The Extra Inch That Changed the Game
A lot has changed in tennis since the days of Ken Rosewall, when wooden rackets were the standard. Photo: Getty Sports
Rod Cross
RacquetSportsIndustry.com
The modern game of tennis is played at a furious pace compared with the old days when wood rackets were the standard.
Just watch old film from the 1950s and you will see that the game is vastly different. Ken Rosewall and Lew Hoad barely broke into a sweat. Today's game has players grunting and screaming on every shot, calling for the towel every third shot, and launching themselves off the court with the ferocity of their strokes.
The change from wood to graphite rackets during the late 70s/early 80s is the common explanation for this change in the game. Everyone concluded that graphite rackets were much stronger, lighter and more powerful, while the players themselves somehow became taller, stronger and fitter. How else could the game have changed so drastically?
Racket Width, Spin and PowerThe real reason for the change is more subtle. It's because rackets got wider.
Wood rackets were always 9 inches wide and 27 inches long, so players could check the 36-inch height of the net by putting one racket on top of another.
Today's players can't do that. Most rackets are still 27 inches long, but they are now 10 to 12 inches wide. They are also lighter, which means they are less powerful, but it also means that players can swing them faster, which they need to do just to get back the power they lost when they became lighter.
When players started swinging their rackets faster, they noticed an interesting effect--they generated more topspin on the ball. A ball with topspin dives down more steeply into the court after it passes over the net compared with a ball without spin.
Players noticed that the ball went in more easily, despite the fact that the ball was hit at about the same speed as with their old wood rackets. So they started hitting the ball even harder, which made the ball spin faster, and it still went in.
Not only that, but the added swing velocity wasn't resulting in mis-hits, due to the larger sweet zone and extra inch or two of frame clearance.
So what did they do next? The extra frame clearance allowed players to start swinging upwards at the ball to get even more spin, and they rotated the racket in their hand to a western grip in order to swing at even steeper angles to the ball.
That grip gave them problems with their backhand, so they had to grip the handle with the both hands to tilt the frame back into a vertical position. The faster they hit the ball, the faster it spun, and the faster it spun, the harder they could hit it.
That's why players today usually have both feet off the ground when they hit the ball, and it's why they need to grunt and scream.
Players were given an inch in the 1970s and they took a mile. The ball now spins 4 or 5 times faster than it did before the 1970s. An increase in just one inch allowed an amazing increase in spin due to steeper, faster swings and a tilting of the racket forward by up to 5 degrees, all without clipping the frame.