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I knew that racket technology had ended serve-and-volley tennis, but I never really knew if there was a specific "moment in time" when it ended. Well, there was - in 1997, when Gustavo Kuerten won his first French Open using Luxilon polyester strings. This article says it better than I can - especially the video which shows Kuerten's returns dipping down at Sampras' feet at the net in a 2000 tournament. Because of these strings, players were now able to swing as hard as they could, off both wings, and almost never miss. Look at what the game is today - the best players can rally for hundreds of shots without missing, all the while swinging as hard as they can swing. Tennis is now a sport of who is in the best physical condition - there are twelve-year-old kids who can hit better ground strokes than many college players could a generation ago. Oct 8, 2015 - "1997: Gustavo Kuerten's Game-Changing Win with Polyester Strings" by Steve Tignor on tennis.com Pete Sampras was *so much better* than Gustavo Kuerten that it was a travesty that he lost, and Sampras will quite possibly be remembered as the last pure serve-and-volley player in history, thanks to these strings. A quote from the article: "By 2000, Kuerten was No. 1 in the world, and some of his fellow players began to whisper that his string should be banned for giving him an unfair advantage. Tour stringer Nate Ferguson has said that as he watched Guga dip passing shots at the feet of Pete Sampras on his way to the title at the Tennis Masters Cup (now called the World Tour Finals) in Lisbon in 2000, he wondered how anyone would ever be able to rush the net again. Ferguson’s thought proved prescient: Fifteen years later, now that polyester is the standard on tour, virtually everyone rips the ball with pace and spin the way Kuerten did back then, and few dare to venture to the net. The feel of natural gut is out; the power of poly is in." The game has been forever changed. I think it's a very similar concept to "clap skates" - the speed skates with blades that were only attached to the boot from the front, which interestingly caught on around the same time as Luxilon strings did in tennis (and, not long before Mark McGuire hit 70 home runs). This article explains it very well: Feb 15, 2014 - "How a Century-Old Skate Design Completely Changed Modern Speed Skating" by Bring Back (?) Anthony Mason on kinja.com I'm not being judgmental here - however, one thing technological advances do (as is touched on in the speed-skating article) is take away valid comparisons with past and present generations. Baseball - steroids excepted - is the one sport where the equipment was mandated to stay basically the same as it was almost one-hundred years ago, so it's much more reasonable (and fun!) to compare Ty Cobb to Rickey Henderson, than it is to compare Jack Kramer to Roger Federer.
