Listen to this racket: The grunts that split the tennis world

Unnnngh! When Alexander Zverev saw red over Alex de Minaur grunting during a United Cup clash last weekend, it reignited one of the oldest debates in tennis. Zverev, the world No. 6 player, complained to the umpire that the emphatic grunt he heard as he attempted to return a shot had disrupted his play. “That’s 100 per cent a hindrance,” opined commentator and former world No.1 player Jim Courier. However, the umpire didn’t believe it warranted a penalty: “His grunt was longer than usual … [but] no it wasn’t [a hindrance].”

In the gladiatorial world of the tennis court, there are several ways to rattle your opponent: taking too long for a toilet break, calling for a medical time-out or simply taking too long to serve.

But there are few more controversial topics in tennis than the grunt. Noisy vocal emissions have long been the bugbear of some players, tennis fans and commentators.

Grunting, groaning and shrieking has been compared to everything from a chainsaw to the wail of strangled bagpipes to a lion’s roar. Is grunting a tactical weapon to distract your opponent or an involuntary physiological response to exertion? When is a grunt a hindrance?

“This has been a question that has been around for decades,” said former professional umpire Richard Ings, who was the Association of Tennis Professionals’ executive vice-president of rules and competition between 2001 and 2006.

Grunting is governed under the International Tennis Federation’s hindrance rule, which states: “If a player is hindered in playing the point by a deliberate act of the opponent(s), the player shall win the point.”

As an umpire, Ings’ view is that “if the grunting is deliberately designed to hinder your opponent, then the rules cover that”. “If it’s an involuntary thing and a habitual thing, then it’s not something you tackle on court.”

Ings was the chair umpire when Ivan Lendl complained about Andre Agassi’s grunting in the 1988 US Open. “I said to Lendl: ‘He’s not deliberately hindering you … he’s been doing it in every match. There’s nothing unusual here.’ I told him to go back and play.”

Lendl questioned Ings’ decision and called the supervisor to the court. “The supervisor in my opinion made a mistake,” Ings said. “He walked over to Agassi and said ‘Could you tone down your grunting please?’ That completely threw Agassi off his game. And Lendl went on to win the match.”

Thirty-five years later, a decision by an umpire to dock a point from Novak Djokovic for an extended grunt at Wimbledon last July caused a commotion.

“I think that maybe could have been a word to Novak at the changeover to just be aware before giving that,” said former Australian player Todd Woodbridge, who was then commentating for the BBC. “That’s rough.”

Djokovic reflected later that the hindrance penalty could have changed the course of the match. “I don’t normally have extended grunts. Maybe it was an echo from the roof or something like this. I actually didn’t feel I was causing any hindrance to my opponent, but OK,” he said.

Asked if grunting is likely to be an issue at this year’s Australian Open, Ings replied: “It’s an issue all the time. It’s been going on since the ’60s – we’ve got half a century of grunting issues. So I don’t think it’s going to resolve itself in the next two weeks.”

Australian Open defending champion Aryna Sabalenka was mocked by the Melbourne crowd for grunting while playing against Ash Barty in 2018.

While apologetic to anyone annoyed by it, the world No.2 said it’s an intrinsic part of her game.

“I wish I could control it and be quiet on court,” Sabalenka told this masthead last week. “This is something out of my control. If someone doesn’t like it, I’m so sorry.”

During the match, Woodbridge wrote on social media: “Nice player Sabalenka but something needs to be done about her noise and grunting on court!”

Fans were admonished by the chair umpire for their impersonations of Sabalenka’s shriek. The Belarussian said the experience left her worried about what reception she would receive in Melbourne the following year.

“I was really worried coming back to Australia and facing the same problem, like the crowd being against me,” Sabalenka said. “It was a tough experience. It’s all good lessons though.”

Barty, who had an impressive come-from-behind win over Sabalenka that night, was typically unfazed.

“We knew it was coming,” the Australian said post-match. “A lot of players grunt. A lot of players don’t grunt. It’s just the way they are, the way they play. For me, it wasn’t a distraction. It wasn’t anything like that.

“It was just part and parcel … I think if something that small can irritate you, that’s a bigger issue in itself.”

Sabalenka believes she now grunts less, but is not sure why. “I feel right now it’s getting a little bit better. I hope so,” she said.

Another leading women’s player, Jessica Pegula, says she successfully blocks out outside noise. The world No.5 is fully cognisant of the grunt when in spectator mode watching on TV but when on-court, she’s in the zone and concentrating.

“I don’t notice at all [when I’m playing], and then I watch on TV and someone has a bad grunt I’m like, oh my gosh I cannot watch this. It drives me insane,” Pegula told this masthead.

“I have a lot of people that will message me or talk to me or whatever and go ‘how do you handle her grunt? It’s so loud. Doesn’t it bother you?’”

One of the first notable grunters in tennis history was Victoria Palmer. In 1962, another player asked Wimbledon officials to stop the 17-year-old grunting, although they didn’t end up facing each other. (The officials told her mother no action would be taken.)

Almost two decades later, an umpire at Wimbledon told Jimmy Connors – sometimes described as “the father of the tennis grunt” – to tone it down.

Grunting became increasingly contentious over the decades, with the arrival of vocal players such as Agassi and Monica Seles. British tabloids began bringing grunt-o-meters to Wimbledon, reporting Seles’ decibel level at 93.2 “equivalent to a police whistle, noisy home appliances, a pneumatic drill, and not far below a jackhammer”.

It came to a head at Wimbledon in 1992. After losing the first set, Martina Navratilova complained to the umpire about Seles’ grunting. Seles received a couple of cautions. She won but was later forced to defend herself: “I said millions of times, I’m not doing it on purpose and … after this tournament I’m going to practice to get rid of it because I really don’t want to answer questions about it any more.”

Seles played (and lost) the final against Steffi Graf in near silence. In her autobiography, Seles described the decision to muzzle herself as “one of the only things I have regretted in my life”.

Navratilova maintained her tough anti-grunt stance.

In 2009 – after a cacophonous French Open match in which Aravane Rezai complained about Michelle Larcher de Brito’s high-pitched shrieks – Navratilova claimed grunting was a form of cheating.

Grunting masked the sound of the ball hitting the racquet, Navratilova said, which made it harder for an opponent to judge the shot.

“The grunting has reached an unacceptable level,” she said at an awards ceremony in 2009. “It is cheating, pure and simple, and it is time for something to be done.”

Players known for grunting such as Seles, Larcher de Brito, Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams – have insisted the noise came naturally to them.

The same year as Navratilova’s criticisms, Williams said her grunting was “definitely not conscious”. “Sometimes I am so zoned I don’t grunt, sometimes I am so zoned that I do grunt.”

But Navratilova said whether the player was doing it on purpose or not was irrelevant. “They should not be doing it and the umpire needs to take care of that,” she said on the Wimbledon YouTube channel in 2009.

Rules aside, Navratilova said grunting was counterproductive “because it takes a lot of effort and energy to make that kind of noise”.

Does grunting help tennis players with their game? A small number of limited scientific studies have suggested there are advantages.

A 2014 study of college tennis players found the ball velocity increased by almost 5 per cent during serves and forehands when athletes were allowed to grunt.

Another experiment – which asked students to watch video clips of professional tennis players and determine where the ball was being hit – found reaction time was slower when sound was played when the racquet hit the ball. (Of course, asking people to watch tennis is not the same as playing an actual game.)

A more recent study showed the louder the grunting, the further the participants assumed the ball would fly.

University of Melbourne psychologist Dr Courtney Walton, whose research focuses on athletes, said the science around grunting is not yet conclusive.

“You’d want to see more consistency across a greater number of studies to really be sure of those findings,” Walton said. However, grunting is also common in other sports – such as weightlifting and some martial arts – to exert force.

Walton said grunting could help tennis players with the rhythm and pacing of their strokes. There could also be psychological benefits.

“Grunting might be just as helpful in terms of building confidence through what is a very mental and long game,” he said.

What’s more, once grunting had become a habit it would be very difficult to stop.

“Athletes are so finely tuned. So if you’ve always hit the ball with a certain vocalisation and you’re then forced to take that away, I would anticipate this is going to have some adverse effect on performance, at least in the short term,” Walton said.

While both male and female players grunt, it is women who attract the shrillest criticism. BBC commentator and former Wimbledon champion Michael Stich once complained that women grunting was “disgusting, ugly, unsexy”.

Female players have been dubbed “decibel demons” and assigned annoyance ratings.

Tennis writer Dr Anita Stahl, from the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the media shames women by framing grunts in animalistic and sexual terms.

The London Telegraph once wrote that Sharapova, whose vocalisations were recorded at 101 decibels, “enjoys climatic shriek of the blue-movie variety”.

Venus Williams’ “higher-pitched scream … could plausibly be confused with a newborn foal sinking in quicksand”.

Seles “adopted a two-tone scream, characterised by an anticipatory moan followed immediately by a louder, high-pitched groan of exertion”.

Stahl, who wrote a book chapter on policing femininity in women’s professional tennis, says men grunting doesn’t trigger spectators and commentators in the same way.

“Rafael Nadal – that man grunts quite a bit – but he has permission. People want him to be his most physically exertive,” Stahl says.

“Women are to be seen not heard – grunting is inherently at odds with the feminine branding that tennis has built itself on.”

It’s a discrepancy that Sabalenka has also noticed. “[One] day I was practising next to [Dominic] Thiem. I feel like he was screaming way more than me,” she said.

The grunt has been on and off the agenda for years.

In 2012, the Women’s Tennis Association announced plans to teach young players breathing techniques to avoid grunting. The prospect of an official “grunt-o-meter” was also on the table but was never introduced.

Sabalenka says she was never instructed by the association or others on how not to grunt in her formative years. “It would be a really awkward conversation if they would ask me to be quiet on court.”

The International Tennis Federation is aware that some people can find excessive grunting a distraction but argues everyone who watches tennis knows that grunting is part of the game.

While the hindrance rule may apply, excessive grunting is generally addressed by educating players and coaches about breathing techniques and expulsion of breath when making powerful strokes.

These days, the women’s tour believes the rules exist in the game to keep it at bay and punish it when it goes too far.

“Grunting is a natural part of the game and excessive grunting doesn’t seem to be an issue that affects players,” a Women’s Tennis Association spokesperson said. “But if it does become a hindrance, there are rules to address it in competition.”

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