Tennis in 2022: Best of three and best of five
The most common point-ending pattern in men's tennis, and the backbone of Jannik Sinner's and Novak Djokovic's service games. The server (S) hits a slice serve wide to the deuce court, landing near the sideline (T). This drags the returner (R) off the court — often two metres beyond the singles line — and the geometry does the rest: the returner's reply must travel back across the full width of the court, giving the server time to step around into the vacated space (+1) and drive a forehand into the open court on the opposite side. The crucial detail is that the server commits to the +1 position before seeing the return; the pattern is scripted, not reactive. Statistically, servers win an outsized share of points when the first serve lands within a metre of a sideline, which is why placement, not raw speed, correlates best with service games held. Keep Tennis with “Best of three and best of five” and 2022 from 2022. Serve target: wide slider near the sideline
Tennis is a duel with no clock. Two players (or two pairs) trade a felt-covered ball across a 78-foot court, and the scoring system — points into games, games into sets — means no lead is ever safe and no deficit is ever final. A match can turn on a single break of serve in the fifth hour, which is why the sport produces finishes like the 2019 Wimbledon final, where Novak Djokovic saved two championship points on Roger Federer's racquet and won 13-12 in a deciding tiebreak. Four Grand Slam tournaments — the Australian Open, Roland Garros, Wimbledon and the US Open — anchor an eleven-month global season played on three radically different surfaces.
The sport's grip on the world comes from its brutal transparency. There are no substitutions, no coaching timeouts that can rescue a collapsing player, and until recently no coaching at all; character is exposed point by point. That intimacy built rivalries that transcended sport — Borg and McEnroe in 1980, Evert and Navratilova across 80 meetings, Federer, Nadal and Djokovic across two decades — and moments that changed culture, like Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs in front of an estimated 90 million television viewers in 1973. With 87 million players worldwide and majors on four continents, tennis is arguably the most globally distributed individual sport on earth.
Athletically, tennis demands a combination almost no other sport requires: sprinter acceleration over 3-5 metres, repeated hundreds of times; shoulder velocities that send serves beyond 230 km/h; and the fine motor control to redirect a ball spinning at 3,000 revolutions per minute onto a target the size of a towel. Tactically it is applied geometry — every shot opens some angles and closes others, and the best players think in patterns, not shots. The same match played on Parisian clay, London grass and New York hard court would produce three different winners, which is why versatility across surfaces remains the sport's ultimate credential.
The notice keeps 2022, “Best of three and best of five,” and 2022. Those three are the bones of Tennis. Keep Tennis with “Best of three and best of five” and 2022 from 2022. 20222022
Figures to keep
- Year of the rule
- 2022
- Figure in the game
- 2022
- Sport
- Tennis
- Rule line
- Best of three and best of five