This is a fun interview the great Jimmy Arias. He was #5 in the world in the 80’s. One observation he makes: the game today is far more shotmaking than strategy.
I agree. Shotmaking is at an all time high. Tactical and strategic understanding near lifetime lows. Makes sense, if you think about it. A person only has 100% to give. Whatever attention given to one aspect of the game, comes at the cost of another.
The same argument can be made about movies, by the way. Special effects are better than ever… plots and scripts are trash.
It’s ironic because Bollettieri started factory training… with Arias. When you’ve got hundreds of people going on the court at any time, there’s no time for nuanced, personal interventions. Everyone’s gonna be taught the same stuff… ie. the “Bolletieri forehand”, the coaches will zero in on the player who does it best. The rest die on the vine.
Think of the tens of thousands of players who have gone to these centers. Maybe a dozen or two made it out. A factory that delivers a small fraction of the products that enter the assembly line is an inefficient factory. Thing is… if people pay in full, even for the stuff that doesn’t make it out, it’s also… highly profitable.
Coaching factories don’t have enough skin in the game. That’s true for pros too.
Anyway, at the 28 minute mark, he tells the story about a tennis lesson he took when he was a kid, from a top-ish professional tennis player. The player prescribed the right way to hit a forehand. His dad, who was a mathematician, not a player… called bullshit. The “right” way made no biomechanical sense to him. After the lesson, he told Jimmy to ignore what he’d just paid to have him taught, and created an idea of a forehand for his son to pursue.
More irony… that forehand became the “Bollettieri” forehand that was taught to everyone.
A top tennis pro’s knowledge was trumped by a civilians intuition. It’s an interesting story line because Jimmy, himself, is a pro now. Head of tennis at IMG… formerly Bolletieri’s. Unfortunately, that story line is ignored in the interview. I would have asked what the value of a pro… or “development” center is. I mean, if he could figure out how the game on his own… who needs a pro?