Quick: Which tennis player on the men’s tour won the most tournaments last year? Yes, Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open last February, and finished the COVID-disrupted year ranked No. 1 in the world, once again, with four title trophies. But Andrey Rublev, a Russian player who turned twenty-three in October, who two years ago was barely within shouting distance of the Top Hundred, struggling with injuries and anger-management issues, won five. It was Rublev’s curious fate to play remarkable tennis—winning forty-one matches, equalled only by Djokovic, and rising to No. 8 on the tour—during a global pandemic that begat cancelled tournaments, spectator-less stadiums, and a plunge in the TV viewership of events that were eerily quiet and frequently rescheduled. If you are crushing forehands on a tour upended by the coronavirus, and no one is around to hear them, do they make a sound?
Rublev continues to crush forehands. In his first-round match at the Australian Open, which began on Monday, he used that shot to quickly bludgeon the unseeded German journeyman Yannick Hanfmann, 6–3, 6–3, 6–4. It is true that almost all élite tennis players, women and men, hit their forehands hard. But there is hard and there is hard. Against Hanfmann, as against most of his opponents, Rublev, whether serving or receiving, attacked relentlessly, looking to get a forehand to smack even if it meant running way around his backhand. His aim, always, is to end each point in no more than three or four shots, by striking forehand blasts to the corners—blasts that, on Tuesday morning, according to the Tennis Channel commentators, who were as boggled as I was, consistently registered ninety-five miles per hour or more. Because Rublev takes the ball early, and because he hits his forehand not just hard but flat, with little or no loop-creating topspin, the ball gets on his opponent fast. He tries to angle his forehand shots severely off the court to either side, sending his opponent scrambling in pursuit. Often—very often in Hanfmann’s case—said opponent fails to reach it: forehand winner.
When I first watched Rublev from a courtside seat, a year and a half ago, at the U.S. Open, in a match against Nick Kyrgios—Rublev won, 7–6, 7–6, 6–3—I set out to problem-solve: how does someone who is maybe a hundred and fifty pounds hit flat forehands with the thunderous pace of, say, the Argentinian giant Juan Martín del Potro, who is six feet six and weighs sixty pounds more? The simple answer is racquet-head speed. In the moment it takes for Rublev to begin bringing his racquet forward till he finishes with it across his torso and over his left tricep, his swing is a blinding blur. My technical speculation is that he’s able to achieve the racquet-head speed he does because he has a hyper-flexible right wrist. Striking a modern-day forehand begins with directing the knob at the bottom of the racquet toward the incoming ball. This requires the wrist to be, as the coaches say, laid back, at a ninety-degree angle to the arm. Rublev’s wrist bends beyond ninety degrees; his knuckles seem to face his forearm. With the wrist this far back, and the racquet loosely held, his forehand whips with a flick toward the ball—and, to deepen his opponent’s misery, the flick whips forward with no indication, or tell, as to whether Rublev is hitting the ball crosscourt or redirecting it inside out. If there is a more punishing shot hit by a tennis player under twenty-five, I haven’t seen it.
Of course, to master it took practice, and Rublev is known as a player who practices and practices and practices. That practicing began early, in Moscow, when he was just a toddler. His mother, Marina Marenko, was an élite coach; she helped develop Anna Kournikova, the fleeting Russian star of the late nineties, among others. Rublev more or less grew up at her office, the Spartak Tennis Club, Moscow’s premier training ground for promising players. “I used to be there all day,” he recalled in a recent documentary. He began skipping school, passing tests by cribbing answers from friends. He became a top international junior. As a teen-ager, he went where many of the best tennis youths venture when they want to train even harder, to participate in even more exhausting drills designed to improve their fitness and footwork: Spain. At Barcelona’s 4Slam Tennis Academy, he was tutored by the onetime pro Fernando Vicente, who remains his coach, and who was named the A.T.P. coach of the year in 2020 for his work guiding Rublev into the Top Ten. Vicente and Rublev believe they have more work to do. One of their goals is to improve Rublev’s defense—players with an attacking game tend not to work on defensive-minded tactics that can keep them in longer points. Rublev remains happy to practice, and practice some more. It is a tennis-story trope that the tennis court is a lonely place. Rublev, in the documentary, says he is lonely most everywhere except on a tennis court.
He is not the only Russian tennis player edging toward the uppermost reaches of the men’s game: Daniil Medvedev is now ranked No. 4; Karen Khachanov has spent time in the Top Ten. Both are twenty-four years old. Together with Rublev, they constitute a generation of male players like no other that Russia has produced. The week before the Australian Open began, Rublev and Medvedev won the new team-tennis A.T.P. Cup. Medvedev is Rublev’s opposite: a cool chess master, not a fiery attacker. If the early matches in Melbourne go as expected, the two will meet next week, in the quarter-finals. Carefully spaced spectators will occupy seats in Rod Laver Arena—Melbourne’s severe lockdown has resulted in an all-but-COVID-free city (though the arrival of the Open has complicated things somewhat). Those fans, barring an early upset, will be watching two players who could each someday reach No. 1. They may get a glimpse of what could become a terrific rivalry—though Medvedev has dominated Rublev so far in their careers. They will for sure see more than one blistering forehand worth cheering for.
