Serve and volley
Serve and volley is a strategy used in lawn tennis (and rarely in real tennis) where a player serves and immediately moves forward to make his next shot a volley and hopefully a winner.
The aim of the serve and volley is to put immediate pressure on the opponent, forcing him to make good returns or else the server can gain advantage. This tactic is especially useful on fast courts (e.g. grass courts) and less so on slow courts (e.g. clay courts). For it to be successful, the player must either have a good serve or be exceptionally quick in his play around the net. Ken Rosewall, for instance, had a very feeble serve but was a very successful serve-and-volley player for two decades. Goran Ivanisevic, on the other hand, had success with serve-and-volley strategy with great serves and average volleys.
Great tennis players known for their serve-and-volley technique include Jack Kramer, Pancho Gonzales, Rod Laver, John McEnroe, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, and Pete Sampras. Although earlier tennis greats such as Ellsworth Vines and Don Budge had been noted for their fine serves and net games they had not consistently played a serve-and-volley game on every point. Jack Kramer in the mid-1940s was the first world-class player to consistently come to the net after every serve, including his second serve.
Serve-and-volley strategy is less common amongst female players. Martina Navratilova is an outstanding practitioner of it, while in more recent times Jana Novotna is a serve-and-volleyer who won Wimbledon.
Although in recent years the strategy has become less common, quite a few players still prefer to come in on (almost) every serve. Currently (2005), the highest-ranked male player who consistently plays serve and volley is Tim Henman. Many other players employ the strategy depending on the court surface, such as Roger Federer at Wimbledon. Even Pete Sampras, known for his great serve and volley game, did not always come to the net behind the serve on slower courts; particularly on the second serve.
Views on the serve and volley
Bill Tilden, the dominant player of the 1920s and one of the fathers of the cannonball serve, nevertheless preferred to play from the backcourt and liked nothing better than to face an opponent who threw powerful serves and ground strokes at him and who rushed the net -- one way or another Tilden would find a way to hit the ball past him. Tilden may also have spent more time analyzing the game of tennis than anyone before or since. His book Match Play and the Spin of the Ball is still in print and is the definitive work on the subject. In it, Tilden propounds the theory that by definition a great baseline player will always beat a great serve-and-volleyer; his returns of service will, by definition, be impossible to hit for winning volleys. Certainly the theory worked for Tilden for many years; and some of the best matches of all time have pitted great baseliners such as Björn Borg or Andre Agassi against great serve-and-volleyers such as John McEnroe or Pete Sampras.