Secrets of the Wide Slice

Dennis Ralston

If you examine the records of most of the great servers in tennis history, they all had the wide slice serve down cold. Pete Sampras had maybe the best wide serve in the history of the game. The great lefties like John McEnroe and Rod Laver had it in the ad court. In today's game it's the same. Roger Federer wins a lot of points with wide slice serves, even on the second serve.

It should be an important part of the service game of good players at any level. But you have to have the courage to hit it, and to do that, you have to have confidence that you really own the shot. The majority of players don't.

Pancho

There was one other player who is had a pretty good wide serve--in fact he was one of the greatest servers of all time-Pancho Gonzales. In this article I want to share the secret he taught me to hitting the wide slice, because I think any player can use it at any level. When I was playing my best serve was my wide slice, and I owe that to Pancho.

Pancho Gonzales was underrated as a player, but also as a coach. He was tremendously knowledgeable about the gaem. He had this reputation as a tough, hardnosed guy, which in many ways he was, particularly when he was younger. But he was also extremely generous with his time in energy in helping younger players, not only myself but players like Charlie Pasarell and Arthur Ashe. He was the number player in the world for 10 years and we all idolized him.

When I was growing up in Southern California, I had the opportunity to hit with a lot of the great Amercian players of the time, including Pancho. I was lucky enough to have Pancho take an interest in me. He was the coach for all the Davis Cup teams that I played on. Also when I turned pro, Pancho and I played a tour together in Australia with Fred Stolle, Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver.

Not only was he my coach, I actually lived at his home when I was going to school at USC.

I learned so much from Pancho, about tactics, how to practice, about the role of emotion. Pancho told me he played best when he was angry and thought I should do the same. (I found that I actually played better when I was a little irritated, but not when I got too irritated. Then I played worse.)

The Head

But no doubt his biggest contribution to my game was that he taught me how to master the wide slice serve. When I first started working out with Pancho when I was 15 or 16, I didn't hit it very well.

I remember very clearly the first time we worked on it. Pancho had me use an abbreviated motion, starting in the trophy position with my racket already up. He told me to toss the ball up and hit the slice. He said: "I want to you serve like this for a month and practice swinging across the outside of the ball."

And the first time I threw it up and hit it, I turned my head to follow the ball. And he yelled at me. "Don't you do that!" He scared the heck out of me. He said: "I don't want to see your head move, period."

And he explained the reason. When players hit a wide slice they have a tendency to open up their bodies too much too soon.

Pancho stressed strongly that it was the hands and the path and speed of the racket head speed that gave you consistency and control, not the torquing of the body.

It's true that you can hit the slice if you twist or rotate your body, but you are not going to be as consistent and you are not going to get as much pace. So Pancho made sure I kept my upper body relatively quiet and still, and that I concentrated on the hands.

By relying on the hands you can be much more precise in controlling the swing and finding the same spot on the ball. Your timing is just better. The key to hitting the ball wide with more sidespin is only a slight difference in the way the hand moves the racket across the ball.

If you rotate the body too much too soon you'll tend to be all over the place with the contact. By controlling the head position, Pancho believed you learned to hit the wide serve with the proper motion and create both pace and spin.

By keeping my head still I developed the feeling for staying sideways longer. I started to make the serve. Pancho made me serve that way for one whole month! I hit 150 or 200 balls that way every time I practiced. I didn't serve every day, but it was probably over 2000 balls I hit that way in a month's time.

The wide serve is the hardest of the four placements to develop. The difficulty is hitting the wide serve without having the ball sit. You can hit a slice but if it doesn't move with pace, it just gets drilled by a good returner. But the majority of the good servers on the tour have that serve down.

Eventually, thanks to Pancho it became my best serve. I used on the first serve in the deuce court, and I actually preferred to hit on my second serve as well. I also used the slice when I served down the T in the ad court, to run the ball away from the returner.

Toss

It's very important to learn to hit the slice off the same toss as all the other serves. Some people when they slice they throw the ball way out to the right (righthanders) and come around it. But it won't have the same pace. And as the receiver you can tell from the toss what is going to happen.

If you have only one toss, your opponent won't be able to read the slice. This is one of the things that made Sampras so great.

He had a tremendous wide slice serve in the deuce court. But he used the exact same toss when he went down the middle. With a good slice serve, when you see it's coming it's still tough, but when you can't tell it's impossible.

It was the same in the ad court. He could slice the ball down the T or hit it with more kick and take you off the court wide, but you absolutely couldn't read where he was going from the toss.

For years I've been teaching players in my lessons and camps and clinics the same simple exercise to develop this serve that I learned from Pancho so many years ago. Try it for yourself and see if you don't get the same result.