Six of the handful of greatest tennis players ever: Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Raphael Nadal, Martina Navratilova, Rod Laver, and Monica Seles, were lefties. This is way out of proportion to the population, and is undoubtedly not a coincidence.
Lefties have a number of advantages in sports, especially one-on-one, face-to-face sports like tennis. Compare lefties' success in tennis to golf, where only seven lefties have ever even won a PGA tournament, and the only really famous one was Phil Mickelson, who is not on anyone's all-time top 10 list.
To make matters more extreme, there is a sense in which tennis favors lefties structurally, that is, in the rules. Here are the reasons that lefties have such an advantage in tennis:
1. Abstract familiarity. You have to spend half your time worrying about what your opponent is doing. Even if there weren't any specifics, when a lefty plays a righty, the lefty is dealing with what he does almost every time he plays tennis. The righty is doing something weird and uncomfortable.
2. Specific shots. This is related to #1, but is really different. Lefties are always developing the shots that are most effective against righties. But, guess what, RIGHTIES are also always developing the shots that are most effective against righties. After all, in both cases, that's what you usually face, a righty. Nobody is spending a lot of time practicing the shots that are most effective against lefties, why bother?
Here's a perfect example: the serve from the ad court. A lefty will generate enormous spin on the ball, causing it to spin away and to the left of the receiver, pulling him way off the court, and leaving most of the court open. That's if he even gets to the ball. Such a serve is not only spinning away and off the court, but it's hit to the backhand side of the righty. That's the weaker side for almost all players, and in any case has nowhere near the reach of the forehand. Even if he gets to the ball, he's way out of position, has left the court wide open, and has not made a strong return. And you clearly don't want to try to run around it and hit a forehand--you might be on the next court when you hit it.
McEnroe, in particular, totally cleaned up with that serve. [Edited a year later to add: I just saw McEnroe play live at age 51. I used the wrong tense in this sentence.]
But, wait a minute, can't a righty do the same thing to a lefty from the deuce court? Of course he can. But developing a serve like that takes a ton of practice. Why would a righty spend all that time to develop something he's not going to use much, since spin serves all twist comfortably into the forehand of almost all his opponents.
The same thing goes for lots of other strokes and situations.
3. A structural advantage. When a lefty and righty play each other, the righty has the greater advantage in points that start from the deuce court, the lefty in points that start from the ad court (the reason is a generalization of the point I made above about serving from the ad court). Now you would think that a point is a point, and mathematically it feels like it should be. But the reality is that players push much harder on points that could win the game for one of the players. That means the other points are a little more 50-50 than the decisive points, because a whole lot more randomness comes in when the pressure is off. But the decisive points, from which the game can be won, are: 40-0, 40-15, 40-30, ad in, ad out, 30-40, 15-40, and 0-40, and these are more completely determined by the skills of the players involved.
Of those 8 decisive points, six of them start from the ad court, where the lefty has the significant advantage. This was explained to me by Jimmy Bollettieri, eldest son of the famous coach, Nick Bollettieri. I didn't quite get it at first, but eventually I realized how true it is.
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