Serena Williams described her desire to be “perfect.” “I know perfect doesn’t exist,” she wrote in Vogue earlier this month, announcing her plans to leave professional tennis. “But whatever my perfect was, I never wanted to stop until I got it right.” Williams’s serve — the most elementally sound component of her game — might […]
Rafael Nadal has unearthed a valuable cache of points hidden in the red dust of Roland Garros. The 13-time French Open champion dominates a specialized statistical category that may unlock a formula for how he wins on clay: the third shot of a rally. When Nadal strikes the third shot in a back-and-forth with an […]
It’s not quite a first serve. It’s certainly not a typical second serve. Then what is it? It’s a hybrid of the two, and Novak Djokovic has brought it out to play in 2020. The 16-time Grand Slam champion has added an eye-catching 6 mph this year to his average second serve speed. Through the […]
If you’ve ever watched a tennis player dominate with the first serve but saw the second serve obliterated by the returner, you might have wondered: Why don’t more players go for it on their second serve? Wouldn’t they be better off treating their second opportunity to serve like their first one? The answer almost always […]
If you’ve ever watched a tennis player dominate with the first serve but saw the second serve obliterated by the returner, you might have wondered: Why don’t more players go for it on their second serve? Wouldn’t they be better off treating their second opportunity to serve like their first one? The answer almost always […]
