Alexandr Dolgopolov exemplifies the lost art of playing tennis weirdly:
As tennis turned into a ball-crushing baseline game, men and women who rely on kooky spins, unique grips or downright strange strokes have been squeezed out. The evolution is logical. The harder players hit the ball, the less time they have to prepare, so technique today is abbreviated and tends toward uniformity. Training methods have become global and kids start to play under professional supervision at younger ages.
“There’s no more place, maybe, for fun,” said Fabrice Santoro, whose two-handed strokes and subtle spins earned him a spot in Grand Slam draws in four different decades. “When you start as a kid now, your coach normally says, ‘OK, if you want to be a champion, it’s going to be very hard, you have to be very serious, you have to work hard every day, so listen to me, be like this.’ They don’t say, ‘Have fun,’ — they don’t say this.”
Dolgopolov, 22, used to be one of those kids. His father, Oleksandr, coached Andrei Medvedev, the former French Open finalist, and started taking his son on the tour when he was not yet four years old.
Dolgopolov picked up his first racket at three and hit with many top pros throughout his childhood, when he wasn’t playing video games in the player lounges.
“I had classic technique — one of the best techniques when I was like 10, 12, but then I changed,” he said. For Dolgopolov, creating his own style was a first step toward independence from his father.
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In practice Wednesday, Dolgopolov showed off his rapid fire serve, which looks like a normal serve set to fast forward: He bounces the ball twice, tosses it, and hits it when it reaches its peak, if not just before. He’s so quick that he can bounce the ball off the ground with his racket and then spring into his service motion and fire a bullet into the box (he demonstrated this). He says he can bounce the ball off the butt of his racket handle and then serve it.In matches, Dolgopolov is a master of misdirection, especially with his two-handed backhand. “I hit the ball early and move my wrist a lot, so I get bigger angles,” he said.
Tennis was never dominated by funky players, but the sport used to have many more of them. Pancho Segura hit a two-handed forehand that Jack Kramer dubbed the greatest shot in tennis. Alberto Berasategui’s underhand forehand grip was so extreme that he would simply turn over his wrist and hit his backhand with the same grip (and with the same side of the racket). In 1967, Francoise Durr used an arsenal of self-taught strokes, including a sweeping backhand hit with a forehand grip, to win the French Open. John McEnroe’s serve and forehand were as unusual and inimitable as they were beautiful.