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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Jim Courier [USA]Born: 17 August 1970
Career: 1988-99
Plays: Right-handed (two-handed backhand)
Peak rank: 1 (1992)
Peak Elo rating: 2,256 (1st place, 1992)
Major singles titles: 4
Total singles titles: 23
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Jim Courier’s forehand was so good that it made people stupid.
The book on the American was simple. Serve to the backhand. Avoid the forehand. Don’t let him set up points he can end with his forehand. Watch out, he’ll go inside-out with the forehand. And by the way, that forehand is a real weapon.
It was all true as far as it went. I love playing the contrarian, but I’m not going to try to convince you that his forehand wasn’t great. He hit a ton of them, he smacked it inside-out more often than any of his peers, and it would be silly to argue with the effectiveness of the bread-and-butter shot of a guy with four slam titles.
Except… there was a weakness buried in the strength, and his strongest rival spotted it. Courier held his own with almost every player of his era, winning 7 of 12 against Andre Agassi, taking 6 of 10 versus Stefan Edberg, and evenly splitting his 24 matches with Michael Chang. But he won only 4 of 20 encounters with Pete Sampras. Two of the victories were on clay–Sampras’s weakest surface by far–and in the other two, four of five sets were decided by tiebreak.
Sampras was good, but he wasn’t 16-and-4-against-Courier good. Pete acknowledged the Courier forehand, he praised the Courier forehand, and then he did what few of his peers would risk: He attacked the Courier forehand. In his book, The Champion’s Mind, Sampras outlines the strategy:
What I really liked to do with Jim was hit my second serve out wide to his forehand—that’s right, his fearsome forehand. You could accomplish two things by serving to Jim’s forehand–force him out of his comfort zone, and get him off balance so that you could exploit that backhand. With Jim, like Andre, you had to keep that ball out of the middle of the court, from where he could dictate with his forehand.
Returning is different from rallying, and Jim didn’t like to hit that forehand return because he had less time to wind up and tag it like he could in a rally. This was such a gem of strategy that when [Courier’s former coach] Jose Higueras agreed to work with me near the end of my career, he confessed that I had been the first player to recognize and exploit that weakness in Jim’s game.
The strategy wouldn’t have worked for everyone–few men could serve like Sampras. But there were plenty of guys on tour with the offensive weapons to do something similar, like Edberg, Michael Stich, Goran Ivanišević, and Richard Krajicek, just to name a few. Courier won 38% of return points against Edberg and Ivanišević, compared to a mere 30.5% against Pete. It was tough to think more than one stroke ahead when a weapon like that forehand sat waiting on the other side of the court.
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Between 1991 and 1993, Jim Courier won two Australian Opens and two French Opens, and he held the top spot in the ATP rankings for 58 weeks. As great as the tennis was, tactics did not exactly monopolize the headlines. Courier is only a few months younger than Andre Agassi–they briefly bunked together at the Nick Bollettieri Academy–and even when Jim was winning, Agassi hogged the spotlight with his controversial comments and off-court shenanigans.
The two men faced off at Roland Garros every year between 1989 and 1992. The first time, the unheralded Courier pulled off the upset. Two years later, he was still the underdog, but Agassi had yet to figure out how to win a major final. When they met for the 1991 title, Courier won in five sets.
Writing for Sports Illustrated, Curry Kirkpatrick was apparently disappointed that he couldn’t dunk on Andre, so he transferred some of the standard complaints about Agassi to the other brash young American:
Courier kept coming from behind to win a 3-6, 6-4, 2-6, 6-1, 6-4 match that was interesting only if you appreciate unforced errors (123 total), favor baseball caps on tennis players, and possess a surly ‘tude—not to mention a dirty, disheveled shirt that’s as far out there as Courier’s emotions, which, unfortunately, he sometimes shares with the public. For instance, how did he feel after reaching the quarterfinals in a major championship for the first time? “It doesn’t suck,” said Courier.
Kirkpatrick wasn’t alone. Observers saw a confident American–like Agassi–with a baseline game–like Agassi’s–who dressed a bit shabby–like Agassi–and spoke his mind–like Agassi. Little wonder that they lumped the two men together.
But there was one critical difference. Andre gained a reputation as a guy who didn’t win the matches he was supposed to win, a once-in-a-generation talent who didn’t care enough to dedicate himself to tennis. Courier was the opposite. Agassi said, “I don’t think he has a lot of natural talent to fall back on,” but Jimbo–who reminded more than a few fans of Jimmy Connors–worked harder than anybody, and he knew how to win.
The backhand was pretty good too
If you’re too young to remember Courier, just think of every comment you’ve ever heard about another working-class hero, David Ferrer.
Courier: “To me, tennis is trench warfare. I’m constantly digging, grinding and gutsing matches out.”
Mark Woodforde: “He won’t quit even if he’s down five-love in the final set. No one on the tour has more tenacity or a stronger will to win.”
Brad Gilbert: “He tries to the maximum on every single point of every game of every single set. He just has an amazingly high level of intensity during a match. I get the feeling he probably brushes his teeth ferociously.”
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And ferociously, Courier kept losing to Sampras, the one man who wasn’t afraid of Jim’s forehand.
Match Charting Project volunteers have logged every shot of 42 Courier matches, including all of his grand slam and Masters finals and semi-finals. Put all that data together, and we have a more complete perspective on the nuts and bolts of his game than opposing players and coaches did at the time. The further we dive into the detail, the smarter Sampras looks.
In those 42 matches, opponents served to Courier’s backhand 59% of the time. That number understates their preference, because Jimbo–like any player with a preferred wing–often positioned himself to increase his chances of hitting a forehand. He would most often move away from body serves so that he could return them from his forehand side. We can’t precisely quantify that bias, but if we count only serves that were clearly aimed at one corner of the box or the other, the to-the-backhand rate increases to 62%.
Courier congratulates Sampras (again)
When opponents served to his backhand side, Courier won 38% of the time. When they served to his forehand side, he won–wait for it–38% of the time.
Now, the analysis can’t stop here. Because Courier liked to return with his forehand, he was sometimes willing to accept a weaker return position in order to hit the shot he wanted. If he had won, say, 40% of forehand returns and 35% of backhand returns, it would’ve been smart of him to adjust his positioning to play more forehands, to move the numbers to–just tossing out hypotheticals here–39% and 36%, and so on. When players have a choice, whether between forehand and backhand, staying back versus approaching the net, or anything else, their winning percentages with the two options tend to converge. If one alternative is much better than the other, they’ll choose to take greater risks and pursue it more often until the winning-percentage gap isn’t so wide.
But there are plenty of serves that don’t offer the returner a choice. If the serve hits near the corner on the backhand side, it’s tough (though not impossible) to run around it and hit a forehand. Here are Courier’s results–across the 42 charted matches–on four categories of serves hit to the corners. I’ve included tour average winning percentages for comparison.
Direction Courier W% Tour W% Deuce: Wide (FH) 29% 32% Deuce: T (BH) 36% 31% Ad: T (FH) 26% 31% Ad: Wide (BH) 37% 34%
When a serve lands in either corner of the box, the returner is immediately at a disadvantage. Those average winning percentages in the low 30s are bad news. But when Courier was forced to hit a backhand, he nullified the advantage, far outperforming tour average. When opposing servers targeted the forehand corner, they got much better results.
Maybe those forehand-side numbers would’ve looked better if so many of the serves didn’t come off the racket of Pete Sampras. And perhaps Courier would’ve worked out a solution if the majority of the tour had started attacking his forehand. But Stefan Edberg, if you’re reading this: You think the 1993 Australian Open final might have turned out differently if you hit more than a quarter of your serves to Jim’s forehand?
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Of course, Jim Courier has a claim to the 107th spot on my all-time list that goes beyond the ability to cover for a forehand return that was worse than people thought.
Once the ball was in play, opponents avoided the forehand for good reason. In 1989, before Courier’s name was widely known, Agassi said, “[He’s] the most powerful player on tour. He’s like, ‘I’m going to hit this as hard as I can. Then when I get a short ball I’m going to hit it harder.’ He doesn’t even think out the point.” Once a little-league shortstop, Jimbo’s backhand probably inspired more baseball comparisons than any other shot in tennis. Writing for Sports Illustrated in 1992, Franz Lidz reached beyond the sports world for his metaphor: “He attacks the ball with the vigor of a lumberjack, smacking every shot as if it were his first.”
The fearsome forehand
My Forehand Potency (FHP) stat, based on Match Charting Project data, confirms the effectiveness of all that power. FHP combines winners, unforced errors, and strokes that set up winners into a single number that measures how much the forehand groundstroke contributed to a player’s success. Of the 131 players with at least 20 matches charted, Courier’s forehand ranks 7th, right behind Juan Martín del Potro and two spots above Novak Djoković. He’s a dozen places ahead of another man with a forehand that opponents prefer to avoid, Roger Federer.
Those results are due to much more than sheer power. By the time Courier won his first major in 1991, he was no longer the brainless ball-basher of Agassi’s description. At Indian Wells that year, he proclaimed, “Now I can hit and think at the same time.” Eight years later, he uttered the memorable line, “The dumber you are on the court, the better you’re going to play.” Yet his own experience doesn’t bear that out. Certainly his opponents could’ve benefited from a bit more savvy, as well.
Like Ferrer a couple of generations later, Courier proved that you could make up for a lot of things by working harder than everyone else. Lidz called his career “practically a hymn to the work ethic,” and Agassi recalls his former roommate going out for a run right after knocking him out of the 1989 French Open.
With early-career Andre as a perfect foil, Jimbo recognized that there was a lot more to tennis than natural gifts:
I’ve been reading about how I don’t have much talent. There are many different talents besides hitting a tennis ball. Having guts on the court is a talent; having desire is a talent; having courage to go for a shot when you are [down] love-40 is a talent.
Whatever word you use to describe those attributes, Courier had them, and he exploited them to the max. He even convinced some of the biggest servers in tennis history to aim their cannons in the wrong direction. What the hell, let’s call that a talent too.