Most guys that play tennis want to hit big.  Look at someone like Fernando Verdasco.  He likes to hit big.  He gets upset when his big shots don’t land in.  Indeed, most juniors have to be taught to rein in that power and play more conservative tennis rather than being told to hit big.

With Roger Federer’s success in the past 8 years, juniors are coming up modeling their game after the great Swiss player.  It’s all about topspin, big forehands.  When you watch most players play, they look like carbon copies of each other.   It’s even worse in the women’s game where women seem to have banned the sliced backhand.  It’s big hitting tennis interspersed with the occasional retriever a la Wozniacki or Radwanska.

So it’s strange, very strange indeed, to see a throwback game like Bernard Tomic.  Even that’s not a fair assessment.  No one has played like Tomic in the last 30 years.  When Tomic’s game should resemble the hard hitting Ryan Harrison or Milos Raonic, it resembles more John McEnroe than anything else, and even McEnroe might be surprised at the way this guy hits.

Tomic is often compared to two other players: Andy Murray and Miloslav Mecir.  Andy Murray used to use his finesse game more.  He would slice and hit off-pace shots and all of a sudden, opponents would cough up an error.  Unfortunately, the strategy didn’t befuddle players like Nadal, the player with the biggest strikezone ever.  Hit a shot that skids mere inches off the ground and Nadal handles it with ease.  Hit a shot that bounces ten feet high.  No problem.  Nadal is extremely hard to rattle with odd shots.  His game rarely falls apart because you are trying to finesse him, and then he slaps you with power and his incredible defensive skills.  Murray has had to adjust his game to play more power, especially when it comes to Nadal, so Murray’s game has looked far more conventional than it used to.

Tomic, by contrast, has made his game weirder and weirder.  Tomic is a tall guy, but he lacks Murray’s two biggest skills: foot speed and a good return of serve.  However, he tries to make up for that by essentially pushing the ball.  Outside of Fabrice Santoro, he may be the only player that hits the sliced forehand with some degree of regularity.  Tomic will push the ball with no pace off both forehand and backhand.  But he has an uncanny ability to hit these shots very close to the line.  Top pros who hit much harder are more afraid of the lines so they’ll often hit a shot up the middle.  Tomic will do that occasionally too, but he’s trying to lure you to the net knowing that even the best players are vulnerable to passing shots at net.

Perhaps a better comparison for Tomic’s game is not Andy Murray, but Miloslav Mecir.  You have to be a fan of tennis to remember Mecir.  Mecir played in the mid 1980s and had a reasonably short career cut off by back problems.  Mecir was once known as the “Swede killer”.  Back then topspin was becoming the de-facto way to hit the ball, the Swedes were its masters.  When Bjorn Borg retired in 1982, he was immediately followed by Mats Wilander, Anders Jarryd, Stefan Edberg, Joachim Nystrom, and a few other Swedes.  Quite impressive for a country with fewer than fifteen million players.   These were, by and large, patient topspinning baseliners (Stefan Edberg being the major exception).  As a group, they did quite well.

However, they struggled against Miloslav Mecir who hit relatively flat shots without much pace, then bam, hit a hard shot to win the point.  If Lendl is the father of modern tennis, then arguably, Mecir is the father of post-modern tennis.  Watch a match from 1995, say Agassi and Sampras.  Compared to today’s players, these two rarely exploited the angles of the court.  The racquets of their day wouldn’t let them, or perhaps their imaginations wouldn’t let them.  Because Mecir was creating huge angles in his day without the topspin.  He managed to do this by not hitting the ball very hard and placing it with deft accuracy.  Perhaps due to back issues, Mecir actually charged the net quite often and become a reasonably good volleyer and half volleyer.

Tomic slices a lot which means you can never quite tell when he plans to drop shot you.  Most players hit topspin, but to drop shot, they have to change the motion.  And because Tomic is hitting no-pace shots, some players have opted to play along with him.   Except Tomic can hit the ball very flat and hard.  If Tomic is pulled wide to either side, he can slap the ball down-the-line for winners.  He is also adept at aiming the shots to either corner.  He uses angles a little less often than his contemporaries.  However, he can hit these inside out short slice drop shots that hug the line.

And when Tomic is in trouble, which can be often because of his foot speed, he’s not afraid to loft the ball very high.  In one point against Verdasco, he hit it high and Verdasco though the ball must be going out, but it landed on the line and Verdasco, unsure of whether it was in or out, hit it without conviction and Tomic put the ball away.   When you’re lured to play Tomic’s game, he can snap the ball flat and hard and end the point quickly.

Tomic also showed a calm resolve in his match against Verdasco.  Verdasco wears his emotions on his sleeves.  If things aren’t going well, he begins to have conversations with himself and his team.  He starts to spray balls.  Verdasco claimed that his woes stemmed from a stomach issue that hit him in the third set, coincidentally when Tomic started playing better.

Perhaps other players will catch on to his style of play, but currently Tomic’s weird style allows him to hit unexpected shots, and he can hit it fairly precisely.  When he’s not engaged in longish rallies up the middle, his shots can land very close to the line, often without a ton of pace.

In typical Tomic matches, players can be completely fooled by where his shots are heading.  Of course, because Tomic is a bit slow, he, too, can be fooled by where the ball is going because he anticipates one direction but guesses wrong.

Tomic needs to work on a few more aspects of his game.  The first is his serve.  He’s getting better at the serve, which is nice, because it means he can hold serve more easily.  Tomic ran into problems against Verdasco when both players kept breaking each other incessantly.  The second is his endurance.  He needs to be able to play without getting tired, at least, as early as he does.  Finally, he needs to work on footspeed.  If a player like Isner can move better, surely Tomic can learn to run better as well.

In the meanwhile, as players look at Federer and Djokovic and possibly Nadal as role models for how to play tennis, it’s nice to see someone as peculiar as Tomic win with ideas out of nowhere.  They said Fabrice Santoro would be the last of his kind to play a finesse style, but perhaps critics spoke too soon.  Perhaps Tomic will show them there’s another way to play.