Visual Tennis:
McEnroe Case Study

By John Yandell

In the middle of 1991, John McEnroe was in the middle of a serious comeback. He was convinced he could still compete with the world's top players. But he had a problem.

For a period of several months his serve--the dominating shot that had made him one of the most electrifying players in tennis history during the late 1970's and early 1980's--was consistently the weak link in his play. His first serve percentage was less than 50%. Meanwhile the radar gun was registering ball speeds in the mid 90 mph range.

The result was that John had to work very hard on his service games, was under constant pressure to hit difficult first volleys, and was often broken twice or three times a set. Though his legendary mental toughness kept him in many matches, he seemed to have lost the firepower to win against top players. Many observers commented that at age 30 the game had passed him by.

Working with John in making the "Winning Edge" instructional video in 1984, I had spent a lot of hours studying his technique, particularly on his serve. Watching John play in 1990, however, it was clear to me that he had developed a severe technical problem his backswing that was causing his loss of consistency and power.

When I saw John in San Francisco that year, he decided to have me analyze the changes in his motion and compare it to the glory days of the mid-1980's. We both believed that if he could recover the biomechanics of his motion, he could restore his serving effectiveness and compete successfully again at the highest levels of the game.

Few coaches in any sport ever get the chance to measure the effectiveness of their work on world class athletes. Even though I had been on court with John extensively during the filming of "The Winning Edge," this was a different situation. I had worked with highly ranked players before, including lower level tour players and nationally ranked juniors. But this was the chance to use the visual tennis methodology with a legendary champion.

Still, when John and I began working together in February 1991, the approach I took was exactly the same as with the hundreds of players at all levels who had come to our tennis school with technical problems.

The first step is always identifying the problem, and more importantly, identifying it for the player in a medium he can truly understand . To accomplish this, high speed video analysis is critical. Because the natural learning process is visual, the verbal descriptions that are typical of tennis lessons--"you're not turning," "your contact is late," etc., are usually ineffective.

In John's case, the problem was a shift in the shape of his backswing. Although his sideways stance and the increased torso rotation it generated represented an advance in the biomechanics of serving, the rest of John's service motion was completely and perfectly classic.

His shoulders and hips were almost parallel to the baseline at the start of the motion, but his arm and racquet path stayed in the plane of his shoulders during the windup . For the average player this would mean the arm and racquet would drop down and then point straight back at the back fence.

For John with his sideways stance, it meant that as the arm and racquet moved through the wind up in the plane of the shoulders, his shoulders were actually parallel to the baseline until coming up at the start of the racquet drop. This was the fluid, effortless motion that I knew so well from the "Winning Edge."

Many commentators believe that at his peak, John McEnroe's serve was the best in the history of tennis. Because of his unique starting stance, McEnroe was able to take the biomechanics of serving to a new level. As the motion begins, his torso and back are literally turned to the net. As his racquet moves to the ball, this created something approaching 180 degrees of hip and shoulder rotation, roughly double that of other top servers.

By the end of 1990, however, John had developed a severe deviation in his backswing. Rather than staying parallel to the baseline, his arm and racquet were swinging back behind the plane of his body, and actually extending out over the court. At the most extreme point, John's arm and racquet were reaching out over the baseline by 3 feet or more.

Frame by frame analysis later showed that this change was putting about a third of a second delay in his motion, compared to the timing of his serve in "The Winning Edge." From this awkward position, John was forced to muscle the racquet forward to continue the motion, causing a loss of rhythm and momentum, and probably putting pressure on the shoulder joint as well.

The first step was to show John exactly what had happened. Rather than go into the verbal description of the changes in the technical shape of the motion, I had him warm up, then hit serves while I filmed him using our portable high speed video system.

Although John was well aware that something was seriously wrong in his motion, he had literally no idea what had happened to his backswing. When I showed him the slow motion replay, it was about the only time I've seen him at a loss for words-before or since.

We reviewed the motion in real time, and then frame by frame so John could see exactly how much the motion had changed. After identifying the problem, the next step in the methodology was the creation of a corrective model. In John's case we could not have had a more perfect source--extensive slow-motion video of himself from "The Winning Edge," when his serve was the most dominating shot in tennis. The video showed that in 1984, John had a beautiful circular, pendulum windup. Throughout the motion, John's arm and racquet stayed parallel to the baseline, with the racquet face perpendicular to the court.

Using the video system on court, we looked at examples of his service motion from "The Winning Edge" that showed just this, the backswing moving freely with the arm and racquet in the plane of the shoulders and parallel to the baseline. John picked out one key still frame, with the arm and racquet in line with the shoulders, parallel to the baseline, and the racquet face square, or perpendicular to the court surface.

Next I had John stand in position to serve and move through his wind up in slow motion until he reached the key position we had just identified . I had him close his eyes and make an internal kinetic image, in other words, visualize exactly what this position looked like and felt like inside his mind. I told him to project that mental image into space behind him like an imaginary template or blueprint and simply move his arm and racquet should move through this model image we had created.

John understood perfectly. I stepped back, held my breath, and watched. On the first serve he hit, half of the deviation in the backswing disappeared. Now that was exciting--and at that moment I knew that the visual tennis process was going to work for John.

Over the course of the two days on the court, we repeated the same process. John would hit serves. I would video. Then we would compare the motion to the model. We reviewed the model images from "Winning Edge." He would then recreate the physical position of the corrected backswing and visualize this key image as he executed the serve.

After a total of about 4 hours on the court--alternating between practice serves, playing points and video analysis, the deviation in his motion was almost completely gone.

The windup stayed parallel to the baseline with the racquet face perpendicular. The ball was coming off his racquet with a more solid and forceful sound. The result, his tournament results would prove, was an increase of 10-15 mph in service velocity during our work.

Satisfied with his backswing we went a bit further and tweaked his knee bend, increasing it slightly, again, to conform to the model images from "The Winning Edge."

The real test came that March in Chicago when John played his first tournament since the training. The results were as good as I could possibly have hoped.

The motion held together beautifully. For the tournament John served 60%, with his serves consistently registering in the 108 mph--115 mph range . In the final he served 15 aces and defeated his brother Patrick to win the event. I knew for sure that John was making the process work for him when I saw him step back and model the key backswing position at a key point in the final match.

The difference in the position of the arm and racket at the same point in the backswing.

A month later I went to Malibu and we repeated the 2-day training process. But there was little for me to do besides video John, try to hold my own in the rapid fire banter, and enjoy watching him workout with Patrick on the clay courts at the Riviera Country Club. Every time we checked the serve it was conforming beautifully to the model.

Later that year when John hired Larry Stefanki as his full time coach, I made Larry a tape showing the key images of "The Winning Edge," plus the before and after video of our work. They continued to use the tape to keep the serve on line.

It was fabulous to see John's run to a last semi-final at Wimbledon in 1992, where he lost to eventual champion Andre Agassi, and then to the quarterfinal of the U. S. Open later that year. John graciously acknowledged the role of our work in his comeback, and this was picked up in the television coverage, as well as in an article I did for "World Tennis."

From my own experience, I had always believed that the visual tennis training process would work at any level of the game. Now I was certain. In the rest of this series on the Visual Tennis approach, I'll show you how you can make it work for yourself on the critical issue of the hitting arm position on all the strokes.