by Pete Bodo
It's both perilous and easy to draw comparisons between various sports, even while understanding how different they are and how deceptive the parallels may be. Still, every once in a while you come across a story, issue or development that seems to resonate across the boundary lines, separating and defining different sports. A football story I read in the New York Post yesterday instantly made me think of tennis and brought a smile to my face.
I don't want to confuse readers from outside the U.S. who have no understanding of our game of football and the National Football League—although it does occur to me that it's just payback for the way some of you have bewildered me with the sport of cricket. Some of the terminology that follows may be mystifying, but I think you'll get the general idea. The story I'm referring to was an advance on tomorrow night's game between the loudmouth New York Jets, who talk the talk but cannot walk the walk, and the Denver Broncos. You can read the full story here.
The gist of it is that the Broncos, trying to maximize the abilities of their quarterback, Tim Tebow, are using the option offense—a scheme still vastly popular in the collegiate game but long since determined to be ineffective in the NFL for two main reasons: The quality of the pro-level defensive players and the physical toll the option offense can take on a quarterback. That latter is an issue because the quarterback often holds onto the ball and runs with it, or gets hit and piled up, even if he pitches it to one of his running backs. The option offense is basically a running offense: On Sunday, Tebow threw just eight passes and completed only two, the first when the game was already nearly three-quarters over. Still, the Broncos beat the Kansas City Chiefs, 17-10.
It struck me, reading the story, that you could substitute "serve-and-volley tennis" for "option offense." Both are thought to be passe, but the big difference is that the Broncos have a player who makes the option offense viable in Tebow. If tennis had a Tebow cracking the serve and successfully attacking the net, a fair number of those swing-from-the-heels baseliners living off the fat of the baseline land would be forced to tread just a little more carefully. But before going on, I want to emphasize that both components—the style of play and the character of the player—are of critical importance in this discussion.
Just to put Part B of that formula into perspective, this is what Jets head coach Rex Ryan said of Tebow: "You can go back and look when people asked me about him (before the pro draft). I thought he was a great competitor. . . I thought he was a winner. That's what he's showing right now. Are there prettier passers than him? Yeah. Absolutely. But again, I'll just try to find a way to beat him."
When was the last time you heard something like that said about a serve-and-volley player? Not since the days of Pete Sampras and Pat Rafter.
So what I'm suggesting here is that attacking tennis isn't dead; it's just less viable than it was throughout most of tennis history and, more important, it hasn't been the style of choice for a player who has all the other ingredients required to be a big winner and a great champion. I imagine that, should the right kind of athlete and competitor come along (think of John McEnroe, but three inches taller and with a more rugged frame), he'll be able to take his place at or near the top despite toting what most people think of as an archaic game.
The game is begging for someone like that to emerge from the camps, academies, clubs or public courts of the world. Someone whose combination of power and touch is matched by his competitive ability. Someone like a McEnroe, a Rafter, or a Sampras. Someone who could stand across the net from a Roger Federer and convey the message, I can rough you up and expose you as a middleweight. Who can squint at a Rafael Nadal or Novak Djokovic and say, I'm going to smother you, and make you play with your feet planted. Someone with no back-up in him; he's coming after you and will continue coming until the issue is settled.
Part of the problem today is that that guys who are playing serve-and-volley tennis just aren't good enough going in. Take Michael Llodra. I admire him for pursuing the "big game," but he just doesn't have the skill set to pull it off. Llodra is bold and adventurous, but he puts himself in positions where he has to do things that are beyond his ability. It's tempting to think that Llodra might have been extremely successful in an earlier time, but I don't think that's true. He would have been lost in the shuffle among so many quality attacking players.
Also, a guy like Llodra is actually helped by the fact that most of his opponents yield the attacking option to him. He's not called upon to defend as skillfully as someone who is attacked as well as an attacker. He doesn't have to make shots, including passing shots, with his poor groundstrokes. He's left to take what he can get with his big game. When he's on a good run, he can do some damage. But never all that much.
So just for fun, let's take a look at some of the other players who are—or were—fair candidates to pursue the big game, but just didn't—or couldn't—go there with big-time success.
Roger Federer: Early in Federer's run as a Wimbledon champ, even before the "slow grass" narrative fully matured, Sampras asked Federer why he didn't attack more, or regularly follow his first serve to the net. And Federer gave the best answer of all: Because he didn't have to.. .
Federer knew that he could win from the rally, especially in an era where the emphasis was increasingly on the baseline game and courts everywhere were getting slower and slower. As well, the idea of getting to the net ASAP was somewhat foreign and perhaps even illogical to Federer, given his training on clay courts. His mindset also ensured that his serve, while excellent, did not have to function as a not-so-secret weapon (which is standard practice for the attacking player). Instead, the serve is beautifully integrated into that versatile, all-around game.
I also don't believe that Federer has the ideal physical features to be the kind of serve-and-volley player called for in today's game. He's not as big and, in a general way, as physical as a guy would need to be in order to flourish today as an attacking player.
Tomas Berdych: Many of you saw how successfully Berdych attacked the net against Andy Murray during the Paris Indoors. This guy had real potential as a serve-and-volley player and, who knows, he might have become even more successful had the attraction been sufficiently powerful. It's easy to say his background and training (on clay) ruled out Berdych being a big-game guy, but just look at how Stefan Edberg bucked convention and tradition in Sweden to become one of the outstanding serve-and-volleyers of all time. Berdych is a head case, you say. Well, yeah. But all that tells you is that he's not well formed, or incomplete. Can it be that his style reflects those shortcomings?
Mardy Fish: This is another guy, like Berdych, who may have suffered from the idea (as opposed to the reality) that the serve-and-volley game is a thing of the past. You just know that, were Fish playing two decades ago, he'd be charging the net behind every serve and every sliced backhand. However, he would have been hurt then (as now) by his issues as a competitor.
Contrast Fish's history with that of Rafter, the ultimate example of a guy whose aggressive, attacking game was the natural expression of his ambition. Rafter had an appetite for combat, and he was willing to take risks. He was a superior competitor. The difference between guys like Fish (and Berdych) and Rafter are to some degree a matter of ambition. Rafter's desires led him to the place where his unique set of skills and shortcomings were tempered and honed to the point where they were used most successfully. He ended up with a deadly serve-and-volley game.
Robin Soderling: This guy is a paragon of today's passive-aggressive era. His peers and rivals are lucky that doesn't have the sufficiently adventurous spirit required to embrace the attacking game.
Andy Roddick: The most interesting thing to me about Roddick is the way the way the various pieces of his game just don't fit together all that well. He has a huge serve, but he looks woeful when he tries to play the big game that comes so much more easily to men with a similar first strike. That's unusual.
If you roll old film of, say, Stan Smith, you can see where it doesn't take a tremendous amount of touch or even great movement to play successful, smothering serve-and-volley tennis (or it didn't, during Smith's era). How a fella with as big a serve as Roddick's and as serviceable a forehand ended up so ill-suited to the attacking game is something I'll never understand—and a tribute to complexity and the infinity of variations possible when you marry man and racquet.
Gael Monfils: Although he's a little on the lean side, this is the guy I'd probably take if I could choose the clay from which to create a big-game player. He's explosive, limber, tall. . . this is a player who, under the right conditions, could really get in the faces of opponents and dictate. Why he chooses merely to play center field and seems content to make the crowd go "ooooh" and "aaaah" with his acrobatic gets is beyond me.
John Isner: Although he's so big at 6'9" that his size actually works against him—in terms of movement and his general quickness, including racquet manipulation—Isner has the perfect mentality for the big game. He keeps it real simple: Rock the other guy with your serve, end the point as soon as you can; when receiving, take your chances, because all you usually need is one break. Isner can smother anyone, which is why a runner like Nadal has always been so wary of him. I'd like to see Isner lean on his opponents even more than he does, but he's not a naturally aggressive person or player. I think that hurts him.
Feliciano Lopez: Give him high marks for trying to play the big game the classic way—something that comes a little more easily to a lefty with a terrific serve. Granted, that forehand can get a little erratic, but he pays a price for his apparent lack of self-belief, or perhaps it's ambition. He's a good example of the guy who just isn't a great competitor, which in an odd way makes his present success even more surprising.
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Now here's something: All of these men are ranked in the Top 20 (in descending order), and together represent nearly half of that august company (eight of 20). Their gifts and skills are valuable ones, even if they aren't applied the way they might have been at one time, or if they have other shortcomings that prevent them from playing the big game. Each of them has attained a degree of success that is only possible if you follow, understand, and maximize your talent—which is another way of saying that none of them were cut out to be that mythical (in our time) beast, the serve-and-volley champion.
Well, it's fun to kick these ideas around. And don't get me wrong, Tebow may not be able to drive that Denver option offense to the Super Bowl; within weeks, the Broncos could fade into something of a curiosity, at which point the critics will join in a chorus of "I told you so. . ."
But there's always hope, and in the end isn't it nice to know that the options remain open?