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Serve and Volley, a Rare but Welcome Sight

June 28, 2004
By HARVEY ARATON





Wimbledon, England

YOU are down only one set to Andy Roddick in the third
round of Wimbledon and are a measly point from evening the
match. Second-set tie breaker, 6-5, but here's the problem,
a big one: it's second serve, with Roddick ready to pounce,
loading up for the return.

What to do, stay back and hope for the best against the
superior baseline player with an executioner's forehand, or
stick to your guns, fire off the serve and follow it in?

"I just said, 'Big second serve, go the body, try to jam
him, get in there,' " Taylor Dent said.

Immediately, this was bad for him, as Roddick stepped
around the serve and rifled a forehand that Dent couldn't
volley cleanly. But philosophically, this was good for
tennis, a sport crying out for contrast, for diversity of
style.

"He keeps coming in, and that takes courage," Dent's
father, Phil, a former top-20 tour player, said proudly
after his boy lost a battle of muscular Americans, 6-3, 7-6
(6), 7-6 (1) to the second-seeded Roddick.

Conviction is probably the more appropriate word, or the
willingness to ply a serve-and-volley path on which even
the keepers of the lawns have hung signs that read: Beware
of heavier balls, slower grass and rocket-like returns.

"They're trying to slow everything down so there are more
rallies," Taylor Dent said. "In the locker room, guys are
complaining about their arms being sore."

Transformation is inevitable, even here at SW 19, the
swankiest and stuffiest of tennis addresses. Players don't
have to salute royal-box aristocrats upon exiting anymore.
A retractable roof for the green and grand old court is on
the horizon.

Yesterday, Tim Henman, whose family for generations has
held membership here, half-joked that as president some
day, he would make People's Sunday a yearly occurrence, not
just a rain makeup date when the plain and pub folk may
actually pay their way into tennis's cathedral.

We bow and curtsy to the forces of change, except for this
concerted, continuing effort to make Wimbledon much too
groundstroke-friendly for baseliners previously allergic to
grass.

Net result: one more reason for coaches everywhere to
develop players less schooled than their ancestors in the
geometry of the game.

Tennis is always in self-analysis, and dealing with thorny
marketing issues, not the least of which is how the graying
and golf-loving American sports media elite yawns at tennis
while ignoring golf's plummeting television ratings as
Tiger runs on a half-empty tank.

But tennis had better face up to a hard fact: 43-stroke
rallies and three-and-a-half-hour matches are as appealing
to young people as watching lawns grow.

On this side of the pond, the short-sighted club consensus
was that Wimbledon had become too much about service power,
although Andre Agassi was good enough in the power tennis
era to win it from the baseline in 1992.

A decade later, the changes were such that Lleyton Hewitt
outlasted the field with looping, languorous groundstrokes,
while old serve-and-volley savants like John McEnroe
muttered, "You cannot be serious."

On the women's side, grass-court tennis as we know it is
practiced only by the 47-year-old ghost of Martina
Navratilova. Americans may think of Henman as a gentleman
of the lawns, but he struck an underpublicized blow for
attack tennis by reaching the French Open semifinals
earlier this month. Roger Federer, the top-seeded defending
champion, has a beautifully crafted hybrid game, which is
why he is the consensus favorite to beat Roddick here
Sunday in the final.

"That's why Federer has it all over these guys, because he
can do everything and 90 percent of them play the same
way," said Phil Dent, a child of Australian grass courts
whose son grew up on Southern California concrete. "Hit a
big serve, stay back, crack a big forehand."

Betty Ann Grubb, Taylor's mother, also played
professionally, partnering with Renee Richards, the
transsexual who in the 1970's roiled women's tennis.

So now, perhaps, we better understand Dent, this
23-year-old maverick who said: "Serve and volley is pretty
much a no-brainer for me. I'm pretty stubborn."

A six-year pro ranked 31st, Dent won three tournaments last
year, beating Roddick along the way to a title in Memphis.
When they played again at the Australian Open this year,
Roddick defeated him, 6-2, 6-0, 6-2, and Dent called it the
worst drubbing of his life.

Serve-and-volleyers generally require more time to
coordinate their skills, hence the paucity of
practitioners. Maybe Dent will mount a charge at the top
10, maybe he won't. What he promises to do is continue to
push forward against the heavy flow of groundstroke
traffic, as he did on every serve yesterday, including the
point after 6-5 in that second-set tie breaker.

Again, behind another second serve, he moved in. Back came
another bullet for another minibreak, and set point for
Roddick.

"I did what I do," Dent said. Good for him. Good for
tennis.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/28/sports/tennis/28araton.html?ex=1089390422&ei=1\
&en=d6c88ac58e4fdcc7


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