The New Cause and Effect

What is variety good for in today’s women’s game? Contrary to the forecasts of the sport’s doomsayers, it has become the coin of the realm on the men’s side again. Even Rafael Nadal, who is an all-world grinder on one level, is comfortable with every shot and a master at finding different ways to win. I hesitate to say that the WTA has yet to “catch up” to the men in this regard; the two tours share certain general trends like equipment and stroke technique, but just because the men have produced an Andy Murray doesn’t mean his counterpart will soon arrive on the women’s side (though I’d like to see what she would look like). Still, the women’s tour does seem to be crying out for an evolutionary leap that will break the current iron rule of the hard-hitting, two-hand-backhand wielding baseliner. In this week’s WTA rankings, you have to scroll all the way down to No. 17, Patty Schnyder, to find a player who doesn’t fit that mold.

Two spots below Schnyder we find another graceful, and one-handed, anomaly, Amelie Mauresmo. Yes, the 29-year-old former No. 1 is still in the Top 20, despite two years' worth of injury and mediocrity. The Frenchwoman is there because on Sunday she won her first event since 2007, in Paris. She did it in emotional fashion, with a tear-filled celebration in front of the home folks that really did look like it was two years in the making. Even better, Mauresmo did it with surprising and hard-earned wins over a pair of younger two-handed belters, Jelena Jankovic and Elena Dementieva.

Don’t pop the Champagne corks just yet, variety lovers. Mauresmo’s win was not a victory for the artful slice backhand or the gently angled forehand volley, though she still owns both of those shots and they are still a pleasure to see. Rather, what she and her new coach, Hugo Lecoq, seem to have realized is that if you can’t beat the bashers, you might as well join them. In tennis terms, that means that all the variety in the world won’t get you anything these days if you can’t finish a point by reliably pummeling a forehand into the corner and past your speedy opponent. Even if it isn’t the most elegant way to end a rally, there’s no winning without it.

Mauresmo’s forehand appears to have been tweaked with this realization in mind. There was more snap and topspin in it than I’ve seen before. The main problem with the shot in the past was that she didn’t get enough of her hand behind the racquet. This time there was more substance behind her forehands. When she was backed up, she was able to hoist an effective topspin moonball. More important, when she had time to move into a shot, she was flicking it with more flat power and hooking it into the corners with more action.

With this kill shot in place, the rest of Mauresmo’s high-flown repertoire suddenly seemed more useful, and not just fodder for style-loving purists. In the final, she was able to back Dementieva off the baseline with her forehand—something the Frenchwoman has always had trouble doing against two-handed opponents—and follow it up with a creative slice down the middle of the court, which led to a deftly angled volley winner. While Mauresmo is still not as good at forcing the action from the baseline as someone like Dementieva, and while she still seemed to be finding the range on her forehand, the shot held up at crucial stages in the tight first set, stages where Dementieva tended to get panicky and overhit.

If you had known nothing of women’s tennis and had sat down to watch the Paris final, you would have had a hard time recognizing that Mauresmo was the player who has been lauded for style and diversity and that Dementieva is, from a classicist's point of view, the robotic jock who drills every shot exactly the same way. It would have been hard to make these distinctions because what you would have seen first and foremost were shots rocketing from one corner to another off both players’ racquets. Many fans lament that this is how tennis is contested today, that it all happens too quickly and brutally, that there’s no time to savor the path of a player’s swing, and that the diminished importance of net play has robbed the sport of an essential viewing element: that is, the basic concept of cause and effect, in which a player is either rewarded or punished for taking a risk and coming in. To these viewers, today’s baseline battles can look random and formless—one player either hits a winner or makes an error.

But if you watched Mauresmo and Dementieva closely, if you kept an eye on where their shots landed and where they positioned themselves after each one, a cause-and-effect revealed itself. The points were too fast and the shots too deep for either player to consistently try to position herself to charge the net—while tennis may not be getting more varied or more beautiful, there’s no denying that the top pros have become more proficient shot-makers over the years; at the highest levels of the sport the speed, of both the players and their shots, just keeps increasing, without a similar rise in errors. Because of this proficiency from both women, all Dementieva and Mauresmo could do tactically was try to win the battle of the baseline. Whoever could wrest enough control of a rally to be able to move her feet up to the baseline—or, if she was lucky, inside it—while at the same time pushing her opponent a couple of feet behind the other baseline almost invariably won the point. Once this tiny bit of control was established by one player, it took a spectacular effort—usually some kind of running, full swing prayer into the corner—for the other to get back to level terms.

This kind of pace can force a player to do some crazy things. At times, Dementieva took her forehand impossibly early, to the point where it looked like she was rushing just to get the rally over with as quickly as possible. But this also happened to be when she was most successful; if she waited at all to force the action, she was in trouble.

The logic and tactics of today’s tennis take place must more quickly and in a much more condensed space than they did in the serve-and-volley days. But they do take place. Points between Dementieva and Mauresmo were not won by random errors—you just have to watch more closely to make sense of how the points are won. Think of it, if you will, like punk rock versus Chuck Berry. The punks sped up the notes and beats, but the best of their songs retained the verve and swing of old rock and roll, just in a mashed-together and harder to hear form.

In the end, like their hard-hitting styles, there was little to separate Mauresmo and Dementieva. The match was decided not by who handled the pressure better, but by who was the last person to handle it poorly. Mauresmo went up 5-1 in the third. The underdog in the match, she had played with uncharacteristic fist-pumping gusto and overt emotion—contemplating retirement seems to have relaxed her—from the beginning. Now she had something to lose, and she became tentative. Fortunately for her, pressure is a weird two-way street in tennis. Dementieva noticed Mauresmo getting tight, but rather than becoming her more confident when she was returning at 4-5, she only got tighter as well—seeing a nervous player can make you nervous, as counterintuitive as that sounds (it's a tough sport). Dementieva shanked four balls and the match was over in the blink of an eye. Mauresmo didn’t even need to use her amped-up forehand to win the title.

But it was the shot that got her there, and that raised her from a two-year stint in the tennis wilderness. If there’s a message in there somewhere for tennis fans, it’s that any player who wants to use variety and one-handed stylishness in the future is going to need to have the not-so-pretty basics of power-baseline tennis covered first. After watching the Paris final, it seems hard to ask any player to do much more than that—learning to hit a screaming forehand a foot from the baseline 10 times in a row is enough for one player’s lifetime. The last player who had all that and more was Justine Henin. Maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that she couldn’t keep it up.