The speed is the thing you notice.
When you attend any sort of sporting event in person — as opposed to watching it on TV — it’s the speed that’s most astonishing. From how quickly a top-class footballer might control the ball and pass it, to the velocity of a baseball being hurled at 90mph-plus.
With tennis though, it’s a little different. The speed of the ball is one thing. And yes, it is astonishingly quick. But it’s more the speed of the players that is striking and how quickly they react to their opponents’ shots.
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“It seems like he knows minutes before where you are going to serve,” said the Italian Lorenzo Musetti about the mind-frazzling experience of facing Novak Djokovic.
There’s a famous clip of Andy Roddick from the 2007 US Open when he’s facing Roger Federer. He sends down a serve at 140mph — not his fastest, but quick enough to put a hole straight through the head of any normal person who chooses to get in the way. Federer not only returned it but returned it so well that Roddick put his next shot wide and lost the point. Roddick puffs out his cheeks as if to say: “What am I supposed to do?”.
And that’s the reaction of a Grand Slam winner. Those sorts of returns look superhuman, like the players have become Neo from The Matrix and have slowed down the world, able to make things move at their own pace and create time to play the shot.
Which is because that’s sort of what they’re doing.
“What players are constantly trying to do is slow things down in their minds,” says Craig O’Shannessy, a strategy coach for the ATP Tour who has also worked with Djokovic. “On grass, it may seem to be going fast, but they’re just slowing it down.”
This isn’t — you’ll be amazed to learn — some sort of magical power that all tennis players are granted once they join the tour. But more the endgame of a process, careful planning and preparation.
The amount of time a tennis player will have to react to an opponent’s shot varies, but let’s use the example of a serve that a male player could expect to face in most top-level matches which, based on the speeds seen at Wimbledon so far in this tournament, will be anything between around 115mph-140mph — so let’s split the difference at say, around 127mph.
Travelling the 23.77 metres of a tennis court, this would mean a serve reaches the opponent in roughly 0.4 seconds. But there is a wide range of variables: for a start, a serve is travelling diagonally and from a reasonable height, so it will be travelling further than those 23.77 metres, and that’s assuming the receiving player is standing on the baseline — which many don’t.
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Then there’s the fact the ball won’t actually be travelling at 127mph for its whole journey: air resistance will slow it down, as will bouncing and the effect the bounce has depends on the surface and a few other factors.
So we basically have to estimate how quickly it will reach a player, but we can probably put it at something in the region of 0.7-0.8 seconds. For reference, a blink lasts about 0.4 seconds, so it’s not quite blink and you’ll miss it… but maybe blink twice and you’ll miss it.
Either way, it’s fast. So players, one way or another, have to anticipate what’s coming.
“Tennis looks like a game of pinball — but in fact, it’s a game of patterns,” says O’Shannessy, who as part of his coaching and research uses HawkEye to break down a court into sections and is thus able to plan out where the ball goes for most of the time.
“They’re picking up on positioning of the feet, positioning of the body, balance, the angle of the racquet — they see all of these things and they use that to anticipate what’s coming back.
“A lot of what the speed of what they’re doing out there — if you or I were to slow a video down to 25 or 50 per cent of what it is, you would be able to predict what was coming. These players can do that in real time. Through repetition and seeing the same patterns again and again and again, you start to try to get ahead of this.”
Essentially players create databases in their heads, which they then draw upon as they anticipate what will come over the net.
That isn’t possible all the time. The Athletic spoke to former world No 1 Victoria Azarenka after her Wimbledon first-round victory over China’s Yuan Yue.
“Sometimes you have no time to anticipate and you just have to react. For example, (playing against) an opponent like today, I didn’t know much about her, I’ve never faced her, so it’s a bit more difficult to anticipate because I need to understand or learn her patterns, her technique, her ball toss for the serve etc. When you play someone you know, the anticipation comes a bit more,” she said.
“With some players, you know how they’ll toss the ball a certain way, or if they do a certain thing with their racket — so if you’re able to pick up those cues, you’re able to read them a little bit. But with opponents you don’t know, you have to do it on the go. And sometimes it’s just not enough time. Sometimes you do have to guess and just have to react.”
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Conditions can also throw off the best-laid plans/anticipations. Take Taylor Fritz, the American No 9 seed whose second-round game was beset by challenging windy conditions, making his opponent Yannick Hanfmann’s game even more unpredictable.
“If the wind is moving in one direction, it’s constant, then OK, I can adjust for that,” he said. “I can know the ball and where it’s going to be. I can take the wind into account. But when I have no clue the way the wind is blowing because it’s changing directions all the time — and it’s just gusty and swirling — it’s like, how am I even supposed to know where to set up for the shot?”
It’s also a case that if you try to anticipate too much, you could start second-guessing yourself.
“You can’t anticipate too much, but you can guess,” says Azarenka. “Anticipation comes in the moment. Before that, it’s a guessing game. If you start to guess, you have a chance you might be lucky, but I don’t think you can rely on guesses.”
For some, anticipation is something you can work on. For others, it’s innate.
“Some players will track the ball all the way onto the strings,” says O’Shannessy. “Others will watch 95 per cent of the way, but the last five per cent, they know what it’s going to do so their eyes are already forwards. There’s no right or wrong way to do this.”
O’Shannessy cites Federer as an example of a player who, if you watched him very closely at his peak, would already be looking ahead as he struck the ball rather than at the ball as it hit the strings. In effect, the absolute elite players are already preparing for the next shot before they’ve technically completed this one (which is mind-boggling), so when we talk about the greatest players we’ve seen being freaks, it’s not meant as an insult.
The speed is the thing you notice. But to the world’s best tennis players, as it turns out, it’s not actually that fast.
(Top photo: Glyn Kirk/AFP via Getty Images)
