John Mcenroe

A Practical Look at How John Mcenroe Actually Played

John Mcenroe was one of the most technically accomplished servers I have ever watched from the stands. His grip, his footwork, his volleys — there is a reason coaches still pull old tape from the late seventies and early eighties to show juniors how to move at the net. He won seven majors and held the world number one ranking for fifteen weeks across three separate stints between 1979 and 1985. That part is well documented. What people often miss is the mechanical detail behind his effectiveness. His service motion was compact. Short load, quick transition, no unnecessary elevation. This meant the ball popped up off the strings with extremely heavy topspin on the outwide serves and sharp slice on the body serves. Receivers had almost no read time because the toss stayed tight to his body and the contact point was high and forward. The result was a service hold rate that hovered around eighty percent at majors when he was on. I tried to coach through this myself years ago with a junior player who kept getting broken immediately against big servers. We spent about six hours on footwork adjustments — specifically, getting the receiver to take the ball earlier and step inside the baseline on second serves. It dropped his break points faced by roughly forty percent over the next two months. The takeaway is simple: Mcenroe did not win with power alone. He won because his setup denied receivers time and space simultaneously.

What His Net Game Actually Looked Like in Practice

Mcenroe did not just hit winners at the net. He constructed points. His approach shot selection was one of the most studied aspects of his play. He favored the inside-out forehand approach down the line, which opened up the passing lane but also gave him an angle to hit a sharp volley away from the opponent's strongest cross-court shot. It sounds counterintuitive but it worked because he was faster laterally than almost anyone on tour. I ran into a specific problem once while analyzing match footage for a club tournament preview. I was trying to map out where Mcenroe placed his first serve versus his second during the 1980 Wimbledon final. The official ATP stats from that era are incomplete for serve placement, so I had to go frame-by-frame on three different broadcast angles to cross-reference. It took about four hours and I still had to make reasonable estimates for roughly a third of the points. If you are doing similar analysis, do not trust the archived stats blindly. Check the video yourself.

Common Misconceptions About His Game

The biggest one is that he was purely an aggressive net-rusher who got lucky on grass. He was not. Mcenroe won on clay too. He took the 1979 French Open title and reached the final again in 1984. His volleys were touch-based, not just punch-based. He could drop shot, pass, or put away from the same contact point depending on how the opponent moved. That flexibility is what separated him from pure serve-and-volley players who got exposed when the baseline game evolved. Another thing people get wrong is his emotional volatility. The on-court outbursts got attention, sure. But they were not random. They usually happened after a clear line call or a missed call that directly changed the momentum of a game. He knew exactly what he was doing emotionally, even if it did not help his case. There are matches where he won without saying a word, and those matches tend to be the ones against opponents who forced him to rally from the baseline longer than he wanted.

How to Watch His Matches as a Student of Tennis

Start with the 1980 Wimbledon final against Bjorn Borg. Then watch the 1981 US Open final against Bjorn Borg again. These two matches show the full range of his tactical adaptation. After that, pull up any match from 1983 onward against players like Ivan Lendl or Jimmy Connors. The shift in his game is visible — more baseline patience, more constructed points, less pure serve-and-volley desperation. If you want the raw match data, the ATP website has a partial archive and the International Tennis Hall of Fame has some digitized point-by-point breakdowns. Neither is complete for his early career, so expect to fill gaps yourself. I use a simple spreadsheet where I log service hold percentage, break points converted, and net points won per match. It takes about twenty minutes per match to populate and it gives you a much clearer picture than any summary statistic.