For 11 months, professional tennis exists largely as a hitting contest light on finesse.
Then the grass season arrives in June, reaching its zenith at Wimbledon’s All England Club in the middle of July. For six weeks, tennis morphs into something else, the pulverizing pop of ball on strings punctuated by a gauzier graze. The backhand slice, which at times has the air of a relic from a lost world of tennis, becomes socially acceptable, and perhaps more importantly, nearly indispensable.
Sure, there are still plenty of style points on offer at Wimbledon for the blasted backhand that flies past an approaching opponent — especially if it’s hit with one hand. But for the first fortnight of July in south-west London, there are just as many souls on the court and in the stands lusting after that killer, cutting shot that hits the grass spinning backwards with some zip on it, and bounces about ankle high and not a pore higher.
“You can play with the ball,” said Daria Kasatkina, a master of the shot who won 24 of 27 games in the first two rounds — including three consecutive 6-0 sets. “Variety comes in a lot on grass,” says the No. 14 seed, who tumbled to a resurgent Paula Badosa on Friday.
Variety.
Play with the ball.
On any given Sunday down at the local courts in a park, the comments may sound a little different.
Pusher. Hack. Junkballer. And on and on. Sure, there are good slices and bad slices; cutting, swingeing parabolas and floaty pit-pats. But even at the top of tennis, it’s at Wimbledon where the continental backhand grips tightest.
GO DEEPER
The trick to winning on Wimbledon grass? Get low, stay low and embrace the chaos
Kasatkina and her fellow masters of the slice all have a story about how they came to harness a shot whose currency is fluid. At one point, it buys precious time to reset and regroup; at another, it rushes through the court, stealing that time away from an opponent and harrying them into submission.
Kasatkina broke her left arm playing soccer when she was 12 years old. She was already a pretty good tennis player, with a two-handed backhand, but for three months all she could hit was a one-hander. No one had taught her how to hit a topspin backhand, which requires a more complex grip and more difficult biomechanics, so she taught herself the slice, which was the most natural motion for a kid still developing her strength.
Grigor Dimitrov, who has one of the most envied slices in the men’s game, said it was the first shot he learned when he was a child in Bulgaria.
“My father is an excellent teacher,” says Dimitrov, whose one-handed backhand gives him an advantage in throwing a slice into a rally, since so little about how he sets up for a shot on that side has to change.
“I still vividly remember. The only way to hit these shots is if you play with one hand.”
Lorenzo Musetti, another one-hander, has a similar tale. At 10 years old he had a traditional continental grip and struggled to get on top of the ball, so for two years, the back- and side-spins became his thing.
“I was doing a lot of drop shots, a lot of slice, a lot of stuff with the hands,” he said. He faces Francisco Comesana of Argentina in the third round. One more win and it will match his best showing at a Grand Slam, for a player whose win percentage on grass and clay — the natural surfaces on which slice’s many faces are at their prettiest — outstrips his record on hard courts. Fellow Italian Matteo Berrettini is another master of the art.
Wimbledon champions mastered it too.
Roger Federer carved his way to eight titles. Martina Navratilova, whose slice helped her win 20 titles at the All England Club — nine in singles, seven in doubles, four in mixed doubles — knows something about the shot. Her slice is the weapon of a grass court assassin; she loves it like it is one of her children and she thinks that basically every player hitting a slice today is hitting it all wrong.
In an All England Club anteroom the other day, Navratilova’s magical left arm started slicing across her body like a conductor leading an orchestra through a symphony. Listening to Navratilova, you suddenly have the sensation that Georgia O’Keeffe is telling you how to hold your paint brush.
“They all go like this,” she said, starting her left hand at her right shoulder, sweeping it down and finishing the stroke with her hand somewhere around her left hip.
She shook her head in disgust.
“You have to KN-ife it,” she said, putting extra emphasis on those first consonants.
This time her left hand went straight down from her right shoulder, and ended at her right hip.
“That’s how you make it die on the grass,” she said. “You put the sidespin on it, it’s going to make the ball pop up.”
She did the knifing motion again. This time she bit her lower lip as she finished the stroke. You didn’t need to close your eyes to have a vision of her ball skidding into Chris Evert’s shoelaces.
When it comes to the technique, the Gen Z and millennial lot can sometimes be prone to that OK, Boomer attitude, even if Navratilova’s view that nobody can dig into the cutlery drawer is a little extreme. It doesn’t help that one of the most effective uses of the slice is as an approach shot, forcing an opponent to dig the ball up after it barely clears the net, and hopefully drawing an easy volley — or a volley that ought to be easy, in a tennis meta that has swung away from taking the ball out of the air since the 1990s. Carlos Alcaraz, among others, is trying to help everybody rediscover the front of the court.
He’s got a pretty good slice.
In Austin in February, Christo van Rensburg, a South African pro from the 1980s and the tournament director of the ATX Open, gave Katie Volynets a slice tutorial after she lost a heartbreaking three-set match to Danielle Collins. He told her to stop bringing the racket across her body, to cut down on the ball and finish the shot with the tip of the racket pointing at where she wanted the ball to end up.
Volynets, who is 22, listened attentively. At Wimbledon, the American sliced her way to four straight wins, including qualifying. Useful for a player for whom power is not a natural attribute.
Was she incorporating Van Rensburg’s lesson?
“I just hit it the way I always have,” Volynets said, after her first-round win.
Kids these days.
However the slice gets hit, it’s getting hit a lot more at Wimbledon than it generally does in professional tennis.
According to analysis from TennisViz, the men on the ATP tour hit slices on 20 percent of their backhands during the season.
At Wimbledon, the figure has climbed to 27 percent.
Similar statistics are not available for the WTA, but watch any match from the All England Club and it can seem like every rally comes with a slice or two.
It doesn’t come naturally to Coco Gauff, the No 2 seed. Her default mode is aggressive, especially on the backhand — her best shot — and especially on grass, which often rewards players who take charge of points at the first opportunity. She hates to practise it.
But her coach is Brad Gilbert, a notorious junk-baller. Gilbert wants Gauff slicing even with her forehand. Sometimes she follows his advice. Sometimes she wishes she had.
“It’s just a feeling in the moment,” she said. “I don’t always make the right decision.”
To be fair, slicing doesn’t always work great as option A.
Tommy Paul said he sliced with abandon and better than he ever had through the clay-court swing, making the semi-finals of the Italian Open and losing a tough third-round match in the French Open to Francisco Cerundolo of Argentina.
Paul came into the grass season sure that he had found a new weapon.
Then Sebastian Korda beat him handily in the quarter-finals in the Netherlands in his first grass tournament. Reviewing the match, he realized he hit backhand slices on balls he could have driven with two hands — the backhand which for Paul is arguably more reliable and more effective.
“I decided if I had an opportunity to hit a real backhand, I was going to hit a real backhand,” he said.
He won the title at Queen’s Club the next week, and on Friday rolled past No. 23 seed Alexander Bublik, a slicer of all things, including serves, into the fourth round at Wimbledon.
Another American, Ben Shelton worked on his slice in the off-season. His twists more than he knifes, but it’s not bad. Navratilova wouldn’t scold him.
He’s been trying to exploit it on the grass for a couple of different reasons.
First, it works. Second, it helps that he thinks a lot of people think that he is just a banger with a big serve. He wants to be known as a creative, all-court player with a variety of weapons. Throwing in the occasional slice helps his cause, especially on the grass.
“It’s just one of those surfaces that you get really rewarded for it, a lot more than the others — because it stays so low,” he said earlier this week.
“Sometimes the bad ones you hit end up being winners.”
And then there’s the other benefit, the one that gets the slice a bad name in the sport at just about every level. They’re a serious pain in the neck to deal with.
“Annoying for most players,” is the unassuming way that Ons Jabeur, a finalist the last two years at Wimbledon, talks about her lethal slice.
“Slicing a higher-speed ball could really bother any player, to be honest with you,” she said, after using it to beat Robin Montgomery on Thursday in the second round.
“That’s really an advantage for me.”
(Top photos: S&G/PA Images; Sean M. Haffey / Getty Images; Design: Sean Reilly for The Athletic)
