Serena Williams has the most beautiful service toss in tennis—aesthetically pleasing, effortlessly smooth, the ball gently leaving the left hand of a player whose game is anything but gentle. Beautiful, too, in the functional sense of being everything a service toss should be at the highest level of the game, which simply, yet not so simply, comes down to being consistent and functional. Serena drubbed her sister Venus on Friday night, 6–1, 6–2, because her toss was preternaturally consistent and spectacularly functional.
Most humans have a dominant arm and hand. Most tennis players are taught to serve with that arm and hand, and thus, when serving, toss the ball with their non-dominant arm and hand. Consequently, and crucially, every point in tennis begins with a player depending on an arm and hand that she otherwise does nothing crucial with. Here’s what that developmentally secondary and underutilized arm and hand need to do: cradle the ball delicately, with all the fingers; firmly straighten the arm and slightly turn the forearm (without tightening the grip on the ball); and lock the elbow. Then, with the shoulder, not the arm—a completely unnatural movement—raise this oddly deployed limb calmly and continuously to the height of the eyes (while doing all sorts of other things, which I won’t get into here, with the dominant arm and hand, the legs, and back) and release the ball with a force such that it reaches a height to meet the racquet, fully extended above you. Got it?
Serena Williams, again, does this better than any player, Roger Federer and other male players included, but don’t take my word for it. Ask Nick Bollettieri, the coaching legend, or Rick Macci, who trained Williams for a time in Florida before she reached high-school age. Macci told me, some years ago, of how, after drilling all day, she would practice her serve, with baskets and baskets of balls, until somebody told her to stop.
She got bigger, yes, and used those muscular thighs and strapping shoulders to hit first serves that can top a hundred and twenty-five miles per hour. That’s nearly unheard of in women’s tennis. But here is something rarer: her beautiful toss has no “tells.” Even most very good servers indicate with their toss what kind of serve is coming: out front for a flat serve, out wide a bit toward the racquet-hand side for a slice, above the crown of the head for a topspin kick serve. When Williams is playing her best, her toss is in precisely the same place for all her serves. (It falters when she is anxious or fatigued, and that’s when she can be beaten.) An opponent can’t lean, can’t guess. Or can, but helplessly.
No one has seen more of Williams’s serves than her sister Venus—twenty-five, thirty years of them. On Friday night, she had no clue where they were headed. She guessed wrong, leaned wrong, stood flat-footed, and quietly despaired. True, of the ten aces Serena struck, it wouldn’t have mattered even if Venus had guessed right: they were simply too good, painting the lines. But, beyond the aces, there were many Serena serves that Venus got a racquet on and never got back over the net, and many others that she did get over the net, but which landed short or smack in the center of the court—balls Serena could pounce on to take control of the point. Serena had turned her right ankle early in the first set, and her movement was clearly hampered. But Venus just could not get into enough points when Serena was serving to create the kinds of angles that would have tested that ankle. Serena won nearly ninety per cent of her first-service points. Venus never broke her.
When you are serving that well, everything else flows for you. You play with ease and confidence. Serena Williams played the best match since her return to the game after giving birth to her daughter, nearly a year ago. And when your opponent is serving out of her mind, and you sense you cannot break her, every aspect of your game comes under pressure: your serve and strokes, your ease and confidence. Venus looked defeated before the match clock reached twenty minutes. She knew, better than anyone, that Serena had brought that serve. She had the best view in the world of the ball rolling off the tips of Serena’s fingers, and the earned knowledge that that view would do her no good at all.
