Stroke of genius: Kunal Pradhan on tennis’s Lorenzo Musetti and the beauty of the backhand

For about 120 of the 145 minutes they spent on court, Musetti gave the champion a run for his money. It was perhaps inevitable that the Italian would lose; he hadn’t beaten the Spaniard in any of their last five meetings. Still, this was more than just another semi-final loss in the annual cycle of Grand Slam tournaments. For many, it was personal.

Musetti, ranked No. 7, is the best single-handed backhand player in the world today. The leader of a dying breed of men and women who have been sidelined by sports science — the one-handed backhand return is deemed too weak, with the evolution of carbon-fibre racquets, nylon strings and vibration dampeners that offer greater power and control — but who still press on with it.

Grigor Dimitrov and Stefanos Tsitsipas are the others in the top 30 who have a single-handed backhand. But only eight men in the top 100 employ the most elegant stroke in tennis . On the women’s tour, there are none in the top 70, and only three in the top 100.

These are the impractical, romantic madcaps who persevere no matter how many coaches and pundits tell them to switch. For them, there is pride in playing the shot. The fluid arc as the single-handed backhand falls into a slice or rises into a topspin for a flourishing follow-through is the kind of poetry in motion nothing else in tennis can ever be.

These are professional players who want to win, but this is a stroke that defines their love of the game — a nod, if you will, to Don Budge, Ken Rosewall, Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Stefan Edberg, Pete Sampras, Justine Henin and Roger Federer — and without it, there would be no point at all.

Talking about a revolution

The problem with the single-handed backhand, Navratilova said in 2016, is that it practically takes a genius to hit one. Navratilova, who won 18 Grand Slam singles titles, used a single-handed backhand — not the most elegant avatar of the stroke, but an efficient mix of slices and top spins that set up one of the most aggressive serve-and-volley games in history.

What Navratilova said nine years ago is particularly important since she had a view from across the net of what would turn out to be perhaps the most important innovation in sport since Dick Fosbury’s flop in the 1968 Mexico Olympics changed the high-jump forever.

Here’s a short summary of what happened.

In 1954, Chris Evert, Navratilova’s great rival, was born into a tennis family in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Her father, Jimmy Evert, was a professional coach. Chris was five when she first stepped on court, and when Jimmy realised she couldn’t generate enough power on her backhand side, he encouraged her to try using both hands — a temporary retrieval plan for a young girl, borrowed from the Australians Vivian McGrath and John Bromwich, who used it in the 1930s.

Chris found that the stroke worked perfectly. The repeat motion, with a use of the stronger right hand for support, was a bit like hitting a forehand from the other side. So what if it compromised on reach; she could compensate for that with greater fitness. And so what if it didn’t look that great; it got the job done.

When Evert started climbing the ranks — as a 14-year-old who made the semi-final of a senior event, a 15-year-old who defeated World No. 1 Margaret Court, a 16-year-old invited to the US Open, and a 19-year-old double Grand Slam champion — the world started to take note of this odd double-handed system that relied on supreme fitness and hanging back at the baseline to offer greater consistency and power.

Over the next decade, while Evert and Navratilova were locked in a battle of philosophies in women’s tennis, it helped the double-handed cause that Jimmy Connors burst on the men’s side with a similar stroke that was encouraged by his mother Gloria Connors. And it helped that Bjorn Borg emerged with an even stranger double-handed style that had a straighter backswing, inspired by his early days as a hockey player.

And so, the revolution — albeit not a pretty one — was being televised.

A parting shot

It took a couple of decades from the Evert-Connors era for the balance to shift.

Great champions such as Sampras and Federer on the men’s side and Graf and Henin on the women’s side concealed the fact that change was truly upon us, until we woke up one morning in today’s sports-tech-ruled world. A world in which Musetti, Dimitrov and Tsitsipas, with zero Grand Slam titles between them, are the last samurais fighting for a stroke in danger of being lost in time.

A stroke that, as Navratilova said, now requires a genius to play it.

But therein lies the hope that it’s not all over; that someone will rise to not just celebrate the shot but also triumph with it. For what is sport without a dash of genius?