When the name Roger Federer is mentioned, Patrik Kühnen’s enthusiasm can hardly be stopped. “He simply played the one-handed backhand slice at his opponents’ feet, like, ‘Here you have it!'” he shouts. That’s what Federer did throughout his entire career. “And the ball was so flat after it bounced that the other person was able to generate significantly less counter-pressure and not be able to follow through fully.” Or the backhand topspin, the technique in which the ball is hit with forward spin instead of backspin. “You have to watch a video of him on YouTube,” advises Kühnen, “there are wonderful shots of Roger. In super slo-mo! How he takes the step to the ball and stands there like Robin Hood! Great!”
Kühnen is not only enthusiastic because, at 58, he still loves tennis like he used to when he was a successful professional and even won the Davis Cup and has long remained connected to the industry as tournament director of the ATP tournament in Munich. Kühnen also practiced the backhand one-handed, like Federer, which is why the current news this week moved him. For the first time since August 23, 1973, when the men’s ATP Tour world rankings debuted, there is no player ranked in the top ten who hits the backhand with one hand. The Greek Stefanos Tsitsipas slipped one position, from tenth to eleventh place, thus cementing the turning point in sports history, which Kühnen regrets. “I loved playing the backhand one-handed, and I still play it today. For tennis aesthetes, the one-handed backhand is a dream.”
That’s it, but the one-handed backhand means more. Tennis history and the evolution of this sport can be told through them. Their gradual extinction shows that athleticism triumphed over elegance, that power prevailed over finesse, and that there could be no turning back. In the early days, the mainly polite society gently pushed the balls back and forth with one hand. When competitive tennis, whose predecessor discipline Jeu de Paume went back to the Middle Ages, began to become established in the 1920s, it was only a logical consequence that the backhand continued to be swung with one hand. Everyone played like that.
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Roger Federer’s compatriot Stan Wawrinka is still playing – he also won three Grand Slam titles thanks to his extremely powerful one-handed backhand.
(Foto: Clive Brunskill/Getty)
This development was also reflected in the first ATP world rankings. In the first top ten, led by Romanian Ilie Nastase, only a two-handed backhand appeared. American Jimmy Connors used this grip as a left-hander to throw himself into balls with all his body weight, making his smooth backhands with his legendary metal bat look like baseball strikes. Connors thus conquered the number one position and was to stay there, with interruptions, for a total of 268 weeks. Björn Borg and Chris Evert later made the breakthrough of the two-handed backhand.
They had difficulty swinging the heavy wooden rackets of the time with one hand when hitting backhands. Borg’s left hand supported the thrust, but more as an extra, as he let it go early again. In this way, by wiping the club head up low, he was able to give the ball spin. The topspin brought Borg five titles in a row at Wimbledon alone. American Chris Evert won 18 Grand Slam trophies. The clash of backhand culture, the backhand fight, was also visible in the two big duels of that era. Borg and Evert’s biggest opponents were John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova, they played the backhand one-handed.
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Unmistakable: Stefanie Graf was one of the few women who played the backhand with one hand.
(Photo: Timothy A. Clary/AFP)
The balance of power between one-handed and two-handed backhands now tipped. Until 1990, Sports Illustrated once found, professionals with one-handed backhands accounted for more than 60 percent of Grand Slam winners. This dominance was then over. “Those were really exciting years back then because so many different types of players met each other,” remembers Kühnen, who defeated Connors at Wimbledon in 1988. Among the women, Stefanie Graf shone with her one-handed backhand, mostly implemented as a slice; she was more of an exception than Boris Becker, Michael Stich and Pete Sampras were among the men. “You have advantages with the two-handed backhand in terms of power. And you can control the ball more easily,” says Kühnen, who briefly tried to switch to two-handed as a teenager. “But by then I had long since been conditioned to use one-handed. As a two-handed person, you also have a little less reach. That wasn’t for me.”
Sampras, who retrained as a 14-year-old to use one-handed training, proved that the change can be successful in rare cases. Novak Djokovic almost went this route, as he described in 2013: “My former coach, Jelena Gencic, actually wanted me to play with one hand. I felt very weak because most of the kids played high balls to my backhand, so that started I tried to support my right hand with my left. That’s how I started playing with two hands.”
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Andre Agassi, married to Stefanie Graf, changed tennis with the way he played the backhand with both hands – the left hand strongly leading the stroke.
(Foto: John G. Mabanglo/picture-alliance /dpa)
It was Andre Agassi who changed the two-handed backhand again, his left hand was heavily involved in hitting. Kühnen explains this technique as follows: “For many who play a two-handed backhand, the left hand more or less does the punch. It takes over the striking, so to speak.” Rafael Nadal in particular perfected this. “I don’t want to say that Nadal, who is left-handed, plays his backhand with his right hand almost like a forehand – but his right hand really whips into the shot with his two-handed backhand.” It was similar with Serena Williams. The two-handed backhand has therefore become established, in stages. In 2013, for the first time at Wimbledon, no one-handed backhand was seen in the quarterfinals, neither for men nor for women. Currently only eleven men and three women in the top 100 play with one-handed backhands.
The two-handed backhand is scientifically proven to be the more effective stroke. More than 40 years ago, the American Jack Groppel examined the biomechanics of both strokes. The result was that the one-handed backhand is more difficult and requires more synchronization between the hips, legs, torso, upper arm, forearm and hand. Two Japanese demonstrated that the higher the ball you hit, the more difficult the one-handed backhand becomes. For this reason, Federer was never able to defeat Nadal at the French Open. “The optimal height for the one-handed backhand is hip height,” says Kühnen.
Federer was always aware that this blow was threatened. Back in 2019, he advised his four children to hit a two-handed backhand “because it’s easier. If they want to change it later, I’ll teach them to hit a one-handed backhand.” This change should probably not fail because of a capable teacher.
2024-02-23 15:17:07
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