I took two years of French in high school. In an indictment against the utility of that education, I had to use Google to check my understanding of the title of the French documentary that I am writing about today. John McEnroe: Analyse de son jeu directly translates to John McEnroe: Analysis of his game. Spoiler alert! This review does not contain a lot of insight directly gleaned from the narrative of the documentary which was entirely in French.
Last week, I wrote about John McEnroe: In the Realm of Perfection. That documentary was written and produced by French archivist Julien Faraut. It heavily leveraged footage originally collected by Gil de Kermadec. The natural follow up to that is an examination of de Kermadec’s original study of John McEnroe.
John McEnroe: Analyse de son jeu is streamable on YouTube and I have embedded a link to it at the end of this post. One comment I received last week observed that John McEnroe: In The Realm of Perfection induced an ASMR response. The same can definitely be said of John McEnroe: Analyse de son jeu, particularly for a person that doesn’t speak French. I was unable to locate a version with English subtitles, though I didn’t look particularly hard for it.
Relying on the embedded translation from In the Realm of Perfection, de Kermadec outlined how still photos and staged videos of tennis stroke technique are uniformly inaccurate. He analyzed the best players of his era in realistic competition using video with the highest frame rates available at the time. The divergence in technique between what the athletes thought they were doing and the physical reality was striking.
This film is interesting from the standpoint that it illustrates that evaluated against modern standards… McEnroe’s technique would be regarded as poor. He is seen hitting the ball using a cramped spacing that would now be described as “T-Rex arms.” His follow through is abbreviated and he hits off his back foot with high frequency.
This documentary includes video of McEnroe using both a wood and graphite racquet frame. As such, it documents his technique at a point in time where he was transitioning technology. In 1985, when this film was released, McEnroe was still using wooden frame techniques with modern equipment. At that point in time, pretty much everybody was doing that.
John McEnroe: Analyse de son jeu is an interesting watch for hard core technique junkies. I also recommend it for anyone who might be looking for a serene place to park their brain before drifting off to sleep. The ASMR effect is strong.
Maybe if I watch it enough, I will recover some of my high school French via osmosis. It is worth a try.
