explicit | george russell/max verstappen | george russell/toto wolff | multi-chaptered
when george finally gets a chance to fight for the championship, he soon realizes there is more to winning than being the quickest one. while he strives for perfection, the pressure keeps mounting on and off track and the lines start to blur—between loyalty and ambition, restraint and appetite; who george is supposed to be and who he can become. now, he is forced to confront how far he’s willing to go—and what it means to be both the hunter and the prey.
sports has everything you could possibly want honestly. found family. forced family. divorced family. soulmates. enemies to lovers. lovers to strangers. good overcoming evil. evil winning it all. broken dreams. dreams come true. and most importantly. bloody face injuries. who said that
To add to my Ruud question, I know people like to talk a lot and praise top players like Novak, Alcaraz and Sinner that they constantly add something new to their game and improve to raise their levels. I am not sure if this is a unique aspect of just top players or do all tennis players apply that attitude? To diversify their game. Or are just top players better at it / it is more clearly visible in their case?
I am wondering because I also heard an opinion from Andy Roddick that when he joined the tour it was quite unheard of to be great on all surfaces, he said that it was more of a specialization case, different players suited better to different conditions and then the era of the big 3 came and that changed tennis forever. So now tennis players are expected to master and conquer all to be among the greats. But I do not know how much of this is just big talk about the best players and how much of it actually applies to just incredible few / all. I am not sure if I am making sense. Basically yeah, is tinkering and adding new tools just an attitude of the greatest or is that usual for the players?
As always, thank you for the answer!
my dear anon, the short answer is that the desire to constantly improve is universal on tour, but the ability to act on it is not. everything else flows from that distinction.
the desire to improve is universal. the ability to act on it is not.
every professional on tour wants to get better and that impulse is not exclusive to the greats. but the tour structure makes meaningful change brutally difficult for anyone outside the top 30 or so. you want to work on your second serve, you spend a week changing it, then you play a tournament and hit ten double faults, lose ranking points you can’t afford to lose, and immediately abandon the experiment. the tour is a tournament per week or every two weeks for eleven months. there is almost no off-season window long enough to absorb the regression that real change requires before it becomes improvement. for players outside the top 50, this is compounded by the financial reality as atp ranking 150 is roughly the break-even point financially, and only about a third of top juniors ever reach career-positive earnings. many of those players travel without a full coaching team because they simply cannot afford one. so the structural conditions for deep game development don’t exist for most of the tour. they are surviving, not constructing.
what you see at the top is real, but it’s not just attitude.
when you watch alcaraz, sinner or the current generation of top players constantly making small adjustments between seasons — more net play, a new drop shot, an improved serve motion — those changes are real and documented. at that level you always have to improve something, whether it’s physical, technical, or tactical. but that capacity exists because those players have the resources, the teams, the financial security, and most crucially the time to actually follow through. they can absorb a few weeks of worse results while ingraining a new habit, because their ranking won’t catastrophically suffer and their bank account can handle it. that combination of conditions is extraordinarily rare.
roddick’s observation is historically accurate but the cause is more structural than personal.
he is right that the big 3 era changed expectations permanently. but it’s important to understand why all-surface dominance became achievable in the first place. it wasn’t primarily that those players were more ambitious or more adaptable than sampras or edberg. the physical conditions of the game changed to make it possible. the surfaces of the old era didn’t just play at different speeds; they demanded completely different physical actions. old wimbledon grass, made from a mix that wore out quickly and produced extremely low, skidding, irregular bounces, made baseline play genuinely untenable. the ball didn’t bounce — it skidded. players like mcenroe, becker and edberg came to the net not by choice but because staying back meant dealing with ankle-height balls skipping off worn turf unpredictably. serve-and-volley wasn’t a stylistic preference, but it was a structural necessity the surface imposed.
clay, meanwhile, demanded a completely different physical toolkit: heavy topspin requiring a semi-western or western grip, a sliding footwork technique that must be trained from childhood, the patience for long grinding points, and a serve that functions more as a launch pad for a rally than a weapon to win free points. these weren’t different preferences but physical habits, built over years of repetition. the continental grip that made volleys natural and efficient on grass made heavy topspin difficult. the western grip that produced devastating clay-court topspin made volleying awkward. lendl spent years working with a dedicated grass-court coach specifically to learn to serve-and-volley adequately and was arguably the best player in the world through that period. he reached two wimbledon finals but never won. that is how wide the chasm actually was.
geography was therefore destiny. spanish children grew up sliding on clay every day, building muscular memory and instinctive footwork patterns that players from grass and hard-court nations had simply never developed. by the time you reached the professional tour, undoing those patterns under competitive pressure against elite opponents was extraordinarily difficult. nearly 40% of roland garros entrants skipped wimbledon entirely in 1990 — not because they lacked ambition, but because they rationally understood they had no real chance on the surface.
what this means in practice is simple: in the old era, skipping surfaces was a rational career strategy. in the current one, it is a death sentence for your ranking. the points system and the compressed calendar mean that any player with serious ambitions at the top cannot afford to write off an entire grand slam or a cluster of masters events. all-surface competence stopped being an admirable quality and became a baseline requirement, not because players became more ambitious, but because the sport’s administrative and physical structure left them no other option.
the actual mechanism that killed surface specialization was technology, not ambition.
wimbledon changed its grass in 2001, which of course matters. but the deeper cause was polyester strings. gustavo kuerten won the 1997 french open with the first luxilon-strung racket used at a major, and within a few years the whole tour had followed. polyester strings gave players the ability to hit returns that dipped sharply to a volleyer’s feet at the net, generating spin rates completely impossible with natural gut. the safe zone at the net effectively disappeared. serve-and-volley died not primarily because surfaces slowed, but because the baseline game developed tools that made it lethal even on the fastest remaining courts. topspin baseline play, critically, scales across all surfaces in a way that serve-and-volley never could. on clay it kicks higher and creates brutal angles. on modern slower grass it now creates the same dynamic it does on hard courts. the surface changes removed the physical conditions that made pure attacking play mandatory. the string revolution gave the baseline game the tools to be viable everywhere.
the greats don’t fix weaknesses but weaponize strengths.
paradoxically, the greats tended to build their careers around a core identity that was visible from early on, but they refined and deepened it rather than rebuilt it. a telling counterexample comes from a generation of players who, despite reaching the top 10 and spending years on tour, never converted that quality into a grand slam title. the coaching philosophy around them looked at what was wrong and tried to fix it — identify the weak backhand, the inconsistent serve, the defensive tendency, and spend the offseasons correcting it. the logic seems intuitive: eliminate the weakness, remove the target, win the slam. but the result, more often than not, was players who became more complete on paper while losing the sharpness of what had made them dangerous in the first place.
what the big 3 did was not ignore weaknesses, but neither did they spend their careers trying to turn them into strengths. federer improved his backhand substantially, yet never attempted to make it equal to his forehand. nadal worked continuously on his serve, but never tried to become a serve-dominated player. djokovic developed a much stronger transition and net game, but remained fundamentally a baseliner. their evolution came from raising weaknesses above the point where opponents could reliably exploit them while relentlessly amplifying what was already exceptional. federer’s forehand, nadal’s forehand and movement, and djokovic’s return and baseline consistency became so dominant that they shaped matches on their own terms. the weaknesses never disappeared entirely, but they became increasingly difficult to target consistently because the strengths had become overwhelming.
the difference, in other words, was not effort or ambition. it was philosophy. fix the weakness and you get a more balanced player. deepen the strength and you get a more dangerous one. the two are not the same thing, and at the very top of the game, that distinction can define an entire career.
so where does that leave your question?
the attitude of wanting to improve is widespread. the discipline to follow through is rarer. the structural conditions to do so systematically — time, money, team, security — exist almost exclusively at the top. and even among the top, there is a meaningful difference between adding new tools because you’ve identified a specific tactical gap, and chasing improvement as a general ambition. the most successful players have done the former: targeted, precise additions built around an identity that was already forming when they were teenagers. what looks from the outside like constant evolution is often, at closer range, the relentless deepening of something that was always there, made possible by conditions, resources and a psychological profile that most professionals never get access to, in a game whose physical landscape was deliberately and systematically changed to make all-surface play not just possible, but mandatory.
