Why Was Serve-and-Volley Tennis So Popular?
There is a way to see the change without reading a single statistic. Look at where the grass wears out at Wimbledon.
"You see the worn paths on the baseline, from left to right," Huub van Boeckel says. "And if you watch films of Wimbledon from the eighties, you see the worn path running from back to front."
Same tournament, same two weeks, same turf. The players were simply moving in a different direction.
Huub played the tour through the late seventies and eighties and describes his own game as very attacking, with the volley as his best shot. We asked him why almost everyone played that way, and why almost nobody does now.
The rackets made the decision
The first answer is not tactical. It is material.
Wooden rackets produced a slower ball, and a slower ball changes the maths of a point in two directions at once. From the back of the court it became harder to hit through an opponent. At the net it became easier, because the ball arrived before he could organise a passing shot.
"You could score a point from the back of the court much less easily," Huub says. "And you could score a point at the net much more easily, because the ball arrived at the net much faster."
Coming forward was not bravery, in other words. It was the percentage play, and the equipment is what made it so.
He has tested the claim more recently than most people writing about this. After a tournament played with wooden rackets, his verdict was short: you simply cannot hit as hard.
Grass was a different surface then
On grass a second factor stacked on top of the first, and it has since been deliberately engineered away.
The grass was faster in the eighties and the bounce was markedly lower, which made sustained rallying difficult and serve-and-volley the obvious response. Wimbledon has since slowed its courts, a change documented in the club's own research.
"They changed the grass," Huub says. "They made the grass slower."
The low bounce also explains a shot that faded along with the style that needed it. A slice stayed low and skidded through, which on fast grass was close to unplayable.
The Wilander case
The clearest evidence that surface speed, rather than talent, shaped outcomes is a single career.
Mats Wilander reached world number one and won the Australian Open, the US Open and the French Open. At Wimbledon he never got close, and Huub attributes that directly to how fast the courts were.
What makes the argument airtight is that Wilander did win a Grand Slam on grass. The Australian Open was played on grass until 1987, and he won it twice.
"But because the ground there is much drier, because the weather is warm, the ball bounced much higher," Huub says. "Which made it much easier for him."
Same surface, different climate, different result. A baseliner could win on dry Australian grass and not on damp English grass.
What about clay and hardcourt?
The same logic applies, minus the bounce argument. The limiting factor everywhere was how hard a player could hit with the equipment available, and it was not hard enough to end points from the back of the court.
Why it disappeared
Not because it was coached out of players, but because the alternative finally became available.
"Those guys just hit from the baseline, whether it is the backhand or the forehand, so hard," Huub says of the modern game. "They can simply score points from the baseline."
He is precise about when that became true, and it is later than most people assume. Not the seventies, not the eighties, and not the early nineties either. For most of that period, he says, it simply did not work from the back of the court.
Once it did, the net stopped being the efficient place to be. The wear pattern on the Wimbledon lawn turned ninety degrees, and it has stayed there.