There was a writer—I won’t name him lest it set off your pretense detector—who said that there are only so many facial types in the world. You run across the same genres everywhere you go. Something similar might be said for tennis players. Everyone swings a little differently, but there are only so many ways to win a point and only so many places to put a shot. Originality goes just so far. Styles repeat themselves.
We’ve already talked about Bernard Tomic being in the Miloslav Mecir family of players (distant relatives: Karol Kucera, Andy Murray), and how the bearded Cat’s touchy game reappears with regularity. It’s an approach that has more success gathering the world’s drooling tennis nerds in its wake than it does winning big titles. Even a guy like Alexander Dolgopolov, who was an extreme touch player as a junior—Mecir and Fabrice Santoro were his uncles—beat Jo-Wilfried Tsonga today by out-bulleting him from the baseline. Dolgopolov has the same hands, but the old junk and funk is harder to spot now.
There’s another style of play that has been less fashionable in recent years, but it was much more successful in the right hands. It’s the Pete Sampras game, and it's the opposite of the Mecir method. Sampras was about preemptive strikes with unbeatable weapons. The core of it all was his serve, the best in history, and everything else flowed from its invincibility. Sampras could play fast and loose on return games, and wait for a quick strike with his other unbeatable weapon, his running forehand. Sampras has been passed in the Goat sweepstakes, but I would still say that at his best, he would have beaten anyone else at their best, ever. When he put the clamps down, there was nothing anyone could do.
Unlike Mecir, though, Sampras hasn’t inspired a school of followers. Federer began more in his mold, but he cut back on the serve and volley that Sampras used when he found that dictating from the baseline was more effective/efficient. Few players hit with a Pistol-like one-handed backhand these days. And it’s the killer forehand, rather than the killer serve, that is now the must-have shot.
So it was with some surprise—and some surprise at my surprise—that I saw the spirit of Sampras rise again this afternoon in the blandest of places, Melbourne Park's Show Court 3, and in seemingly the most anonymous of players, Milos Raonic. A native of Montenegro (his uncle is the vice-president) who has lived most of his life in Canada, Raonic spent his youth poring over tapes of Sampras matches and building a game that was similarly based around a monster serve—“I’ve got a good shoulder on me,” Raonic says. You could see that his serve, which Raonic believes is already among the game’s best (he’s really not that cocky), allowed him to take a Sampras-like approach to his match with No. 10 seed Mikhail Youzhny.
“I feel like I serve like probably one of the top guys on the tour," he said. "It allows me to play more freely also on the return games, because I know most of the time I will be holding. So it allows me to take less pressure on myself, whereas I feel it also puts more pressure on the other guy.” (Confident, yes, Raonic does seem to be that—call it the civilized version of cocky.)
Even when Raonic was broken in the second and third sets, which he was more regularly than he might have expected, he played borderline-risky, opportunistic tennis on Youzhny’s serve. Raonic prefers to rip rather than rally on his forehand, and he loves to go for an outright crosscourt winner on his return from that side. He also put two backhands smack on the sideline to break Youzhny early in the third set.
But as big as he tries to hit, Raonic says he has a plan. When one reporter implied that he was enjoying the youthful freedom to crack the ball with total abandon, Raonic quietly protested. “I was trying to do what I thought was the percentage play," he said, "or if I felt I had an opportunity to try something riskier. But I wouldn’t say I was really just letting the ball fly off my racquet, not knowing where it’s going.” Indeed, Raonic doesn’t just bash to bash or rally to rally. He hits with purpose and aggression, and has to accept the errors that come with that aggression. It’s not a style, like the Mecir school, that’s mesmerizing to watch.
It’s success here doesn’t seem to be a shock to the intelligent Raonic. One reason is that he's learning to contain his sizable temper. There haven’t been any outbursts in Melbourne so far.
“We’ve sat down many times and had a heart-to-heart talk about this,” Raonic says of his discussions with his coach, the fabulously named Galo Blanco. “I’ve been keeping it together.” Hearing Raonic talk afterward, you wouldn’t expect him to be a hothead, but that’s tennis for you. It doesn’t sound like we’ve heard the last from his angry side.
Why now, was the obvious question for Raonic, who just turned 20, but who hasn’t been at the top of the list of next-generation prospects. Even his academic-oriented father has wondered if Milos should have gone to school instead. The obvious question was asked.
“Why are you playing so well?” This is a Zen tennis sentence if there was one—why indeed? If only we knew.
A Zen tennis question begets a Zen tennis answer. “I’m doing the things I need to do” Raonic said. He credits a recent training move from his base in Montreal to Barcelona with helping give him an extra top-class competitive edge.
We’ll see where it takes him. Is this 6-foot-5 kid the next of the tall ballers? His immediate future consists of David Ferrer in the next round. That's another guy that Raonic could beat, as long as he is, as he likes to say, “imposing his will” out there.
He’s someone to root for. He seems nice, he’s smart, and he has the engineer’s programmatic sense of purpose—“I’m doing the things I need to do”—that’s bound to lead to success in some field.
The Sampras school is too purposeful and utilitarian to be considered high art the way the Mecir or Federer schools are. It will never be the darling of tennis writers and nerds—in fact, there really hasn’t been a Sampras school to date. But in the right hands, and with the right shoulder, and at the right height, we know one thing: It wins.