TennisOne (2024)

Go to Part 1 of the Visual Tennis Series on TennisONE

In the middle of 1991, John McEnroe was in the middle of a serious comeback. He was convinced he could still compete with the world's top players. But he had a problem.

For a period of several months his serve--the dominating shot that had made him one of the most electrifying players in tennis history during the late 1970's and early 1980's--was consistently the weak link in his play. His first serve percentage was averaging less than 50%. Meanwhile the radar gun was registering ball speeds in the mid 90 mph range.

The result was that John had to work very hard on his service games, was under constant pressure to hit difficult first volleys, and was often broken twice or three times a set. Though his legendary mental toughness kept him in many matches, he seemed to have lost the firepower to win against top players. Many observers commented that at age 30 the game had passed him by.

Working with John in making the "Winning Edge" instructional video in 1984, I had spent hundreds of hours studying his technique, particularly on his serve. Watching John play in 1990, however, it was clear to me that he had developed a severe technical problem his backswing that was the direct cause of his loss of consistency and power. When I saw John in San Francisco, he agreed to let me analyze the changes in his motion and compare it to the glory days of the mid-1980's. We both believed that if he could recover the biomechanics of his motion, he could restore his serving effectiveness and compete successfully again at the highest levels of the game.

Few coaches in any sport ever get the chance to measure the effectiveness of their work on world class athletes. Even though I had been on court with John extensively during the filming of "The Winning Edge," this was a different situation. I had worked with highly ranked players before, including lower level tour players and nationally ranked juniors. But this was the chance to use the visual tennis methodology with a legendary champion.

When John and I began working together in February 1991, the approach I took was exactly the same as with the hundreds of players at all levels who had come to the tennis school with technical problems.

The first step is always identifying the problem, and more importantly, identifying it for the player in a medium he can truly understand. To accomplish this, high speed video analysis is critical. Because the natural learning process is visual, the verbal descriptions that are typical of tennis lessons--"you're not turning," "your contact is late," etc., are usually ineffective.

In John's case, the problem was a shift in the shape of his backswing. Although his sideways stance and increased torso rotation it generated were an advance in the biomechanics of serving, the rest of John's service motion was completely and perfectly classic.

His shoulders and hips were almost parallel to the baseline at the start of the motion, but his arm and racquet path stayed in the plane of his shoulders during the windup. For the average player this would mean the arm and racquet would drop down and then point straight back at the back fence.

For John with his sideways stance, it meant that as the arm and racquet moved through the wind up in the plane of the shoulders, they were actually parallel to the baseline until coming up at the start of the racquet drop. This was the fluid, effortless motion that I knew so well from the "Winning Edge."

Many commentators believe that at his peak, John McEnroe's serve was the best in the history of tennis. Because of his unique starting stance, McEnroe was able to take the biomechanics of serving to a new level. As the motion begins, his torso and back are literally turned to the net. As his racquet moves to the ball, this creates 180 degrees of hip and shoulder rotation, roughly double that of other top servers who use a traditional starting stance with the shoulders and hips perpendicular to the net.