The volley did not die, the approach shot did

Players still have hands at the net; what they lost was any reliable way of getting there with the point already half won.

Every few years somebody announces that net play is finished, killed by polyester strings and passing shots hit from eight feet behind the baseline. Then you watch a doubles specialist, or a singles player forced forward in a tiebreak, and the volleying is fine. Sharp, low, angled, competent.

What has actually gone is the shot before it.

An approach is a specific thing: a ball hit with enough depth, low enough bounce and enough direction that the opponent's reply is constrained before you arrive. Historically that meant a flat drive down the line or a skidding slice deep to the backhand, hit off a short ball, moving forward through the shot. It was drilled for hours. It was the entire point of learning to hit on the rise.

Modern players come forward on nothing. They hit a big topspin forehand from the middle of the court, admire it, and then start running in after the ball has already bounced, arriving in no-man's land as the passing shot leaves the strings. Of course they get passed. They would have been passed in 1985 doing that.

The equipment argument is real but it is doing less work than people claim. Yes, a modern string bed and racket lets a defender hit a dipping pass from a position that used to be hopeless. That raises the standard an approach must meet. It does not make approaching impossible; it makes a bad approach fatal, which is a different statement, and the response of the sport has been to stop practising the shot rather than to practise it harder.

There is a coaching-hours explanation underneath all of this. Baseline patterns are trainable by feeding balls and they scale to a group lesson. Approach and volley work requires live balls, a partner hitting genuine passes, and a lot of failure. Guess which one fills an academy timetable.

I will make a prediction I am fairly confident about. The next player to make net play look modern will not have unusual hands. They will have an ordinary volley and an extraordinary sense of which ball is short enough, and the commentary will spend a year praising their reflexes while missing the shot that actually did the work.