Former World No. 1 Chris Evert has questioned Novak Djokovic’s big change to his serving motion ahead of his campaign at the Australian Open in Melbourne.
Evert and former Australian Open semifinalist Patrick McEnroe were on a conference call with ESPN. Speaking about Djokovic’s chances at the Open, McEnroe reckoned it would be tough for the Serbian to achieve success initially, but was hopeful of seeing some great results once Djokovic settled down in rhythm with his tinkered serve.
McEnroe said: “I’ll start with the elbow situation and the serve. Obviously you don’t want to go into your first tournament, first of all being a major. Second of all, you don’t want to go into it with a brand-new stroke of any kind. We’ll have to see how it looks in match play, number one. He has tinkered with his serve quite a bit over the years. If you remember a number of years ago, he had some sort of serving yips when he was still No. 3 in the world. He was able to iron them out, take over No. 1. If there’s anybody that can tinker with it, probably be successful, it would be him. More important than that I think for Djokovic is just the overall health of that arm and the elbow going forward. We’re not going to know that, I don’t think he’s going to know that, until he gets out there in competition.”
Evert added: “Wherever you have had a certain serve or a certain swing for so long, to tweak it even a little bit, you don’t want to do that your first tournament back, a Grand Slam tournament. Like you say, you want to have a lot of matches, a lot of smaller tournaments, to see if it’s going to really improve your serve, if it’s going to really help the elbow. I mean, he’s a big question mark. Obviously he’s a big question mark. He needs to play. He’s playing a couple exhibitions, but then you get to a place where you have to play seven matches in a row in the course of two weeks. That’s a whole different story. That’s really testing the elbow to the highest level. I think we can only speculate at this time what’s going to happen with him. You know he’s in great season. Off-season, he was one of the hardest workers ever. You know physically he’s got to be in great shape. The question mark, again, is how the elbow is going to hold up.”
“You talked about it, and tennis is a lot different now. There are a lot of injuries out there. The players are getting more injured. The whole mechanics of the game are different, the grips, the stances, the swing, the spin. There’s a lot more open stance now. You don’t have a lot of time to turn or rotate. You’re sort of using your arm and wrist a little bit more. It’s just not as efficient. I mean, I think it’s a whole new different game from when Patrick and I were playing. In our era, and I was even years ahead of him, we didn’t see this many injuries. I think it’s because of the new equipment, the faster courts, the faster balls — not faster courts, but the balls are different. I think that it’s really changed the mechanics of tennis right now.”
