Walk through the gates of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, and you’ll hear it. High-pitched like a pop star’s scream, it is ubiquitous; the sound of tennis shoes sliding on a hard court.
Off-the-charts athleticism has turned the once genteel act of moving on a hard court into an art, worthy of New York’s iconic Pier 62 skatepark. Where players once stopped and started, they now skid and thrash, and they do it with a gusto that would make Tony Hawk’s jaw drop.
It’s astonishing to watch, but for today's players, it’s second nature.
“For me, it's just been natural since I've been a kid,” said Canada’s Denis Shapovalov after his first-round win over Marton Fucsovics. “It's really part of my game.”
From a young age, Shapovalov rambunctiously pursued the art of sliding. His parents weren’t always enthusiastic about it.
“I remember my parents gave me such a hard time about it because back then we had to buy tennis shoes and I was sliding as a 10-year-old kid,” he told USOpen.org. “I was ripping the shoes up after like a week and they were expensive, so they were restricting me from sliding. They were like, ‘Okay, you can only do it in matches and you can't do it in practice.’
“We used to put the skater’s glue on to try to save the shoe.”
These days Shapovalov, a former Top-10 player who has reached the second week twice at the US Open, doesn’t have to pay for his shoes – Nike foots the bill – so he can slide to his heart’s content.
For recreational tennis players, a pair of shoes may last for a year, maybe more, but today’s top stars literally burn through them.
Czechia’s Jakub Mensik, a 6’4” teenager with a booming serve, shreds up to four pairs in a single match. He says sliding has become a trend, albeit a necessary one.
“The game right now is so fast and improving so much, everyone is playing aggressive,” Mensik says. “It’s a skill, when with the flow.”
Players like Shapovalov and Mensik credit Novak Djokovic for popularizing the hard court slide.
“At the beginning, when Novak was sliding ten or fifteen years ago, everyone was like ‘Oh my God, this is the only guy on the planet that is sliding on the hard courts,’ but in this moment everyone is sliding,” he says.
Mensik says his typical burn rate is one pair of shoes per match, but it all depends on the intensity of the tennis.
“Sometimes I destroy one, sometimes two, it depends on how long the match is,” he said. “I think once I destroyed four pairs of shoes during one match, but it’s only on the hard court – on the clay court shoes can last for a whole week.”
Today’s players aren’t sliding to be on-trend. They use it systematically, for defense and recovery. Aussie Alexei Popyrin explains why the slide is a key contributor to his improved movement.
“I think it helps a lot,” Popyrin said. “I think to be able to reach for the ball, it helps, but you have to be kind of strong enough to get out of that position also, and recover quickly.”
36th-ranked Popyrin says his trainer forces him to put in the hard yards in the name of better sliding.
“We do a lot of Bulgarian split squats, which I think is probably the worst exercise in the world,” he said. “And I think I've also kind of improved in getting out of those corners quite well.”
Popyrin, like most enthusiastic sliders, rips through more pairs of shoes during a hard court season than Sarah Jessica Parker does in a season of Sex and the City.
“I got a hole in my shoe after one match and that’s normal,” he said. “In a tournament I'll probably go through three, depending on how I play.”
We’ve seen players slide on the iconic red clay of Roland Garros forever. By comparison, sliding on the hard court is a more nascent trend. So what’s the difference between the two slides? It’s subtle, says 2022 US Open champion Iga Swiatek, known for her elite movement, no matter the surface.
“I'm not changing anything in terms of the decision or the way I slide [on hard courts compared to clay], but for sure the slide is going to be different,” she said. “It's going to be shorter, and you're going to kind of feel the grip more. It's all about the timing and knowing when exactly you're going to stop.”
Fussy about her equipment, Swiatek says she likes to change her shoes before they go up in smoke.
“I don't get to the point where I burn them, because I kind of use a new pair every match,” she said. “On [Swiatek’s shoe sponsor] has to provide a lot, but they're happy about that.”
