Eddies, Swirls and Facets of Federer's Backhands
I'm on and off with the single hand backhand, but I desire to use it most of the time not only for the meaningful reason that it looks so esthetic. There are many players out there that we can copy this technique from, however, none of them is so popular than Federer. So what that means is there are tons of his clips on youtube. And I'm no jealous you know, well maybe a bit, but between you and me, he barrows his technique from the older ones... Don't believe me, take a look at Boris Becker's, Stefan Edberg's or even Ivan Lendel's ;)
Anyways, Federer's single hand backhand is a weapon. There are many ways to look at it and with my untrained eyes here's what I picked up from all those videos;
Anyways, Federer's single hand backhand is a weapon. There are many ways to look at it and with my untrained eyes here's what I picked up from all those videos;
- Now his feet are fast. Therefore he is, most of the time, behind the ball. And I'm pretty sure he sees the ball in slow motion (4K). Even I can hit that way...
- Don't get confused the techniques in his normal training videos with the real matches. In real matches he uses virtually no-swing backhands to kill the points. That gives him a very neat control on the down-the-line shots.
- He rarely swings the racquet all the way to his back with strings pointing to his opponent :)
- His front foot is parallel to the baseline when he hits the ball behind it.
- His front foot gets more aligned to the court when he is inside, which is quite normal.
- He looks at the ball even after the contact.
- I don't want to mention about his left arm, since sometimes I hate it's elasticity. come on!