The Lost Art of Serve-and-Volley: Why It Survives Only on Grass

You can almost put a date on the death of serve-and-volley, which is unusual for the passing of an entire style of sport. Most ways of playing fade slowly, over decades, until one day you notice they are gone. This one has a hinge you can point to: the twelve months between the 2001 Wimbledon men's final and the 2002 one.

In 2001, the final was Goran Ivanisevic against Patrick Rafter — two committed serve-and-volleyers trading rockets and reflex volleys, the net the centre of gravity of almost every point, the whole match a tribute to the most thrilling style tennis ever produced. Twelve months later, the 2002 final was Lleyton Hewitt against David Nalbandian: two baseliners, hammering ground strokes from the back of the court, barely a volley struck between them. In one year, on the same grass, at the same tournament, the sport changed its mind about how to win. The old art did not fade. It fell off a cliff, and you can name the year it jumped.

This is the story of how the most exciting way to play tennis was quietly engineered out of existence — and why the grass season is the one place its ghost still occasionally walks.

What the art actually was

For anyone who came to tennis in the baseline era, it is worth describing the lost style properly, because it was genuinely a different sport. You hit a big serve, and rather than settle in to rally, you sprinted in behind it — covering the fifteen-odd metres to the net in the time it took the ball to travel down and come back — and met the return up close, finishing the point with a volley angled into open court before your opponent could set their feet. Power, footwork, soft hands and nerve, the whole thing compressed into about two seconds. Done well, it was breathtaking; done badly, it got you passed, and the courage to risk the second outcome for the first was part of what made it beautiful.

It built champions and defined eras. Pete Sampras won seven Wimbledon titles on it. Before and around him, Stefan Edberg made it look like ballet, Boris Becker threw his whole body at the net, John McEnroe turned it into improvised genius, Patrick Rafter and Ivanisevic carried the torch to the end. On the women's side Martina Navratilova built a record nine Wimbledon singles titles substantially on her willingness to come forward. For decades, on grass especially, this was not one tactic among many. It was how the best players won, and the lawns of the All England Club were its cathedral.

2001: the day the grass changed

The first and most literal blow was struck by the groundsmen. In 2001, the All England Club changed the composition of its grass — moving from a mix of roughly seventy per cent ryegrass and thirty per cent creeping red fescue to one hundred per cent perennial ryegrass. The new grass was tougher, more durable and harder-wearing through a fortnight of play, which the club wanted; but it also produced a slightly higher, slightly slower bounce. And the margins that serve-and-volley lived on were measured in exactly those slivers of height and speed.

On the old, faster, lower grass, a good serve skidded through so quickly and stayed so low that rushing in behind it was a percentage play — the returner was rushed, the bounce was awkward, the volleyer arrived in command. Nudge the bounce up and slow it down, and suddenly the returner has a heartbeat longer to load up, and the ball sits a fraction higher to be passed. The serve-and-volleyer who was winning that exchange is now, on the new grass, losing it. It was not a dramatic change to watch. It was a tiny adjustment to the soil that quietly rewrote the maths of an entire style.

That 2001 final between Ivanisevic and Rafter turned out to be the last great stand of pure serve-and-volley at Wimbledon. And it is no coincidence that the last champion of the genuinely fast-grass era was Sampras, who won the last of his seven titles in 2000 — the final summer before the lawns were changed. After that, the baseliners arrived, and they did not leave.

The other two killers: strings and the baseline revolution

The grass was only the first culprit. The second, and probably the most lethal, came from the racket.

Around the turn of the millennium, polyester strings swept the professional game. They let a player swing as hard as they liked and still bring the ball down inside the lines, generating topspin at levels that had simply not been possible with the old natural-gut and nylon strings. And the shot that benefited most from all that new topspin was the passing shot — the serve-and-volleyer's nightmare. Suddenly a baseliner could stand back, take a full, violent cut at a passing shot, and drop it at the incoming volleyer's feet with vicious dip. The risk of coming to net had always existed. Now the punishment for it became routine, available to almost anyone with modern strings and modern technique.

The third killer was simply the rise of a better baseline game. Fitness, racket technology and coaching made the modern back-of-the-court player so powerful, so consistent and so physically relentless that there was no longer any need to take the gamble of rushing the net. That 2002 Hewitt–Nalbandian final was the template for everything that followed: two superb athletes out-hitting each other from the baseline, content to win the long way because the long way had become the safe way. Why risk a volley when you can simply out-rally anyone? The economics of winning had flipped, and serve-and-volley did not survive the new arithmetic. By the middle of the 2010s, whole Wimbledon fortnights would pass with serve-and-volley reduced to a rare novelty, a few brave points a match rather than a way of life.

Federer, the last holdout

There was one great exception, and it is fitting that it was the most beloved player of the modern era. Roger Federer won eight Wimbledon titles between 2003 and 2017 as a baseliner first — but an all-court player at heart, the last true descendant of the serve-and-volley tradition, who would still float forward and finish at the net with a grace that made older fans ache for what the sport used to be. He could not bring the style back; the maths were against even him. But he kept its memory alive longer than anyone, mixing it into his game as a reminder that tennis had once been about variety, about contrast, about the bravery of coming forward. When he retired, the last living link to the golden age of net play more or less went with him.

The man who tried to bring it back

If Federer kept the memory alive, one player in the next generation actually tried to resurrect the corpse — and his story is the most poignant proof of how thoroughly the modern game has buried the style. Maxime Cressy, an American with a French upbringing, built his entire professional game around serve-and-volley in the 2020s, behaving as though the previous twenty years of tennis had simply not happened. He served and came in. He served and came in again. He chip-charged returns, he closed the net behind everything, he played a brand of tennis nobody under forty had seen attempted full-time — and for a while it worked spectacularly. He beat top-ten players, pushed the very best to the brink on the biggest courts, and climbed inside the world's top forty, a genuinely startling achievement for a one-man throwback in an era engineered against him.

But the same era that made him a novelty also wore him down. The style exacts a brutal physical toll — all those explosive charges forward, all those lunging volleys, a body flung at the net point after point instead of settling into the grind — and Cressy's, his lower back in particular, eventually gave way. By 2025, hampered by chronic back pain that had dogged him for years, he had stopped winning at tour level, slid hundreds of places down the rankings, and announced he was stepping away from the Tour. The man who tried hardest to prove serve-and-volley could still win at the top did not fail because the tactic stopped working in his hands. He faltered because the modern game asks a serve-and-volleyer to do something close to physically unsustainable — and that, in the end, is the quiet truth about why the style died. Not that it cannot win a point. That it can no longer win a career.

The grass still remembers

And yet it is not quite dead, for one reason: the grass itself, even the slower modern grass, still produces a lower and faster bounce than clay or hard courts — the exact opposite of the high, slow clay we wrote a love letter to. That low skid still, just occasionally, rewards the player brave enough to come forward, because a crisp low volley on grass remains very hard to answer. So it is on grass, and really only on grass, that you still see the old art flicker — a surprise serve-and-volley point to steal a quick game, a change of pace on a fast afternoon, a flash of the lost style from a player who grew up watching clips of Sampras and Edberg.

If you ever feel tempted to add a little of it to your own game this grass season, be warned: club players discover the moment they try it that serve-and-volley is far harder than the greats made it look. Getting to the net in time, then stopping, splitting your feet and changing direction to cover a pass, asks more of your movement than any baseline rally ever will — it is all explosive first steps, sudden stops and lateral scrambles. Which is exactly why a proper pair of tennis court shoes matters more for a would-be net-rusher than for almost anyone else on the court; the right shoes are what let you get in, stop and react, and the wrong ones are how net-rushers turn ankles. Beyond the footwear, the rest is pure nerve: come in behind your best serves, accept that you will get passed, and enjoy the variety it brings back to your tennis.

Where the net game still lives

Pure serve-and-volley is gone from singles, then, but net play itself has not vanished entirely — it has simply retreated to the corners of the sport where it still pays. The most obvious refuge is doubles, which remains, quietly, the last great stronghold of the volley. With two players a side and the court effectively narrower to defend, coming forward and finishing up close is still the winning percentage play, and the best doubles teams in the world are full of the soft hands, the poaching and the sharp angles that singles forgot. If you genuinely want to watch the lost art performed at the highest level, stop building your day around the singles and go and find a top doubles match instead — it is all still there, the movement, the reflexes, the closing of the net, alive and well and almost entirely ignored.

There are flickers in singles too, mostly from a new breed of enormous servers who use the net not as a philosophy but as an occasional weapon. A handful of the tour's biggest men — towering hitters with deliveries clocked well past 220 kilometres an hour — will follow a thunderbolt in behind it to cut off the return, not because they are serve-and-volleyers in the old romantic sense but because a free point is a free point. It is a ghost of the real thing rather than its revival. But on a fast grass afternoon, when one of those giants serves and storms forward and puts away a volley before the returner has finished swinging, you catch a half-second of what an entire era used to look like, and the older heads in the crowd feel the years fall away.

What we actually lost

The real loss was never tactical. It was aesthetic, and it was about contrast. Serve-and-volley gave tennis an argument — the baseliner versus the net-rusher, two opposing philosophies colliding inside a single match, the rally player trying to pass and the volleyer trying to cut the point short before it could become a rally. That tension turned matches into dialogues between styles, and it is mostly gone now, replaced by two superbly conditioned baseliners hitting hard from the back of the court in broadly the same way.

The modern game is faster, fitter and more athletic than anything the serve-and-volley era could have produced. Nobody who has watched the best of today's tennis would seriously argue otherwise. But it is also more uniform, and the disappearance of net play took some of the sport's variety and a good deal of its romance away with it. The 2001 final was a conversation between two ways of playing. The finals since have mostly been monologues, magnificently delivered, in a single voice.

The last word

Serve-and-volley is not formally extinct, but it is on life support, and the grass season is the ward where the machines are kept running. Slower lawns, polyester strings and the all-conquering baseline game retired the most thrilling style tennis ever produced, inside the span of a couple of summers around 2001, and most of the players who could truly do it are long gone.

But for two weeks at Wimbledon, on the low fast grass that made the art great in the first place, you might still catch it — a player choosing the brave option, serving and storming the net, finishing with a volley the way Sampras and Edberg and Navratilova used to. When it happens, the older heads in the crowd will lean forward and the younger ones will wonder why. They are watching the same thing: a flicker of the most romantic age the sport ever had, kept alive by nothing but the grass, which has not yet quite forgotten what it was built for.

Sources

• Tennis.com: How a switch to 100 per cent ryegrass brought Wimbledon in line with the contemporary game
• All England Club / Wimbledon: changes to the grass courts in 2001
• ITF: court surface pace ratings and the effect of slower surfaces
• Tennis histories: the 2001 Ivanisevic–Rafter and 2002 Hewitt–Nalbandian finals as the pivot from serve-and-volley to the baseline era
• Coverage of polyester strings and their effect on topspin and passing shots
• Records of serve-and-volley champions: Sampras, Edberg, Becker, McEnroe, Rafter, Navratilova; and Roger Federer's all-court game
• ATP Tour: Maxime Cressy steps away from the Tour (2025) — the modern serve-and-volley experiment and its physical toll

Photo: Roger Federer at the 2019 Wimbledon final / LHC88 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY 4.0