Is tennis finally ready to stop wishing it was played some other way?

PREVIEWS: Gauff vs. Halep, and Kyrgios vs. Hurkacz, in Canada quarterfinals

Purchase tickets to the National Bank Open in Toronto and Montreal HERE with TicketSmarter

Maybe it was the break after Wimbledon. Maybe it was the fact that Montreal and Toronto are both in my time zone, and I can watch every match at a reasonable hour. But this has been one of those weeks when I’ve wondered how anyone could think that tennis isn’t in a good place—game-wise, personality-wise, variety-wise, style-wise—at the moment.

Even without any of the Big Three in action, and even with a fair amount of rain to slow things down, the must-watch matches have never stopped for long.

The first night brought us two tough sets between two stylistic opposites, Bianca Andreescu and Daria Kasatkina. The next day we saw Tommy Paul upset Carlos Alcaraz in a frantic contest that didn’t reach its shot-making crescendo until the three-hour mark. After that, Coco Gauff survived two thrillers in third-set tiebreakers, over Elena Rybakina and Aryna Sabalenka. Nick Kyrgios twirled his fanciful way past No. 1 Daniil Medvedev. Dan Evans edged Taylor Fritz in an all-out, three-set scrap. Beatriz Haddad Maia and Iga Swiatek went to war against each other and the wind for three topsy-turvy hours. And two new faces and names, 20-year-old Jack Draper and 19-year-old Qinwen Zheng, showed off powerful games in wins over Stefanos Tsitsipas and Andreescu, respectively.

What struck me most about these matches as a whole was how seldom anyone played it safe, settled for a rally ball, or waited for the opponent to miss. Today’s game doesn’t reward complacency for long. “Baseline tennis” has been disparaged for decades as monotonous, cautious and cookie-cutter; but this isn’t your dad’s, or your mom’s, baseline tennis. Rather than a war of attrition, the sport has become a race to hit the first forehand, get ahead in the rally, and move forward to finish the point. As we’ve seen in Canada, there are many different ways to do that.

Once upon a time, at some point during a week like this, I would have heard someone say, with a cluck of disapproval, “Nobody comes to the net anymore.” Or, “They all play the same way.” Or, “Why doesn’t anyone serve and volley?” Or, “Look how far back they’re standing.” Or maybe even that old warhorse, “The grass at Wimbledon used to be torn up around the net.”

The words might have come from a commentator of a certain age, or a general-sports pundit, or a rec player watching on the television at my club. But I haven’t heard anything like that recently. Is the sport finally ready to stop complaining about the way it’s played, and start enjoying what the pros are doing now? Is it finally ready to stop mourning the decline of serve-and-volley—which, FYI, can be just as monotonous and cookie-cutter as any other style—and start celebrating the rising levels of athleticism that we see each year on tour?

At some point along the way, we finally stopped grumbling about how the game should return to wood racquets. Maybe now we can finally stop grumbling about how no one plays like Stefan Edberg anymore.

Is tennis finally ready to stop mourning the decline of serve-and-volley—which, FYI, can be just as monotonous and cookie-cutter as any other style—and start celebrating the rising levels of athleticism that we see each year on tour?

“There’s always someone who has to ask, ‘Why don’t they volley?’” says Joseph Gilbert, coach of Jenson Brooksby. “Or ‘Why do they stand so far back to return?’ What the players are doing athletically today, the ground they cover and how they hit the ball, is unbelievable.”

Gilbert agrees that tennis only shoots itself in the foot with this unwarranted, nostalgia-driven self-criticism. There will always be dull players, and there will always be bad matches, but there were just as many, if not more, of both in 1982 as there are today. The people who watch the game avidly in 2022 seem to realize that; they probably wouldn’t watch it as much if they didn’t. The problem is that the complaints about cookie-cutter baseline tennis are still prevalent among the general public, at least in the United States. Even through the golden era of the Big Four—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams—the conventional wisdom among sports fans in the U.S. was that tennis wasn’t what it used to be.

A tournament official in Canada might wish that a few more big stars had survived to the weekend, of course. Medvedev, Alcaraz, Serena, Swiatek, Andreescu, Osaka are all gone before the quarterfinals. Yet even with that carnage, Kyrgios, Auger-Aliassime, Paul, Draper, Gauff, Bencic, Halep, Zheng, Pegula and others remain. Each mixes attack with defense, and each does it his or her own way.

To use a word that’s in the tennis air this week, the baseline game has evolved. It’s time for our appreciation of it to evolve along with it.