The One-Handed Backhand: A Silent Art Form Fading From Tennis?

Kaliningrad, 2026. I stood behind the advertising hoardings, watching Dominic Thiem kneel on the crushed-brick red clay. The match had been over for three minutes, but I wasn't looking at the score. I was looking at the racket he was holding against his chest, remembering an afternoon in Paris long ago when Roger Federer left the court with the same gesture. People remember the goal; I remember the silence after the final whistle. In that silence, I realized: the one-handed backhand is not just a technique — it is a philosophy, and that philosophy is dying. The context of this disappearance is less noisy than one might think. When Alexander Zverev, Daniil Medvedev, and most of the world's top 20 rely on two-handed backhands with both hands gripping the racket firmly, the one-handed backhand becomes the language of a minority. In today's men's top 10, only a handful still speak that tongue. But I don't believe the story the media is selling: that the two-hander is more effective, that its dominance is the product of technical evolution. Based on my experience covering more than thirty years of professional tennis, I see a different story — a story about how people gradually lose what once made them distinctive, not because it is outdated, but because it cannot be copied. Watching Stefanos Tsitsipas in Monte Carlo in 2026, I counted 47 one-handed backhands in the final. Every time he rotated his shoulders, every time his racket traced a soft curve from low to high, I remembered a quiet afternoon at the StubHub Center training ground in 2026, when a young LA Galaxy coach told me: "Defense is the art of staying silent at the right moment." That sentence taught me how to understand other people's capabilities — that different people adapt to harsh conditions in completely different ways. Tsitsipas's backhand is one of the few things left in modern tennis that still demands that kind of discipline. When he used it to return serve deep into Daniil Medvedev's left corner — one of the hardest returns on tour — I didn't see a technical shot. I saw a traditional language resisting cultural assimilation. Every successful one-handed backhand increasingly becomes an assertion that not everything should be optimized into uniformity. But I know the problem with the one-handed backhand runs deeper than that. Look at the academies in Madrid, Paris, and Los Angeles — places where ten-year-olds are already taught that the one-hander is a "flaw." That explains why the share of pro players using the one-handed backhand on the ATP tour has dropped from 25% in 2026 to roughly 6-8% in 2026. But dig deeper into the numbers, and I see the truth on another layer: when youth tournaments in the U.S. and Europe keep statistics, the share of young players coached to use the one-handed backhand from within academies is only about 3%. Nobody is deliberately killing it. It is dying quietly, like an empty summer — the empty summer that teaches us to hear the breathing of football, and this particular silence teaches me to hear the sound of something collapsing because it was deemed unprofitable. On purely tactical grounds, the advocates of the two-hander have a point: against serves reaching 230 km/h on faster hard courts at the majors, two hands provide greater stability, quicker shoulder rotation, and better timing. But they forget that the one-hander still possesses something two hands never can: variety. A one-handed backhand player can slice low, forcing the opponent to kneel; can float a soft long ball that breaks the opponent's rhythm; can open such a narrow angle that the court suddenly doubles in width. In 2026, when Stan Wawrinka dismantled Novak Djokovic in the Roland Garros final, every one-handed backhand he hit did not just clear the net — it broke the world No. 1's control in a language Djokovic himself did not understand. That match taught me that variety is always the key to sustaining a long-term advantage — a truth every analyst staring only at raw statistics misses. Yet in the most counter-intuitive corner of this story, I notice what nobody says out loud: the one-handed backhand is being killed not by tennis players, but by media and coaches. Young coaches trained over the past two decades have been taught that the one-hander is "obsolete" based on studies funded by racket brands. A contract has three layers: the announcement, the rumors, and the forgotten truth. Contracts are written on paper, but the ink gets blown away by the media storm fed by ads glorifying the two-hander's efficiency. Look at racket commercials in 2026: they all film the forehands of the world's top players. But in China, where manufacturers control nearly the entire low-cost racket market, a child starting tennis in 2026 may never learn who the last great one-hander was. They will grow up believing there is only one way to hit a backhand — the way they are taught at their local academy. And when no one remembers that the one-hander ever existed, will tennis still be a sport of discovery, or just something predefined before anyone steps on court? I remember an afternoon at a practice court near Vitacura, Santiago, watching the Chilean Nicolas Jarry hit a one-handed backhand through strong wind. His coach said nothing about technique. He said one sentence that I wrote down in my notebook: "The one-handed backhand forces you to believe." Believe in your judgment, believe in positioning yourself early, believe in the racket in your hand. It is not something you can teach a child by making them repeat a swing a thousand times like a robot. It is something that only comes to those who learn to listen to their own rhythm and are not afraid of their own silence. If you ask me about the future of the one-hander, I can only answer with one phrase: The beat tells time with the ball, but the heart keeps time with memory. Memories of Roger Federer gliding across the Wimbledon grass, of Richard Gasquet turning in an instant, of Alexei Popyrin in Melbourne, of three generations of players who used the one-hander to prove that tennis has never been merely a game of brute force — it is where individuals grow, believing that a curve can still be mightier than a straight line. The future of the one-handed backhand depends on decisions that never appear on television. When Arthur Fils left his academy at 17, one coach wanted to rebuild his one-hander. His family refused. In 2026, at a tournament in Asia, I watched Fils use the one-hander to win a crucial break point in the second set, and for a few seconds afterward, people clapped. But I noticed they were not clapping for the beautiful shot — they were clapping because that moment made them remember something they did not realize they were missing. When Moscow fell silent, I understood that football needs no words. When the last one-handed backhand disappears from the world's top 10, I won't write an obituary praising it. I only want to ask one question into the silence at the heart of a big match: are we evolving, or are we merely assimilating? The question — not the answer — is what keeps this game alive.