Before we delve into this controversial topic, it behooves us to ask what it means to “play like a woman”? In it’s most generic meaning, to play like a woman is to play without athletic talent. If you find a guy that’s never thrown a football or a baseball, who prefers tango to tackles, saxophones to spirals, they, too, might be said to “play like a woman”.
That’s not the kind of feminine playing skill I’m talking about.
I’m talking about how women play pro tennis.
Now if you’ve been hiding under a rock since the days of Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova, women’s tennis has changed. When Chris Evert was queen of clay, both men and women had similar styles. Long, protracted baseline rallies that seemed to last as long as cricket test matches (i.e., a long time) until someone made an error. By today’s standards, players of the late 1970s were too passive. Where are the booming winners?
Tiny wooden racquets didn’t seem to permit the kind of power tennis you see today. It would require the kind of precise hitting that didn’t seem to exist in the day. Only when graphite racquets became more popular did power hitting suddenly become what it is today. Or perhaps, it took a player like Ivan Lendl to realize a power shot can be tamed with enough topspin, and one simply had to try hitting harder, all the time, to win. It was said that Babe Ruth hit as many homers as he did because he thought hitting homers was the right thing to do. Baseball was novel enough, in its day, that players simply didn’t think about hitting homers.
The power game not only made the men’s game more dynamic, it made the women’s game more powerful too. Steffi Graf was the first modern power player. Shortly thereafter, players like Monica Seles, Jennifer Capriati, Lindsay Davenport, Mary Pierce all became hard hitting phenoms. The Williams sisters added powerful serving to the mix.
But the one place the women’s game suffered, at least compared to men, was pure foot speed. If men are reluctant to go for big shots all the time, it’s because men can chase down big strokes. Roger Federer, in his match against Marcos Baghdatis last night, had several shots that looked to be winners, and yet Marcos calmly retrieved those shots, sometimes with pace, and sometimes without, making Roger hit one or two or several more shots.
In the women’s game, if you can hit a good solid shot down the line, you can often win the point outright. And so it leads the top women of the game to employ a strategy that’s more macho than the men. Go for big shots whenever you can. Maria Sharapova has played matches where she’s tossed in some 50 unforced errors, and still been in the position to win a tight three setters. Do the errors not bother Maria? Why doesn’t she play more conservatively? She could easily point out that she’s made 50 unforced errors and is still on the verge of winning. Why let up now?
And in that respect, Roger Federer does play like a woman. Federer’s game is a brand of aggressiveness that is matched by few others. Those that try to play ultra-aggressive all the time often lack Federer’s other immense talents, his defensive skills, his ability to pick up shots at his feet, to make magic out of mayhem. Verdasco and Blake come to mind as players that like to dictate points. On the flip side are players like Murray and Nadal and Djokovic who play a more conservative style, who wait for opportunities to attack, often passing up opportunities to attack to let their opponents miss one more shot.
Surely, as Roger played Marcos Baghdatis and misfired of both sides, he would try to be more conservative. But perhaps like the old basketball adage that shooters must shoot (or lose confidence if they hold back), Federer doesn’t seem to worry that errors pile on. He continues to play the way he does, and hopes that all that training he does, where he puts himself through drill after drill, to make the tough shots that most players would think too risky, into something manageable, will suddenly kick in, and he will zone out, the errors will disappear, and he will, once again, look sublime.
It is perhaps Roger’s European upbringing that lead him in the post-match interview to conclude he hadn’t played too bad. Traditional American competitiveness strongly encourages brooding and lack of sportsmanship (running off the field without shaking an opponent’s hand) as signs that they care about winning above all. It’s not that Federer doesn’t want to win badly, and perhaps it’s not that losses don’t hurt him, but that he prefers to hide any forms of weakness. Or perhaps, when he loses close matches like this, he thinks, it was close, he did have opportunities to win, and so that’s all that matters. He’s not being blown out. He’s controlled the matches. He just didn’t hit that one up-the-line winner to take the match when he could have.
Unlike women players, Roger is aggressive because he’s trained himself to play aggressive and to make that risk acceptable. Where women appear to hit big shots and hope that it’s a winner, Roger does seem to craft his points, to lead up to taking the shot he wants. It’s part of a bigger plan. It’s just that, when he misfires, he doesn’t rein himself in. We tend to forgive Roger these kinds of matches because, on the occasions he does cut out frivolous errors, most of them mishits, he can appear sublime, like nothing can go wrong.
With the women, you always feel there is going to be some level of errors. That even under the best of circumstances, you aren’t going to see someone cut their errors down and have a free-flow of winners. Where are the slice backhands in the women’s game? Where are the forays to the net? At least, Roger tried chipping and charging, reviving an old strategy that was once fairly common. Roger struggled putting away volleys once he was at net, something that gave Baghdatis a chance to win.
In the end, give credit to Baghdatis for continuing to play well, for hanging in there. When Roger makes errors, he doesn’t collapse in the way Novak Djokovic collapses. He often throws enough winners and enough good shots that he continues to stay close. Let us not forget that Roger was up 4-1 in the third set, that he had three match point opportunities. Any of those could have been times that Baghdatis chokes and makes a mistake and we would have forgiven Roger his excesses, and applauded his ability to make big shots when it counted.
And believe me, we do that. For most coaches would advise Roger not to play such big shots, at least, not so often. But he does, and when they go in, we awe at his genius, we marvel at his fluidity. We say, hey, it’s not so bad you made 40 errors, because, by golly, that was fun to watch.