Frances Tiafoe has a huge personality, winning grin, formidable forehand, and supersonic serve. But there are aspects of the American’s tremendously successful game that are…how to say it? Decidedly funky.
And not just because of the way he confidently struts around the court and plays to the crowd, often bopping to the DJ’s jams on the PA. The No. 20 seed, into the quarterfinals at the 2024 US Open, has an unconventional hitch in his forehand windup and a surprising ball toss on his service delivery.
Earlier this week, during Tiafoe’s fourth-round win over Alexei Popyrin, commentators Jim Courier and Mary Carillo got into an interesting discussion of Tiafoe’s unusual technique and how integral smooth, schooled shots are to a player’s fortunes.
Courier described Tiafoe’s ball toss as “something I’d never seen before.” Instead of cradling the ball in the palm of his hand, Tiafoe holds it with the back of his hand pointing up toward the sky. He then, in Courier’s words, “releases it like a bird, imparting underspin on the ball before striking it.”
Everyone else—you, me, and all the pros—just holds the ball in our fingertips and simply tosses it skyward.
“His ball toss is perfect every time,” Courier said.
The Tiafoe forehand, said the former American No. 1 and four-time major winner, is also highly unusual, with a distinctive takeback. He begins with his elbow up by his ear, and he dips his wrist dipping wildly, with the racquet facing down at the court just before whipping through the ball. There is some wasted movement, but from the point of contact, it becomes a fairly standard forehand.
Tiafoe’s unique stroke, Courier said, is due to the fact that as a child young Frances—who famously began hitting balls against the wall at the Maryland club where his immigrant father was a groundskeeper—picked up any and every racquet lying around the club, no matter the size or the weight, and went to town.
Courier is a good person to opine on the matter. After all, his two-handed backhand looked more like that of a baseball slugger trying to fend off fastballs and hit behind the runner. He swatted at the ball like someone who’d made a mid-career change and adopted a new sport.
Of course, tennis prodigies go to tennis academies to learn perfect tennis technique. It’s drilled into them: how to construct the perfect two-fisted backhand; how to roll the wrist with maximum racquet speed to produce big topspin; how to strike the serve at the apex of the toss. Ad infinitum until classic (or what constitutes modern classic) strokes are achieved.
Fans have long marveled at the mellifluous strokes of a Roger Federer. Or even those of Emma Raducanu, who two years ago emerged from the nether regions of women’s tennis to shock the world by streaking from qualies all the way to the US Open title. When you looked at her game, though, her success didn’t seem unreasonable or shocking, really. Her technique on every shot was textbook, perfectly schooled like the A-student that she was.
But there are always outliers, high-achieving players who perhaps don’t look “studied” or “proper,” but who nonetheless play incredibly effective tennis with their unique stroke production.
Besides Tiafoe, there’s Daniil Medvedev. The fifth seed, who won the title here in 2021, does a lot of things one would probably never dream of trying to teach. For one, he hangs out so deep in the court that his windmill racquet windup almost brushes the backdrop when he returns serve. But it’s more than court positioning that makes Medvedev a curiosity.
Medvedev has some of the most incredible groundstrokes in the men’s game, off both wings. But his forehand—a long, sweeping shot—is wildly baroque, with a slingshot effect that makes it look like it might hit the fence every time. And his two-handed backhand, with an extremely high takeback, often produces a peculiar little scoop shot.
But wow is Medvedev’s unorthodox arsenal of weapons hugely effective. He can lull you to sleep with loopy balls and suddenly crack the living daylights out of the ball, from anywhere—and I mean anywhere—on the court.
Courier and Carillo considered these quirky, different strokes, and argued that perhaps technique, at least as we’ve been taught to understand it, is hardly the only, or even most important, determination in a tennis player’s success.
Other factors are equally, or probably much more, important, Courier said. He reeled off several factors that comprise a winner. How one handles pressure. Self belief. Mental strength. Willpower. Pure athletic ability. Heart.
Tiafoe and Medvedev possess all of those qualities in abundance. And they’re just as hard to copy.
While the discussion is about more than aesthetics, it reminds me of one I’ve heard about rock vocalists. Billy Idol once said, "Robert Plant can sing and Mick Jagger can't. But do I listen to Robert Plant? No, I listen to Mick Jagger. Why? Because he can't sing and he sounds great. It's what you put into it."
Rock 'n' roll is full of incredible singers whose skills are a far cry from technical masters like Adele. Bob Dylan, Tom Waits, Lou Reed, David Byrne. Few aspiring musicians would purposely try to imitate any of those singular and idiosyncratic voices.
In the same vein, I welcome the unusual strokes that add flavor and diversity to the game of tennis. I remember the first time I saw Medvedev seven years ago in New York. I’d never seen anything like it. Kooky, mind-bending winners that came out of nowhere. And it was glorious.
As we look toward the tournament’s money rounds, here’s a toast, then: to the unorthodox, the idiosyncratic, the ones who dare to be different. To unique, inimitable genius.
