Slicing tee shots? Try this fix from a top-ranked tennis star

Alex De Minaur may not have been prepared to talk golf, but he’s always ready to do so. The 8th-ranked tennis player in the world had just finished physiotherapy in the Netherlands — following the first of his four wins that week — when we hopped on a video call to chat about the sport he dominates as well as the one he can’t seem to conquer.

De Minaur grew up playing golf but was taken by the rapidity of tennis, the pace of which he found more appealing. But in recent years he’s found himself using time on the course as a reprieve from stresses on the court. “I’ve got the bug,” he says emphatically, admitting he’ll probably start traveling with a set of clubs soon.

De Minaur recently joined a golf club in London, just broke 80 for the first time and now sports a 10 handicap, which makes him roughly as good a golfer as I am a tennis player. To me, that made us a perfect match. He struggles controlling a fade on the course; I struggle to create top-spin on the court. Surely we could help each other.

“There’s a lot of similarities,” he told me immediately. “That’s why you have a lot of tennis players gravitate towards golf. Not that they find it easy — I think golf is one of the toughest sports there is — but you can have a pretty good idea of how to swing and make contact.”

He’s right about that first part. Many of the best tennis players in the world have taken to golf. Novak Djokovic played in the Ryder Cup celebrity all-star match in Italy. Rafa Nadal is a golf sicko. Casper Ruud, too, escaping to Le Golf National last summer after getting bounced from the Olympics — just so he could follow Rory McIlroy inside the ropes. Ruud is in so deep that he has his own golf-focused Instagram account.

De Minaur isn’t there just yet. But he’s right about that swing and contact part, too. Elite golf instructor Chris Como has used the idea of a tennis racket numerous times in his teaching. For those trying to hit a draw, Como says to think about having the face of the racket tilted down as you swing, pulling it across your body. That face-down-while-lifting motion gets the body into proper extension as the face squares at impact. 

Simple, right? 

Of course not. 

But it’s that Como tip I shared with De Minaur. At their core, both sports are about manipulating the face of the club/racket, controlling the plane of your swing and delivering a speedy impact to the ball with a type of spin and target in mind.

“The scariest shot for me is off the tee,” he said. “And if I do not commit fully, I lay off. That’s when I open up [my hips] and you get a cut that becomes a slice.

“So for me, it’s just reminding myself to commit, and make sure my right hand is pulling its weight.

That’s exactly what Como is talking about. It’s a forehand swing thought, focused on the right hand. De Minaur tells himself to be right-hand dominant when his fades start leaking into slices. That overemphasis helps keep the clubface from opening wide at impact, and likely leads to plenty of straight balls, or at worst what people call a “pull cut,” starting left and easing back to the right. It may not have him hitting draws just yet, but I’m pretty confident he’ll get there. “I’ve already got it sorted,” he said. “As soon as I’m done with tennis, I’m going to spend five days a week on the golf course.”

As for my tennis, De Minaur offered some top-spin advice that can apply to just about anything in sports: minimize everything. Shrink the size of the court to the area right at the net and shrink the swing down to the movements right before and right after contact. Create more of a looping, upward motion, he said, to get the feel of brushing the ball at contact. Top-spin rests on the other side of that brushing action, he told me, but you have to learn the feel of it next to the net before you can perform that feel from the baseline. Too much of it will end up with volleys into the net. Too little will send those returns long.

Sound like golf? 

It should. The base of your full swing is the same as the base of your pitch shots. The base of your pitch shots is the same as the base of your chip shots. It all comes down to what’s happening on the six inches prior to contact and the six inches after contact. Struggling with your long game, on the tennis court or the golf course? Start small. Head to the net — or the chipping green. Minimize it.