In 2022, I’m counting down the 128 best players of the last century. With luck, we’ll get to #1 in December. Enjoy!
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Lleyton Hewitt [AUS]Born: 24 February 1981
Career: 1998-2016
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (2001)
Peak Elo rating: 2,192 (1st place, 2002)
Major singles titles: 2
Total singles titles: 30
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It was impossible not to have an opinion about Lleyton Hewitt. In 2002, when Hewitt ruled the men’s tennis roost, Billie Jean King said:
How can you not love Hewitt? He’s incredible for all of us that aren’t 6’2″…. He’s giving everybody hope again to play this sport. This guy loves it so much he just loves every ball, he’s just like… give me the ball. God, I love him. How can you not love this guy?
Plenty of people were ready to answer Billie Jean’s question. In the London Times in 2003, Simon Barnes spoke for many fans as he basked in Lleyton’s first-round exit at Wimbledon:
He looked–and behaved–as if he had left his skateboard parked outside. … He was the most unpopular champion since Jimmy Connors did his brat’s stuff in 1974 and has the air of a stormtrooper who has been ostracised by the other stormtroopers because they find him a bit on the fanatical side.
Part of the problem was that he became a star so early. It’s a rare teenager who finds himself on the world stage and doesn’t act like a jerk. When he was 18, he proclaimed that the Australian public was stupid. Two years later, he called umpire Andreas Egli a “spastic,” and then gave one of the worst apologies in the history of lame athlete apologies: “If I did say it, it’s not something I’m proud of, that’s for sure. I apologise to whoever it may be.”
He hinted that a line judge was giving calls to James Blake because both men were Black. He hated the practice of congratulating opponents on excellent shots. He constantly yelled C’MON!–every two seconds, according to Greg Rusedski–even if it was his opponent’s mistake that decided the point. When Juan Iganacio Chela spit at him on a change of ends in 2005, we all knew that it was wrong… but we understood.
Many of Hewitt’s peers were careful to make the distinction between his on-court and off-court personalities. He was pleasant enough out of the heat of competition, at least if he wasn’t talking to journalists. But with a match on the line, as Roy Emerson put it, “He plays every point as if it’s World War II.” Inevitably, there were casualties.
Nobody liked to face him–partly because of the abrasiveness, and partly because Lleyton usually won. But it was impossible not to respect the way he played the game.
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Hewitt certainly didn’t look like an elite tennis player. He stood only five-feet-ten-inches tall, and when he arrived on tour as an outspoken 16-year-old, he weighed barely 130 pounds. Reporters couldn’t decide whether he looked more like a surfer or a skateboarder.
Vince Spadea, who played him in the quarter-finals of the 1998 Adelaide tournament, thought he looked “weak, inexperienced, unrehearsed, and unpolished.” Three sets later, Spadea was sent packing and Hewitt was in the semi-finals. The teenager backed up the win with a two-tiebreak victory over an out-of-form Andre Agassi. He took the title in a third-set breaker over fellow Aussie Jason Stoltenberg.
Hewitt in 1998
Over the years, Hewitt was often criticized for his apparent arrogance. But as baseball great Dizzy Dean once said, it ain’t bragging if you can do it. Hewitt became the third-youngest player ever to win an ATP title, behind only Aaron Krickstein and Michael Chang. He was just getting started.
In 1999, he beat top-ten opponents six times, and won four singles rubbers for the champion Australian Davis Cup team. Hewitt kicked off his 2000 season with 13 straight victories Down Under, beat Pete Sampras for the Queen’s Club title, and reached the semi-finals of the US Open. He became the youngest player ever to qualify for the season-ending Masters Cup, where he beat Sampras again.
By 2001, no one was underestimating the brash young Aussie. With wins in Sydney, Queen’s Club, and ‘s-Hertogenbosch already under his belt, he advanced to his first major final at the US Open, where he whipped Sampras, 7-6(4), 6-1, 6-1. He blitzed the field at the Masters Cup, scoring five top-ten wins in a week with the loss of only two sets. Aged 20 years and 9 months, he became the youngest number one in ATP history.
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Pete Sampras was one of the great servers in history, and he was not accustomed to losing sets by scores like 6-0 and 6-1. Before the 2001 US Open final, the only men to win such lopsided sets from Pete in the previous five years were Agassi and Hewitt himself. Andre was the only man in memory who could return like Hewitt, and the Australian was a better mover. After the 2001 US Open final, Pete said, “The kid is so quick it’s unbelievable.”
How about this for unbelievable: Going into the US Open final, Sampras had held 87 straight service games, 24 of them in the quarter-finals against Agassi. Hewitt broke him six times in the championship match. Pete won 73% of his service points in his first six matches at the tournament and less than 55% against Lleyton.
Hewitt pulled the same trick at Wimbledon the next summer. David Nalbandian, his opponent in the final, was another baseliner. His serve was nothing like Pete’s. In his first six matches at the Championships, he won 63% of his service points. Lleyton still had the same effect he had on Sampras, holding the Argentinian to a pathetic 44%, breaking him eight times. The unlikely grass-court final, in which neither player serve-and-volleyed a single time, was over in less than two hours. Hewitt won, 6-1, 6-3, 6-2.
Sampras and Nalbandian had nothing to feel bad about. Lleyton defanged everybody. Between 1999 and 2002, Hewitt broke serve in at least 187 consecutive matches. The streak might run as high as 230 matches, though I haven’t been able to determine whether he broke Sébastien Grosjean in a 1999 Davis Cup dead rubber. Either way, it’s the longest such streak in the 30-plus years that the ATP has recorded break point statistics.
What’s less clear is how he did it. Sampras wrote, “It was very tough to get the ball by him, or to ace him.” Yet in the US Open final, Pete still hit aces on more than 10% of his serves–lower than Sampras’s average, but not by a wide margin. Roger Federer aced him 12% of the time, a better rate than he managed against the tour in general.
C’MON!
The Match Charting Project has logged 120 of his matches. It’s not a random sample–it’s biased toward finals and late-round grand slam matches against quality opponents, so it understates his peformance in general. In those matches, he put the return in play only 67.6% of the time, a rate that both was and is below average. But simply getting the ball back wasn’t the point. Like Agassi, Hewitt took his return position with aggression in mind, accepting that some serves would get past him. The ones he could reach, he sent back with interest.
Sampras wasn’t alone in the belief that Lleyton was particularly hard to ace, or that he got an unusually large number of serves back. It’s understandable that Hewitt’s rivals got it wrong. Agassi considered him to be “among the best shot selectors in the history of tennis,” and he loved a target. Those skills were enough to end the domination of serve-and-volleyers at Wimbledon and to alter the trajectory of the game as a whole.
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When Hewitt retired at the 2016 Australian Open, Tom Perrotta of The Wall Street Journal explained the magnitude of his effect on men’s tennis:
Before Hewitt, there used to be a clear division between defensive and offensive players. Hewitt blurred that line, which [Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic] have since erased. Like Hewitt, they can all defend with bursts of speed and quick hands, but also attack from a defensive position. Like Hewitt, they have no glaring weaknesses.
Lleyton’s former coach, Darren Cahill, told Perrotta:
The past champions of every era always had a place to get to, a safe zone. Pete’s backhand wasn’t that strong. Andre’s movement wasn’t that strong. You go through every single player and they all had a slight weakness that you could attack. Lleyton of that period, he did not.
You could say the same about any of the Big Four. Early returns suggest that Carlos Alcaraz fits the same mold. The best players of the post-Hewitt era have better and worse parts of their games, to be sure, but it is no longer possible to reach the top while covering up for a true weakness like the Sampras backhand.
Hewitt had an even more direct impact on the modern game. He forced Federer to develop the game style that would win him 20 major titles.
Hewitt (left) and Federer in 2004
Lleyton is only six months older than Fed, but he owned their early rivalry. He won their first three meetings, and when he came through a five-setter in the 2003 Davis Cup semi-finals, he led the head-to-head, seven matches to two. In those days, Federer serve-and-volleyed more, and he frequently attacked the net behind middling approach shots. It worked well–after all, Roger was ranked third in the world by the 2003 Davis Cup encounter–just not against the Australian.
Federer said, “Lleyton made me figure out my game.”
Starting in 2004, Roger won their next 15 meetings. It was sometimes close–they went to four sets at majors on three different occasions–but the result was never really in doubt. Hewitt didn’t win 48% of the total points played in any of them. More data from the Match Charting Project illustrates how Federer changed his approach to solve this particular puzzle. He serve-and-volleyed less and less, and he was incrementally more careful about approaching the net at all:
Match Winner S&V% Fed App% 2002 Masters Cup Hewitt 16% 26% 2003 Davis Cup Hewitt 24% 23% 2004 Aus Open Federer 7% 19% 2004 Wimbledon Federer 9% 19% 2004 US Open Federer 7% 19% … 2005 Wimbledon Federer 3% 9%
The final column shows Fed’s net approaches, as a percentage of total points played. By 2005, even on the grass at Wimbledon, he’d learned not to challenge Hewitt with anything but a can’t-miss approach shot.
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It’s odd to think of the brash teenage champion turning into one of the game’s elder statesmen, but tennis fans tend to embrace almost anyone if they stick around long enough. Hewitt didn’t say goodbye until the 2016 Australian Open, eight years after a hip injury essentially ended his chances of returning to the game’s elite.
What was once “abrasive” became “no-nonsense,” and the on-court behavior that used to be called “obnoxious” was recast as “fiery.” Hewitt’s intensity reached a particularly high pitch when he played for his country. He was a key part of the champion Australian teams in 1999 and 2003, he handled singles duties as late as 2015, and he wrote in his own name for doubles after he became team captain. He and John Peers took the Bryan Brothers to five sets in 2016, and they won a match two years later.
The 1999 Aussie champion Davis Cup team
Hewitt said early in his career, “[W]hen I set my schedule at the start of the year, Davis Cup is the first thing that I write down.” He never wavered from that commitment. Lleyton holds just about every Australian Davis Cup record there is. He played 40 ties, winning 42 singles rubbers and another 16 in doubles.
No one compared him to surfers or skateboarders anymore, but as retirement approached, Lleyton was still the same player he had always been. Wally Masur, the Davis Cup captain who preceded him, said in 2015, “The very first point I saw him play was as a junior at the US Open. He hasn’t changed a bit since then. He’s full of enthusiasm…. I used to say: ‘Whatever you think about Lleyton Hewitt, if you pay the price of admission, he gives you full value.'”
The early, peak Hewitt–and his effect on an opponent–remains impossible to forget. “I’ve always enjoyed watching him. Playing against him has been cool at times,” Federer said at Lleyton’s final Wimbledon. “Not always so much fun.”