It's on its way to extinction in tennis. In other racket/paddle sports, notably pickleball, it's very much alive and well. If you add up the numbers for all such sports, there might be as many one-handed backhanders as ever. Competitive tennis is becoming more about strength and height (the article even alludes to the former) than anything else. This is rarely good for any sport, and is likely why interest in alternatives is growing.
> Competitive tennis is becoming more about strength and height
Is that really the case? At present, the world's #1 and #2 men's players are 6'1" and 6'2" respectively. And both well under 200 pounds. These are not giant musclemen by anybody's reckoning. Nadal and Federer were also both 6'1" and quite slim.
It seems to me that tennis is about agility, coordination, and reaction time -- and that great height and remarkable muscle bulk are somewhat disfavored.
The two-handed backhand is apparently a shorter and biomechanically more efficient movement than its single-handed equivalent, is all. And at the top levels of sport, with so much on the line, every small advantage counts.
I think you're right that other aspects of the sport impose upper limits of efficient sizes, but I don't think the article (or the original poster) was using 'giant musclemen' as benchmark for strength and height.
Before I get too deep - I don't follow tennis. I'm just a sport nerd. I went and grabbed the 2007 and 2023 ATP men's ranking (cause that's whats on ESPN.com) and grabbed the heights of the top 10. Average height in 2007 was 71.8 inches (1.82m) and average height in 2023 was 74.5 inches (1.89m).
Djokovic (who is in top 3 in both lists... absolutely amazing) went from being tied for tallest in the top 10, to being tied for 4th tallest.
Height has risen over time, although the rise is far more pronounced for women than for men.
Perhaps most interesting though is the apparent decrease in height variance from the 1990s onwards. Before that, you had a mix of relatively tall and relatively short champions. But from 1990 onwards, which would seem to coincide with the decline of wooden rackets and the rise of the modern power game, you stopped seeing any champions below 180cm.
It's also worth considering that, even if height confers a significant advantage, its impact is limited by the normal distribution of height in the overall population. Assuming that A) you still need to have exceptional tennis playing ability to become a champion and B) exceptional tennis playing ability is very rare and not correlated with height, then you would expect rather more exceptional players of average height than exceptional players of significantly above average height.
So even if height provided an advantage with no meaningful upper limit, you still might not expect champions of 7'0" because there are just no players with such an unlikely combination of extreme height and extreme ability. You might instead expect a statistical sweet spot where the populations of players with both attributes is large enough that the overlap is where most champions sit.
Tennis, like fencing, is getting taller at the pro level. However, the athletes in both games are a lot more about agility than bulk. Above 2 meters in height, there aren't a lot of people (and many of the athletic ones end up playing for the NBA), so I would assume that there is room for "normal-sized" people in tennis for a while.
This is a strange comment. The article is specifically about professional tennis. Does professional pickleball even exist, and is there any public interest in it? The US Open is currently all over TV and the news; what about pickleball tournaments?
Of course there's plenty of interest in amateur pickleball, but there's no evidence that amateur tennis is becoming more about strength and height.
It has had a ton of money thrown into it to make it a thing, due to the sheer size of the addressable market in the US and the disposable income that's up for grabs (due to being primarily played by older / less mobile people). Jack Sock is a good example of this.
I'm not sure if it's due to the size of the TAM, but there are a lot of pickleball players with a lot of money, and some of them are investing that money into making their hobby into a bigger sport. This sort of dynamic is keeping competitive bridge alive right now.
If I had a choice between watching tennis and watching pickleball, I'd choose tennis.
Not only is tennis far more athletic - almost like fencing with a ball - it sounds and looks so much better. In tennis, the audible whack at the point of contact with the ball is so satisfying. Pickleball sounds, by contrast, are squeaky and annoying.
Pickleball is more accessible to new and older players, though. And that counts for something.
Venus Williams is in her 40's, after a long career as a tennis pro. I assure you that if she could still play high-level tennis, she would, but she is well past retirement age (and the associated physical condition) in that sport. Pickleball is the sport she can still play.
1. change: "high-level" -> "the highest professional levels". I'd wager Venus could play well easily until her 60s if not longer. There are many levels in tennis. There is are a range of competitive club levels. How often and how intensely she plays is another question.
2. Change: "the" -> "one" (w.r.t. "Pickleball is the sport she can still play.)
Stepping back, in my view, some of the most interesting questions are psychological and personal. If you were to talk to a hundred former tennis pros about aging, what would they say? How much do they play? How does it feel? How do they shift their mindset as their bodies age? To what degree is tennis still fun for them?
Venus Williams just crashed out of the first round of the U.S. Open, but she was ranked 407 in the world prior to that. She’s plagued by injuries, beset by problems from the autoimmune disorder Sjögrens Syndrome and a shadow of what she once was, but she’s still playing “high-level tennis”.
Is this a backhanded remark? (pun intended) In conversation, generalization and cross-comparisons happen. Our brains do these things, and it makes for interesting discussion.
If I have to google to discover whether professional pickleball exists, then it's not anywhere near the popularity of other professional sports. I would have heard about the results of pickleball matches in the sports headlines.
> Your reply is just a low-effort attempt to dismiss an idea that makes you uncomfortable, or maybe just to pour derision on something for fun. Show more curiosity.
Please refrain from personal attacks, which are against the HN guidelines.
I don't even understand what you think is supposed to be making me "uncomfortable". I'm perfectly comfortable, thanks.
I was simply disputing this:
> This is rarely good for any sport, and is likely why interest in alternatives is growing.
1) Basically every professional sports is becoming more about strength and height over time, because athletes are getting better over time. Even professional golf, for example, is becoming much more athletic.
2) I don't think there's any evidence or plausibility to the idea that changes in professional tennis explain why pickleball has become popular among amateurs. I'm not disputing the amateur popularity of pickleball. And any growing popularity there may be in professional pickleball is the result rather than the cause of the amateur popularity of pickleball.
> ... but there's no evidence that amateur tennis is becoming more about strength and height.
There's an implied quantitative model in this comment, but what is being claimed is rather unclear. Until that model gets specified, we could talk in circles about it.
Most would expect that strength matters, but how much? / And how much for what? For winning? For being competitive enough for it to be satisfying and fun? For overall participation levels? / I don't assume a linear effect across age, ability, nor skill. / And how much relative to other qualities? And how much are the factors intertwined?
The comment I responded to claims there is no evidence, without offering support for itself. My goal here is to offer constructive criticism and invite the commenter to clarify.
Here on HN, like most forums, there is a write vs. read imbalance: "write once, read many". If you take a broad view, the implications are clear: it is better when writers put in the effort to be clear, particularly when asked.
There is a common conversational pattern:
(a) One person makes a comment which is somewhat vague.
(b) The next person reads, and despite the ambiguity, responds without asking clarification questions.
(c) Repeat.
Is it a surprise that such conversations have so many failure modes? Some include: (1) talking past each other; (2) not really learning; (3) not getting to know each other; (4) missing an opportunity to connect and build bridges.
I attempted to break the pattern by pointing out the ambiguity and asking clarification questions. This is the norm for sites like Stack Overflow, for good reason.
I have a hypothesis: the above dysfunctional pattern is not widely recognized here on HN. It isn't part of people's awareness; we fall into counterproductive conversational styles without recognizing it.
Sure, there are styles of debate where people try to score points. That's a zero-sum mentality; a waste of our collective effort.
I encourage us to reflect on this question: Given how much time people spend on HN, how many durable personal connections are formed?
Wow, you are vastly, vastly overthinking this. My point was simply that amateur tennis is played by ordinary people—of all ages, shapes, sizes, and experience levels—in large part for fun, exercise, and recreation, so there's no reason to think that amateur tennis is somehow becoming more about strength and height. Ordinary people aren't changing, and thus amateur tennis isn't changing.
This is your opinion. It also comes across as judgmental. Remember: people think differently and to different depths.
I suspected you had more to say. There is no plausible way one could read your mind and go from what you wrote before to what you wrote here.
I'm here to learn and discuss. It doesn't help when people have a dismissive tone in response to questions.
FWIW, I enjoyed many of your comments in this thread. But this one wasn't persuasive to me. If you are curious why, I can explain, but at present, based on your above response, I'm reluctant.
Not sure why you were downvoted. Fitness, equipment (racket and strings) are the reason if not the height. For height, above a certain level, say 6 ft 2 inch, it starts becoming a liability in movement. Tennis used to have a lot of variety in the past. Big serve and volleyers on grass, long baseline rallies on clay, slice backhands, flat strokes. Now it's monotonous.. the surface doesn't matter. The game with the most payoff is to stand back at the baseline and hammer the ball.
On a somewhat related topic, fitness has taken over many sports. In field hockey, dribbling used to be a skill. India was unbeaten for decades in Olympics, winning 8-9 gold medals. The introduction of artificial turf ushered in the era of strength and fitness, and the Western nations mostly took over.
Almost nothing in tennis has to do with strength, quite the opposite. I can see definitely see more tall players become better with movement, ground strokes, and volleys(Medvedev, Zverev). Tall players still get injured a ton, but science is improving in the recovery department.
