiebreaker, she came in and induced a return error from Stosur. She came in again at 6-6 on a mediocre serve, but Stosur’s return still found the net. Martinez Sanchez’s presence up there on pressure points shifted most of that pressure onto her opponent’s racquet. That’s more than just an oddity. It’s a fundamental fact of the sport that, whatever we think at the moment, will always be true. The pressure game is waiting to be exploited again. As good as Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez is, it's a style that, to succeed in the future, will need to be played by a true original.