unfortunately novak djokovic fixed my serve

i went to the us open and it made me better at tennis, booo

Hello friends—

Pretend I’m whispering how much I hate him into his ear.

Last week, I bought my tickets for the US Open. When you buy US Open tickets in advance—at least in advance of the draw and the release of the schedule—you don’t really have a sense of what you’re going to get. It be somewhat of a lottery. I bought an opening night ticket for Ashe Stadium, courtside, because the first round is the cheapest those tickets will ever be, and I’ve always wanted to sit courtside on Ashe, the largest stadium in tennis. I also thought, well, I’m guaranteed to get someone interesting, it’s the first night. Unfortunately, I got the worst possible outcome (for me) because the organizers elected to open the night session on Arthur Ashe stadium with my least favorite tennis player, Novak Djokovic.

I don’t want to get into why I don’t enjoy Novak Djokovic as a tennis player or a human being. But he is in broadly considered the greatest tennis player of all time. He has a strong case, if we go by the numbers. Most weeks at No. 1, most grand slam titles among men, a Gold medal, a career grand slam. He’s won all the majors at least four times. I mean, if I am being objective and not a hater, I can admit that, yes, he is one of the most dominant athletes in history. But I am a hater, specifically a Djokovic hater, so when the announcer introduced him on Ashe, I sat down and did not join the crowd in thunderous applause.

Djokovic was playing nineteen-year-old phenom Learner Tien, who has wins over a few of the top players in the world this year already. Tien, a lefty from California, was looking to make it past the first round of the US Open for the first time in four tries. Djokovic has won something insane like 85 consecutive opening round matches at Grand Slams. It was always going to be an uphill climb for Tien, but I was hopeful he’d put up a fight.

That hope all but evaporated as Djokovic totally blitzed Tien in the first set, taking it 6-1 in twenty-ish minutes. I think Tien was overawed by the occasion. He was playing at his home slam during his first full season tour. More than that, I imagine he felt anxious because, frankly, he had a chance. Djokovic hadn’t played a match since losing in July at Wimbledon. That was a completely different surface. He skipped the traditional tune-ups of the North American hardcourt swing. It’s true that Djokovic has thrived on hardcourts—he has ten Australian Open titles—and always has been a generational, perhaps all-time great talent on the surface. If anyone could skip tune-ups on hardcourt and do fine at the US Open, it’s him. Yet, still, there was going to be rust. And if Tien got off to a good start, you had to like his chances. That didn’t happen though.

The first set was over so fast and Tien seemed to go under water immediately. There was never a chance when he seemed in the match. He seemed instead to float above himself. Walking resignedly from one side to the other after Djokovic hit aces by him. They seemed to be collaborating to get the set over as quickly as possible as Tien overhit when Djokovic maneuvered him out to the lines with deep, well-placed rally balls. There were many moments when Tien looked nineteen out there. Sulky shoulders, dropped head, deadpan Gen Z affect on full display.

The second set was a different matter either because Djokovic cooled off or because Tien woke up or both. Either way, realizing that he was overplaying, Tien adopted a pretty simple, direct strategy: he brought his margins in and directed most of his traffic to the middle of the court. Tien aimed not just away from the sidelines but toward the service line, putting all of his shots just deep of the forecourt. This gave him a stretch of court to work with as he began to put more balls back into play, stretching the rallies out longer and longer until Djokovic’s body began to feel its rust. Djokovic started walking around between points with his racquet hoisted back up and over his head, as though her were carrying around a cross. Or he bent over to catch his breath or stretch out his legs. More importantly, Tien began to coax errors out of Djokovic who, realizing Tien’s game, began to hit a little harder and a little deeper, thinning out his own margins until he was the one overhitting.

Tactically, it was a brilliant move, and it’s one that makes me very bullish on Tien’s prospects. In some ways, it’s the opposite of what we’ve come to expect from men’s tennis (and increasingly women’s tennis) over the last decade and a half: the serve-plus-one. Big serve to set up a lethal put-away. This strategy developed in response to the defensive innovations of Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. Those defensive innovations had as much to do with the surfaces and balls slowing the game down, allowing for innovations in defensive play. In response, players were looking for a way to avoid being drawn into lengthy rallies. One of the fastest ways to end a point is an ace. The second fastest way to end a point is an unreturnable serve. The third fastest way to win a point is to hit a huge ground stroke off a weak reply to a strong serve. Hence the birth of the serve-plus-one. First strike tennis. A breed of tennis mass-produced in hard-court tennis academies all over North America and now even breeding in the clay courts of Europe.

The very best tennis players in the world practice serve-plus-one. The difference is that serve-plus-one is but one aspect of their tactical arsenal. Carlos Alcaraz hits a big serve out wide and his opponent gets the ball back and then they have to deal with the fact that he can hit a big forehand for a winner, hit a dropper, or do one of five other insane things no one has ever thought of. Jannik Sinner (who makes the most correct, rational decisions on a tennis court that any person on Earth has ever made on a tennis court) hits that crazy out-wide serve on the deuce side, gets a short reply, and steps in to hit a forehand, but even if his opponent manages to put the ball deep up the line, he can curl the ball cross court to wait for an opportunity to get the forehand he wants. The serve-plus-one is just a tool. But for some tennis players—many, tennis players—it is a way of life.

That’s what makes Learner Tien such an exciting prospect. He arrives at each match with a plan designed to make his opponent play their worst tennis. And he changes this plan as the match proceeds. He is not single-minded. His tennis has the shape of a great argument—coherent, flowing, but responsive to the facts. His changes never feel panicked or rushed. They arrive with the solidity of having been thought through. He is not an improviser like Alcaraz. Or a high-speed computer like Sinner. He is, I think, somewhere in the middle. He reads the game incredibly well, but at a conscious level, and makes choices in real time. This style of game might look differently if Tien had a different physicality. If, say, he were two or three inches taller. He is currently 5’11” and while biology is not destiny (even in tennis), Tien plays the kind of game you tend to see among the short kings on tour. That is, a game rooted in anticipation, reaction time, and foot speed. If you don’t have the arm span to reach the ball, you make up for it by being fast and getting there early. If you don’t have the natural biomechanics to generate easy power off the ground, you make up for it with good timing. If your opponent is going to have an easy time getting the ball out of your strike zone (putting it up at your shoulder), then you step in and meet the ball early to cut it off. All of this, Tien is very good at. Better than, I would say, almost every person on Earth except for like, fifty or sixty guys.

This makes him the exact opposite of the other much hyped players of his generation: Joao Fonseca and Jakub Mensik, who play the kind of big boy tennis that makes you fear for the structural integrity of tennis balls. Add to that list the outer satellites of American tennis prospects Ethan Quinn, Alex Michelsen, and Brandon Holt who are absolutely nuking every ball they get, even (or especially) the ones they should not be hitting that hard. Tien’s tennis seems quaint by comparison, like he learned to play on a completely different planet during a completely different historical era. Which is to say that Tien plays tennis that requires him to think about what his opponent is doing while the other lads of his generation play an intensely selfish tennis. They are going to try to outhit you. Tien is going to try to outplay you. Those are not the same thing.

Normally, that’s to be expected. A tennis player that young has nothing to lose and is usually up against someone with more experience on tour, on court, and in life. The advantage they bring is usually their youthful abandon and the ability to hit the ball harder than people thought humanly possible. Tien arrives on court knowing, usually, that he isn’t going to be able to outhit the other guy. So he has to rely on his other strengths. His movement. His timing. His anticipation. And his tactics.

All of that to say that I think Tien’s first-set performance last night had a lot to do with tactics. He went in knowing that the rustiest Djokovic was probably going to be was in the first set, and he tried to rush him. The issue is that he also rushed himself. I think on the break between sets, he analyzed and calmly looked at things. He’d lost that set badly, but part of that was down to his own execution. And that in fact, the status of the match hadn’t changed that much. Djokovic was probably still rusty. He wasn’t really going after the ball yet and he seemed a little sluggish physically. So when the umpire called time to start the second set, Tien went out there and got to work.

Part of this was just getting balls back by playing the game he naturally plays: retrieving and absorbing pace. When Djokovic got comfortable, Tien disrupted that comfort by suddenly hitting deeper, and as the rallies got longer, Djokovic started going to the drop shot. Tien found himself more in the mix on Djokovic’s service games, and, heading into the breaker, I thought Tien would run away with it.

The issue is that Novak Djokovic…is Novak Djokovic, rust or not. He found just enough of his own defensive play to get his arms around the match and wrench it open. As the match cooled and descended into its final phase, I had the sense that I was watching someone get slowly squeezed to death. Tien largely abandoned his winning strategy of turning the rallies neutral and started overhitting again, perhaps frustrated or perhaps resigned by the loss of the second set, I don’t know. But the end of the match came quickly, and I thought of what I’ve heard many, many times before from tennis commentators. That players like Roger, Rafa, Djokovic, Serena, once you give them an opening, you’ll blink and find yourself in the locker room ten minutes later. That’s how fast it gets away from you. I don’t think I understood how quickly it happens.

But sure enough, Tien was serving at 1-2 in the third, and Djokovic stepped in an ripped a return winner of an 85mph serve. I thought, oh, yeah, that’s it. It’s over. At 1-4 in the third, I believe he badly missed two overheads in a row. It was bleak stuff. Then it was over.

I’ve spoken a lot about Tien (and I consider myself a Tien fan), and I suppose I should say some more about Djokovic. It was clear that he was not in his finest form. His movement was not as crisp, and at moments, he struggled to time his shots. However, it cannot be denied that his groundstrokes are absolutely superior. Even during the second set, when he started to leak errors, he was putting the ball on a fucking dime off both wings crosscourt and up the line. His net clearance was crazy. His favorite play of the evening seemed to be a crosscourt forehand into Tien’s forehand to get a short reply up the line that he then murdered with his backhand crosscourt, drawing Tien over that way so that he could get an even sharper angle off a forehand cross. He had Tien on a string. But what astonished me, truly, was the pace and spin on his shots, even though he was hitting at like, sixty, seventy percent. His control over the ball is mindboggling. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Tien’s ball had far less shape, and it landed far shorter than Djokovic’s shots, even when he was clearly going for depth. Tien hits a flatter ball, but it’s a ball that Djokovic had no issues with. If there’s anything to fault Tien for, it’s that he didn’t try to give Djokovic a ton of different looks. Even Tien’s slices were kind of sitting up for Djokovic. Tien doesn’t have the pace or the spin to bother Djokovic, it’s true. Tien, if he is going to go further, is going to need more shape on his shots. More clearance, more depth, more power. Tien kind of plays like a WTA player. This is not an insult. After the Djokovic match, I watched Jessica Pegula play Mayar Sherif. Pegula is a very excellent tennis player, last year’s finalist for the women’s singles. Watching the two women hit the ball after two-ish hours of the men playing, it was clear that the women hit with far less net clearance. The balls are flatter and carry less spin. This was accentuated in this case in particular because Sherif hits her forehand with a crazy western grip and there were moments when her shot just looped so high compared to Pegula’s, and you could almost feel the spin on those shots. Tien’s ball flight is closer to Pegula or Sherif than it is to Djokovic. The women’s tour on average hits flatter, with less spin than men’s tour. This is just an average though, and there are always outliers.

The other difficulty related to shape is that Djokovic’s ball hit the court and kicked so high that Tien sometimes got spun around by it. He made a few heroic, incredible stab saves that Djokovic managed to kill right out of the air. But this was partly because the damage came from the shape and force of Djokovic’s shots. The ball is going fast and spinning like crazy and it hits deep, oh, man, if you’re not 6’4”, good luck! You better have fast hands.

I have been thinking a lot about ball shape lately because I am trying to add more shape to my own groundstrokes. I have been taking some private lessons to get more spin because my strokes are naturally flatter. Not without spin, but I learned once early on that you shouldn’t flick your wirst, so I’ve developed a lot of muscle memory around not using my wrist in tennis that has to be undone. Progress is…difficult. Slow. Sometimes, annoying. But I am getting there. I am hitting with more loop. The next step is to hit with more pace and spin, to really get the ball rotating. This requires, like all things in tennis, a degree in faith in oneself and one’s tennis. You have to commit to the shot, to drive it home. As I watched Djokovic move the ball around the court, spinning it a little more or a little less depending on his needs, I realized something that my coaches have been trying to teach me. About the looseness of the arm. I never believed them, fully, about keeping the arm loose. But it was clear to me that Djokovic’s arm was loose and at times Tien’s arm was tight as a drum. Especially on serve. The other thing I realized while watching the match is that every tennis video trying to teach you how to serve is filmed from the wrong direction. Also, every explanation coaches give is…wrong. Or, phrased wrongly.

I have league matches coming up, and I’m anxious about my serve. It’s been acting up lately. Every time I watch a video, the coach says, toss the ball in front of you. But also at 1PM. Imagine there’s a clock, toss it at one. And I always think, you want me to face the netpost, but also throw the ball into the court. But also…in front of me??? None of this has ever made sense, because serve videos are often filmed from the back. Or they are filmed from the front. Or the side, the right side.

But last night, I was seated in Section 60. Which meant that I was parallel to the baseline, but to the left of the baseline. This meant that I had to turn my head to the right to see the server on my side. More importantly, I was a little in front of him, but at a distance. This meant that I had a view of him, the ball, and his racquet. More importantly, I could see the distance in front of him where he was tossing the ball. And where in front of him he was tossing it. Again and again and again I watched, and it struck me that the serve toss should position the ball such that you are falling into it with your racquet. Yes, launching into it with all the good biomechanics, whatever. But really, if you imagine your serve as being like, you falling forward with your racquet extended over your head, you want the ball to be in the way of that collision. The difference is that the fall is initiated by your legs and your pushing up into the ball. But that’s not important. This whole time, the explanations have had me throwing the ball to my right, way out to my right, because, if I am facing the net post, that is in front of me. But what they mean is into the court, but in a place where if you fell toward the service box, your racquet would carry the ball in that direction.

Total game changer. If you make tennis content, stop filming your serve from the right. Film it from the front left. Yes, that will give the camera your back, if you are a rightie, but it will make the serve easier to understand.

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