Eight years ago, Martina Navratilova summed up the problem with the one-handed backhand in today’s game: “It practically takes a genius to hit [one],” she said.
The great Czech-American champion used a single-hander herself to win 18 Grand Slam singles titles from 1978 to 1990. But by the time she spoke those words, in 2016, the stroke had been declining—in use, though not in popularity—for nearly half a century. Last week, that downhill slide reached another milestone when Stefanos Tsitsipas dropped out of the ATP’s Top 10 and left it with no one-handed backhands for the first time since the start of computer rankings in 1973. The state of the stroke is even more dire on the women’s side, where 47th-ranked, 36-year-old Tatjana Maria has the only one-hander among the Top 60.
Navratilova was right: As the sport evolved, and players spent more time slugging from the baseline, it became increasingly difficult to survive the ground-stoke onslaught with just one hand.
