One shot ricocheted decisively through the early part of the new century for me.
Henin arrived to her first Grand Slam final in 2001, a teenage upstart, almost ready to defeat grass court queen Venus Williams, but not quite fully baked. She eventually made 12 Grand Slam finals, winning seven, before retiring for the second time in 2011. The intervening years contained some terrific rivalries, some ridiculous losses and some heart-lurching moments. All of them contained the nuclear weapon that was Henin’s backhand.
Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, Gabriela Sabatini and many others in the near and distant past won slams with one hand. But since the ’90s, it had been infrequently spotted in the wild. After Graf retired, taking her slice with her, most champions placed both hands on the backhand wing before they placed both hands on the trophies.
Over on the men’s side of the aisle, it was briskly and balletically being kept alive by the on-the-rise Federer and the on-the-down Pete Sampras. But by the early 21st century, it was an endangered shot among the women.
To my adoring eyes, Henin was going to rescue it.
To be honest, Henin wasn’t ready-made for heroine worship. She got nervous easily and seemed to sometimes botch matches that were hers to win. She spoke little, and when she did, it didn’t feel ennobling enough. A faint miasma of low-intensity controversy clung to her: the disputed incident in that Serena Williams match, the cold distance from her universally loved compatriot Kim Clijsters, the public confession of unsporting conduct.
For sheer arithmetic greatness she could never match Serena, whose versatility, longevity and force of will made her unique. She didn’t have the teenage fairy tale rise of Maria Sharapova. She eventually didn’t even have the charming comeback story of Kim Clijsters.
But Henin was unpretentious. I loved her no-nonsense skirts and her on-court presence, her sharp baseball cap that did nothing for fashion but everything for utility.
I told anyone who was willing to listen: “Did you know what John McEnroe said? That her backhand is better than anyone’s. Even Federer’s. Imagine that.”
It felt radical.
The French Open – a tournament Henin won four times – is underway this year, and there is little to look for in the women’s draw by way of the single-hander.
The single-handed backhand is undoubtedly an over-fetishized shot; what it does for aesthetes, experts will tell you, it doesn’t do half the time for the scoreboard. In Nadal’s memoir which opens with the 2008 Wimbledon final he writes of a simple strategy, hitting to Federer’s relative weakness, his backhand: “That’s the plan. It’s not a complicated plan.” We all know how that match and most Nadal-Federer match-ups have ended (barring recent history).
It is true, there is no point in being a dandy artist when there are games to be won. The single hander is increasingly seen as a vulnerability. But in the landscape of the dominant two-fisted stroke it feels like a visual reprieve.
When Henin retired, I looked for some place to park my restless devotion to the single-hander and found no fitting beneficiary on the women’s tour.
Carla Suarez Navarro offered promise, but never seemed to proceed into the second week of a slam. Alicia Molik hovered on the margins of relevance only briefly. Francisca Schiavone won one Grand Slame and then receded.
The search for that mythical creature, the high-ranked woman player with the single-hander has thus far been hard and fruitless.
And so on dull days, when eye candy is in short supply, I occasionally turn to the Internet for old Henin footage. There’s the quick body rearrangement as she re-balances her weight and pirouettes to the traditionally weaker flank.
The backswing begins, head still, back half-revealed. As the wrists twitch, the ball is sent capering through the air, snapping as it resists the wall of gut. She rises through the arc, signing off with a full flourish and a triumphant opening of the wingspan.
To me, it’s tennis’ Sistine Chapel. By a female Michelangelo.
