New York – Players will say that being left-handed in tennis is considered an important advantage. The angle at which left-handed people can serve the right-handed backhand in the ad court is almost mythical in its effectiveness.
It was clearly in Toni Nadal’s mind when he famously proposed that his nephew Rafael Nadal play left-handed. Nadal is of course right-handed. But throughout his illustrious tennis career, he was left-handed.
Jack Draper, the world’s No. 5, grew up idolizing Nadal and is one of the right-handed but left-handed players.
“I write right-handed, kick the ball with my right foot, and do everything right-handed,” Draper said this year in Indian Wells, California. “When I was young, I used to hit a wall so I picked it up with my left hand. That’s how I always did it. I couldn’t throw it with my left hand until I was 15. I really had to work on it.
Three-time Grand Slam winner Angelique Carver also did everything else right-handed, but played tennis on the left. So does Cam Nolly, who played Novak Djokovic on Friday in the third round of the US Open.
However, the left-handed player will be playing on the right, including America’s Tommy Paul, who lost in the third round on Saturday.
“That’s a bit strange,” Paul told reporters for the US Open. “I’m all messed up. I write left-handed, eat left-handed, I’m left-handed, but I play all the sports right-handed and kick with my right foot.
“I’m very angry about it. When they handed me the racket, I grabbed it with my right hand. My mother is the same. My mother plays all the sports to the right and writes left hand. When Draper said he was right-handed but left handed, he added:
From 10% to 12% of the world’s population are left-handed, including 11 of the top 100 male players and 7 of the top 100 women.
Some players were hitting left-handed shots when pushed out of position, including five-time major winner Maria Sharapova. As a young teenager, Sharapova even experimented with playing left-handed properly, but eventually returned to right-handed. Or Marion Bartoli, who is left-handed for most of the time, was right-handed and hit the ball with both hands on each side.
Leila Fernandez, a Canadian who finished runner-up at the US Open in 2021, was either left or right-handed. “You can do a few things with your right hand,” she said in New York. “I prefer to throw baseball with my right hand and sign with my right hand, but I write essays with my left hand. I’m a bit odd like that. Anything that comes naturally to me. Tennis has always been left-handed.”
The other players, surprisingly, were left-handed in most cases, but chose to play tennis with their right hand. Maureen Connolly was encouraged by his coach to switch from left to right, while Australians Ken Rosewall and Margaret Court were encouraged by their respective fathers to be right-handed.
It didn’t hurt them. Connolly won nine slams in the 1950s when tennis was officially still amateur. Rosewall won eight single majors, with the court winning 24, and together with Djokovic, he won the co-top of the best list of all-time.
When Croatian player Borna Kolik first went to play tennis, his father told his coach he was doing it all with his left hand. However, when he was asked to pick up a racket, Colick surprised his father.
“Unfortunately, I did it on my right,” Korick told the Tennis Major. Spaniards Carlos Moya and Paula Badoza are both left-handed in life, but right-handed in court, and Badoza once told the tennis channel, “Maybe I would have been a better player if I was left-handed.”
And sometimes players switch for other reasons.
British Roger Taylor, a left-handed serve and bory expert who reached the Wimbledon semi-finals three times in the 1960s and 1970s, suffered shoulder problems later in his life and learned how to serve right-handed people to continue playing in senior events.