By Antonio Gallucci aka Erbaccia
Shintaro Mochizuki weighs 70 kg and plays tennis with the lightness of a hummingbird. But the world is unforgiving, and away from grass this season, Shintaro has won just four matches and lost seventeen.
On grass, however, his light-footed movement, touch and timing make his tennis as effective as it is entertaining.
To be honest, his Wimbledon warm-up events were hardly encouraging. In Birmingham, he lost to Shimabukuro in the first round, then fell in the opening round of qualifying in ’s-Hertogenbosch to 26-year-old Dutchman Sander Jong, the world No. 743. (ATP Tour)
To understand where that lightness comes from, we need to go back. Shintaro is the son of a tennis coach and left Japan at the age of twelve to train at the IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, with Natsuo Yamanaka, the coach who steered his game towards variety and drop shots. Truth be told, he had already picked up a racket by the age of one, and at nine—a Yankees fan—he had almost decided to give up tennis for baseball. His ticket to Florida was paid for by the Masaaki Morita fund, the same one that, around twelve years earlier, had sent another Japanese boy named Kei Nishikori to Bradenton. At the academy, some—including Max Mirnyi—compared him to Fabrice Santoro for his soft hands and his ability to find every angle on the court. And grass did the rest: in 2019, at the age of sixteen, Mochizuki became the first Japanese boy to reach a junior Grand Slam singles final, which he went on to win. Where? At Wimbledon, of course. (ITF Tennis)
When the time came to step onto the lawns of Wimbledon, Shintaro rediscovered the tennis that had already taken him through qualifying and into the second round of the main draw the previous year.
This year, Shintaro Mochizuki achieved the best result of his career: he came through qualifying, winning the final round in five sets, then defeated three players who are no pushovers on grass, Britain’s Max Basing, Ethan Quinn and, finally, rising star Rafael Jodar, whom he beat from a set down after being comprehensively outplayed in the opener. That took him into the round of 16, where his run came to an end against world No. 1 Jannik Sinner. The achievement made him the third Japanese man player in the Open Era to go that far on the London grass, after Shuzo Matsuoka and, fittingly enough, Kei Nishikori.
There are certain elements of Mochizuki’s game that make his tennis unique in the modern game. I am referring to his precise, delightful net play and his ability to launch surprise attacks with the two-handed backhand—particularly down the line—a genuine technical gem, remarkable for its timing and angle creation. And for once, the numbers support the poetry: against Jodar, he won 40 of the 46 points he played at the net, and against Sinner he came forward another forty times, without ever straying from his game.
His Achilles’ heel, however, has a name: the second serve. For the Japanese player, keeping his first-serve percentage high is crucial, given that his second serve is among the least effective on the tour. For example, across his last twelve matches, excluding Wimbledon, he won an average of 46.5% of his second-serve points; by comparison, in 2019 Djokovic posted a monstrous 59.4%.
On the eve of his match against Sinner, Shintaro said that he had told his coach that winning even a single game would already be enough; when he held serve in the opening game, he admitted, he almost burst out laughing.
On a tour ruled by stylistic conformity and the dogma of power, Mochizuki’s tennis is an ode to courage, and every Shintaro victory is a small hummingbird miracle.
