Q: What do you consider the biggest waste of time or biggest myth in tennis?

Working on the strokes until you can no longer hit a ball. You can become so mental about it that you don’t even know how to hit a ball anymore and that’s bad and I (Carlos) unfortunately see that happening quite a bit. Coaching is not about just getting a stroke perfect. Because it will never be perfect. You have to train the situation rather than practicing individual isolated strokes. So it’s not always about where that backswing is.

Let’s go back in time when John McEnroe was 15 years old and I had not yet developed my coaching philosophy to what it later became.

I said to Mac: “Let me take a look at your grip’s.”

He said: “Why?”

I said: “Well, because I noticed you don’t change grip’s, right?

He says “no”.

I said: “And I noticed that the grip that you use, it doesn’t even have a name!”

So, this is a guy that is this genius that is being one of the greatest players to play our game. He played tennis with a grip that doesn’t even exist.

His grip is somewhere in between a continental and eastern forehand. So, for a forehand, because as it is still between a continental and an eastern forehand, he doesn’t have that ability to really crank a big topspin, obviously.

And on the backhand side all the time, the natural way of the wrist is to be able to slice the ball with that grip. So, I said:  “You will never be able to hit a topspin with that grip. You would have to turn that wrist so much that you’re never going to be able to hit topspin on a flat ball with that grip. And on a forehand, you need to have a little bit more of an Eastern So you can put a little bit more whip on the ball.

Mac says: “Nah, it’s fine.”

Mac has a grip that means that he has a callus in the middle of the palm of his hand that none of us have because we don’t hold the racket the way he does.

And I never forget that I said: “I’m sorry to say this, but if you don’t start changing the grip, I think that you’re going to do okay in the juniors and maybe in the beginning of college, but it’s not going to go to well, later on.”

Now, the guy won all of the stuff that he has won – boy I was wrong.