Who's Number One? Our five-part series on the 20 best one-handed backhands begins

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, they say. That’s certainly been the case with the one-handed backhand over the past five decades.

At the start of the Open Era, in 1968, virtually every top player had a single-hander. Fifty-five years later, you can count them on, well, one hand. Of the Top 25 men, just three use the shot; of the Top 25 women, none do. But as the one-hander has gradually disappeared, tennis fans’ love for it has only grown.

Part of that is the nostalgia that any vanishing art form will inspire. But part of it is also that the shot has been taken to new heights of skill, spin, pace and beauty by the few pros who are able to make it work today. With its long, low-to-high arc, the modern one-hander has been transformed into the sport’s most expressive shot. But that transformation has also been a matter of survival: In our power-baseline era, you won’t stick around long with a simple slice, the way you could back when everyone rushed the net.

In 2021, Carla Suarez Navarro packed up her elegant one-hander and retired. In 2022, Ash Barty and Roger Federer did the same. (Watch above.) Stan Wawrinka and Richard Gasquet, wielders of two legendary versions of the shot, are 37 and 36, respectively. Without their examples, will anyone want to hit it in the future? Before the stroke goes entirely extinct, we’re looking back at the Top 20 one-handers—the best, the most beautiful, and the most unique—of the Open era.

To rank them, we’ve considered both their effectiveness and aesthetic appeal. As always, it’s hard to compare eras in tennis, especially with a shot whose purpose and technique have evolved so dramatically. What we can say for sure is that, whether it’s hit with topspin or underspin, there’s nothing like the free-flowing sweep of a one-handed backhand.

No. 20: Gabriela Sabatini

Few debuts on the world stage have caused a stir like Sabatini’s. It happened at the 1985 French Open, when she made the semifinals just a few weeks after turning 15. With her fluid game, unhurried strut and long black hair, the young Argentine brought a striking new presence to a women’s tour long dominated by Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert.

Gaby also brought a new stroke with her: A flowing, topspin one-handed backhand. We had seen the slice, the flat shot and the two-hander, but the low-to-high single-hander, and the RPMs it generated, wasn’t a common sight. Sabatini’s countryman, Guillermo Vilas, had been one of the first to hit it on the men’s side in the 1970s. Sabatini would use it to reach No. 3 in the world and reach four more semifinals at Roland Garros.

But her backhand was as versatile as it was eye-catching. While she could flick up the back of the ball, she also employed a skidding backhand slice that served as a set-up shot for her forehand. Later, when Sabatini decided to build a net-rushing game to challenge her nemesis, Steffi Graf, her backhand—which she could chip low or loop deep—was the ideal weapon. In perhaps the biggest moment of her career, at the end of her 1990 US Open final victory over Graf, she sliced a backhand deep, charged the net and lunged for a winning stab volley. Like the rest of her game, Sabatini’s backhand had style to spare, but there was substance underneath.

No. 19: Dominic Thiem

Why did Thiem, who grew up surrounded by two-handed backhands in his early-aughts youth, go with an old-fashioned one-hander? According to his coach and fellow Austrian Gunter Bresnik, he didn’t have much choice. When Thiem was 12, Bresnik had him go from two hands to one, in the hopes that the switch would make him a more aggressive, risk-taking player as he got older.

“For one year, his results went down,” Bresnik told the New York Times. “Then he came back the next year and started winning everything.”

Thiem continued to win just about everything, right up to his first and so far only Grand Slam title, at the US Open in 2020. His one-hander has been the most spectacular part of that success. He can turn his body parallel to the net and slingshot the ball down the line for a laser-like winner. He can come under it at the last second for a finely-measured drop shot. He can roam far behind the baseline, as he likes to do, and defuse his opponent’s attack with deep, floating slices.

Does this show that the one-handed backhand is still a viable shot? Or does it show that it takes an incredible version of it, like Thiem’s, to compete with the world’s two-handers? Either way, we can thank him, and Bresnik, for pushing the shot’s demise a few years further into the future.

No. 18: Amelie Mauresmo

When we think of the great one-handed women’s backhands of this century, we usually start by raving about Justine Henin’s, and then saving a thought for Ash Barty’s and Carla Suarez Navarro’s. But Mauresmo’s belongs in the conversation as well. The Frenchwoman could come over the ball for topspin, cut under it for backspin and touch, and, when pressed, could rip through it for a flat passing-shot winner that left her opponent wondering what just happened.

Mauresmo was hooked on tennis at age 4, when she watched Yannick Noah use his own one-hander to break down the seemingly unbreakable Mats Wilander in the 1983 Roland Garros final. While she would never repeat Noah’s feat on the terre battue, her backhand was instrumental in her title runs on Australian Open hard courts and Wimbledon grass. Mauresmo was a strong and rangy athlete, but her backhand versatility gave her game added dimensions, and threw off the rhythm of opponents who were used to facing straightforward two-handed power.

When she put her one-hander up against Henin’s in their biggest meeting of all, the 2006 Wimbledon final, it was Mauresmo who had the last backhanded laugh. On match point, her defensive slice from that side kept her in the rally, and clinched her the title.

No. 17: Guillermo Vilas

In the history of Open Era backhands, Vilas is a transitional figure. He began his career at the dawn of that period, in 1968, and like everyone else in those days, he used a one-hander. By the time he was ready to challenge for big titles, though, the sport had begun its slow-moving shift back toward the baseline. Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg led the way there with their newfangled two-handers, and Vilas followed as best he could with one.

That meant, instead of chopping or blocking the ball, he would help pioneer the heavy-topspin one-hander. If anyone had the body to do it, it was Vilas; his left forearm was regularly compared to a tree trunk. He also had the work ethic needed to make this difficult shot sturdy enough for the clay-court marathons he favored. Vilas wasn’t afraid to spend a practice week hitting nothing but backhands.

While his backhand wasn’t quite as elaborate as Richard Gasquet’s, it was useful on multiple surfaces, and hard to attack. It kept him in rallies on clay, got him to net on grass, and sent pinpoint passing shots past his opponents on both. It’s one reason Vilas won two major titles on clay and two on grass. Officially, the ATP computer said the stroke never took him to No. 1, but we know better than that now, don’t we?

No. 16: Gaston Gaudio

“This guy is terrible,’” Gaudio said to a tennis agent as they watched a young prodigy in 1999. “This guy is never going to be No. 1 in the world, he has a terrible backhand.”

The teenager that Gaudio was slagging? That would be Roger Federer. Gaudio obviously wasn’t much of a judge of one-handed backhands, but maybe he just had high standards because he hit his so well. Like his countrywoman Sabatini, the Buenos Aires native whipped up the back of the ball and finished with a flicky flourish above his head. Like his countryman Vilas, he could push his opponents around with the weight and pace that he put on the shot. Gaudio didn’t have a killer forehand or bailout serve, so he relied on his backhand to do the lion’s share of the offensive work. From drives to slices to drops to lobs, he could create winners from anywhere with it.

Unlike Sabatini and Vilas, though, Gaudio’s backhand worked best on one surface. All eight of his titles came on clay, including his lone major, the 2004 French Open. On that notorious afternoon in Paris, he came back from two sets down to beat another Argentine, Guillermo Coria. After hours of marathon rallies, Gaudio brought the operatic drama to an end with—what else?—a crosscourt backhand winner.

Coming Thursday: Backhands No. 15-11