A career grand slam was the Holy Grail for tennis players. Not anymore Rod Laver was the last man to have won all four grand slams in his career for 30 years, until Andre Agassi won the French Open in 1999. Agassi had already won the other three — Australian Open, US Open and Wimbledon — and thus completed a career grand slam with his only win in Paris.
It took another 10 years for another man to complete a career grand slam. That man was Roger Federer, who completed the collection when he won the French last year. And now Rafael Nadal has done it with his maiden US win.
Bjorn Borg never won the Australian or the US Open, but he is rated so highly because for three consecutive years from 1978 to 1980 he won both the French Open and Wimbledon — the first played on slow, red clay, and the second on fast, skidding grass. To win in Paris, you needed to be several feet behind the baseline, hitting ground strokes with heavy top spin. To win in London, you needed to be a master of the serve-and-volley style, in which you rushed to the net in the wake of the serve and dictated the point with sharp angles. And there was just a month’s gap between the two for players to retune their game. At the Australian and US Opens, both of which moved to hard courts, you needed a clever middle-path, mixing things up and covering the courts well.
That is why it was considered an enormous feat to win all four even in different years, which has come to be known as a career grand slam. But, as shown by two players completing career grand slams in consecutive years, it is becoming less and less of a big deal.
All the current players grew up hitting the ball with high-technology racquets. Even a generation ago, say the generation of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, the players grew up on wood and adapted to the modern racquets. The current crop had them on their first day on court. Naturally, that has influenced their playing style.
Even with wood racquets, the good servers could propel the ball at above 130 mph. With the modern ones, the returns have become faster and more precise. To compound matters, Wimbledon has deliberately made its courts slower and the balls heavier, catching the serve-and-volley players on the wrong foot.
The result is that we have not seen a pure serve-and-volley exponent since the retirement of Sampras seven years ago and may never get to see the exciting, attacking play that dominated the game through the racquets of Jack Kramer, Lew Hoad, Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, Sampras and Pat Rafter. Even those with good serves these days, such as Andy Roddick, are content to stay back even after firing in the first serve.
If the career of a uni-dimension player like Nadal had coincided with the peak years of McEnroe, Becker, Edberg or Sampras, it would have been difficult for him to at least win Wimbledon. Ask Ivan Lendl or Mats Wilander, who were no less in ability than Nadal, but just happened to have greater fast-court players in their time.
