Power Baseliners and the Wave of the Future

This is the fourth in a four-part series of articles about the abundance of power-baseliners in professional tennis today, the absence of other styles of play and what this means for the game.

When fans and commentators are asked to name the greatest tennis player of all time, Jimmy Connors is usually not one of those selected. He won eight major titles, a considerable haul, but significantly less than Bjorn Borg, Rod Laver, Pete Sampras and Roger Federer. Also, unlike those more complete players, his mediocre serve and awkward-looking volleys also disqualify him in the minds of most experts.

Back in 1974, however, it appeared that Connors might dominate the sport for all time, having won every grand slam event contested that year save Roland Garros, where he chose not to play. In both the Wimbledon and U.S. Open finals, Connors destroyed another all-time great, the Australian Ken Rosewall. At nearly 40 years of age, the Rosewall probably no longer had the endurance to play his best tennis throughout a two-week event. Even so, it was shocking to see an eight-time grand slam champion acquire a total of eight games in six sets against the hard-hitting American.

Connors would never have much of a serve or textbook volleys. However, his strengths – the never-before-seen aggression on service returns, the flat, overpowering groundstroke, and the bulldog tenacity amounted to much more than the sum of their parts. In a game of counterpunchers and serve-and-volleyers, Connors’ aggressive baseliner approach was revolutionary and it took time for the other players to catch up with it.

In time, other players would find ways of countering Connors’ game plan, but his was the beginning of the movement that would eventually take over tennis. While he may not have been the greatest of all time, he now appears to have been one of the most influential. Besides Connors, there were four other events that lead to the ascension of the power baseliner.

Ivan Lendl – Lendl’s return of serve was somewhat less brilliant than Connors’, but the iron Czech had a bigger serve and a trend-setting level of fitness. He introduced the sport to the concept of the “big forehand,” which replaced the volley, and eventually the serve as the primary offensive weapon in the sport.

Lendl also didn’t do what Connors did best, which was to turn the atmosphere at his matches into prizefights in which Jimbo would assume the role of Ali. On the other hand, Lendl’s businesslike approach to the game kept him at No. 1 for 270 weeks, took him to a record 19 Grand Slam finals and made him immune to the off-speed pitches of players like Miloslav Mecir and Brad Gilbert.

Gilbert, who had solid records against a

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