The Greatest One-Handed Backhands of the Open Era, Nos. 6-3: Richard Gasquet and Stan Wawrinka make their appearances

Our five-part series on The Greatest One-Handed Backhands of the Open Era continues today. Here's the list so far:

• No. 20: Gabriela Sabatini
• No. 19: Dominic Thiem
• No. 18: Amelie Mauresmo
• No. 17: Guillermo Vilas
• No. 16: Gaston Gaudio
• No. 15: Evonne Goolagong
• No. 14: Tommy Haas
• No. 13: Billie Jean King
• No. 12: Ash Barty
• No. 11: Nicolas Almagro
• No. 10: Arthur Ashe
• No. 9: Stefan Edberg
• No. 8: Carla Suarez Navarro
• No. 7: Rod Laver

Today, we reveal the four players whose backhands just missed silver and gold.

No. 6: Gustavo Kuerten

Twenty-year-old Guga brought a breath of fresh and colorful air to Paris in 1997. The 66th-ranked Brazilian’s enchanted romp to the Roland Garros title that year was one of the most surprising and popular breakthroughs in tennis history. Kuerten played with a contagious joy over those two weeks, and the French took to his loose limbs, his laid-back surfer style, his highly-coordinated blue-and-yellow outfits, and his flair from the baseline. Much of that flair came from his backhand side.

By the mid-’90s, the single-hander was fading from the game, but it wasn’t dead yet; Thomas Muster had won the title at Roland Garros with it two years earlier. But Kuerten introduced what would become the 21st-century version of the shot, with its sweeping, expressive upward arc, to Parisian fans who know tennis art. He was aided by another innovation that he helped to pioneer: Luxilon polyester string. Kuerten became the first player to win a major title with the spin-accelerating poly, and he wouldn’t be the last.

Still, it wasn’t all about the string, or even the spin, for Guga. He was a sneaky-tall 6’3”, and unlike some other one-handed players, he was adept at taking the ball high in his strike zone and drilling it for flat winners to the corners. The shot led him to two more French Open titles, the year-end No. 1 ranking in 2000, and back-to-back wins over Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi on in an indoor hard court in Lisbon at that year’s season-ending championships.

Did the stress of his backhand also lead Kuerten to a career-shortening hip injury? Kuerten first underwent surgery on the joint in 2002, and was never a consistent threat again. But he did have one more moment of glory, back where it started. In 2004 in Paris, Kuerten handed Roger Federer his only loss at a Slam that year. Federer had a similarly sweeping one-handed backhand, but on that day Kuerten’s stood supreme, and the French fans still loved him for it.

No. 5: Richard Gasquet

“Richard G., 9 years old, the champion that France awaits?” In 1996, this question appeared on the cover of a French tennis magazine. The “Richard G.” in question, of course, was Gasquet, who was pictured in mid-swing.

The answer to the magazine’s question, we would eventually learn, was “not quite.” Gasquet was ranked as high as No. 7, and made the semifinals at Wimbledon and the US Open. But in the era of the Big Three, he has remained firmly in the tour’s second tier.

Yet that cover was prescient in one way: Gasquet was shown hitting a one-handed backhand. This is not an easy stroke for a third-grader to pull off; in the photo, it looks like he’s struggling to get the racquet above his head. But the effort would prove to be worth it, because Gasquet’s one-hander was the backhand that many tennis fans all over the world had indeed been waiting to see.

As an adult, this native of Béziers, on the southern coast of France, has had no trouble lifting his racquet high in the air, at both the start and the end of his stroke. When he has time to set up, Gasquet’s backhand begins with an elegantly elaborate take-back, in which he curls the frame above and around his head. From there, he can snap up on it for topspin, or, if his timing is sharp, drive right through it with jaw-dropping flat pace. Perhaps even more than Nicolas Almagro’s and Carla Suarez Navarro’s, Gasquet’s is the most aesthetically pleasing one-handed backhand drive of the Open Era.

As far as its effectiveness goes, the shot has had its advantages and drawbacks. Gasquet could only be so aggressive on returns with it, and Rafael Nadal in particular has exploited it with his left-handed topspin forehand—as a pro, the Spaniard is 18-0 against his former junior rival.

But when Gasquet heats up from the backhand side, there are few more thrilling sights in tennis. The winners comes in bunches, with virtually every swing of the racquet, as do the shrieks from the crowd. You’re left wondering how anyone can vaporize a ball like that, with just one arm, swinging across his body. Gasquet’s backhand was tennis’ version of a microwave.

Maybe the best of all of Richard G’s backhands came nine years after his famous magazine cover, at Monte Carlo in 2005. He was 18, playing close to home in one of his first big tour events, against Federer, who was at the peak of his early powers. Gasquet clinched the upset in a third-set tiebreaker, with a running, screaming backhand that he blasted from the back of the court, and which touched down just inside the baseline.

Gasquet wouldn’t go on to have many more wins as spectacular as that one. Fortunately for us, though, he would hit thousands more backhands every bit as perfect.

No. 4: Ken Rosewall

One day in the early 1950s, the American tennis writer Al Laney was sitting with former French great René Lacoste, watching the annual tournament at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in New Jersey. After chatting about old times for an hour or so, Laney suddenly saw Lacoste’s “face light up as though a switch had been turned on.”

Two men had just walked on court to play a match: Dick Savitt, a former Wimbledon champion, and Ken Rosewall, an Australian teenager. Laney began to talk about Savitt, assuming that this was the player who had piqued Lacoste’s interest. But Lacoste quickly corrected him.

“No, it is the little one,” Lacoste said, pointing toward Rosewall. “A beautiful player, and so young!”

There was one shot of the little Aussie’s in particular that Lacoste loved most.

“Each time Rosewall pulled one of his spinning backhands into a corner to beat his heavier-footed opponent,” Laney said, “René would smile his shy smile.”

Laney quickly came to agree with Lacoste’s assessment of Rosewall. “In the bang-bang power-game era, he was an artist,” he wrote of the man ironically known as Muscles. Rosewall learned his art from his father, Robert, a grocer in the Sydney suburbs who owned three tennis courts. Ken was a natural lefty who began by using two hands on both sides, until Robert made him into a more conventional figure for the time: A right-hander with a one-handed backhand. That shot was his strength from the beginning. As a junior, Rosewall was noted for running around his forehand to hit his backhand whenever he could.

In his early years, Rosewall was a perfect foil for his friend and fellow Aussie Lew Hoad. Where the athletic Hoad played a powerfully athletic game, the 5’7” Rosewall honed the subtler, precision-oriented elements of his craft. He developed into a serve-and-volleyer, but he never developed his serve into a weapon of its own. What he did have that no one else had was a backhand that was acknowledged to be the best of its era.

Rosewall’s one-handed stroke of choice was a hard slice. On returns, he could drop it at a charging opponent’s feet; on lobs, he had knack for sending it deep and over his opponent’s non-hitting side; on passing shots, he could thread the ball into the tiniest opening. Rosewall’s backhand was steady enough to win him two titles at Roland Garros—15 years apart—and deadly enough to get him to 10 major finals on grass, six of which he won.

Rosewall’s backhand also brought him his most famous win, over his longtime rival Rod Laver, in the 1972 WCT Finals in Dallas. Down 4-5 in the fifth-set tiebreaker, Rosewall came up with two backhand return winners that even Laver had never seen from him, or anyone, before.

Three years later, though, Rosewall’s vintage one-hander finally had to bow to the march of time. It was no match for the two-fisted version used by the game’s new No. 1, Jimmy Connors, who decimated Rosewall in the 1974 Wimbledon and US Open finals.

Rosewall’s backhand was among the last of the great hard slice one-handers, and would never be improved upon in the Open era. He turned it into a smoothly exacting art form all its own.

No. 3: Stan Wawrinka

When we talk about one-handed backhands today, the name that usually comes up first is Stan Wawrinka’s. His is the gold standard, the most powerful single-hander in the game’s history, a throwback stroke that’s also fully modern. When he started winning major titles a decade ago, he made fans and players believe that the shot still has a place in the power-baseline era. Yet we also understood that no one can hit it quite like the man nicknamed Stanimal.

Wawrinka grew up on his parents’ farm in Switzerland, and he has the strength to show for it. He also hits his one-hander somewhat differently from the others on this list. It isn’t as elegant or flicky or effortless-looking as Gasquet’s and Suarez Navarro’s; you can see and feel the work that Wawrinka puts into it. He points his knee forward; keeps his right arm straight as he swings; and doesn’t throw his left arm back for symmetry and balance. His wrist and shoulder do the heavy lifting for him as he lets his racquet fly across and above his body.

With Wawrinka, it’s not so much the beauty of the swing that matters, but the heavy power of the shot that it produces. It gives him a second point-ending weapon that’s nearly the equal of his forehand. His opponents have to guard against his down-the-line backhand in a way that they don’t against most other right-handers, and the quality of his backhand means there’s no good place to send their approach shots when they come to net.

Wawrinka played in the era of the Big Three, and, like everyone else, he had a lopsided losing record against all of them. But he was also one of the few who challenged them, and defeated them, in major events. He beat Nadal for the 2014 Australian Open title, beat Federer for the 204 Monte Carlo title, and Djokovic for the 2015 French Open and the 2016 US Open titles. Wawrinka respectfully referred to the Big Three as “mutants”; by contrast, he implied, he was merely human. Maybe that’s why he became so popular with fans; he was just one of us, trying to compete against gods.

At the heart of his appeal, though, is that superhuman backhand. It’s different, old school and seemingly impossible all at once. In his peak moment, at match point in the 2015 Roland Garros final against Djokovic, it was only right that he took the first ball he saw and ripped a backhand winner with it.

Coming Tuesday: The Final Two