Motivation Quote by Jana Novotna

Novotna is really arguing for a different kind of tennis: not just a change in equipment, but a change in values. The call to “go back to the wood racquets” isn’t nostalgia for its own sake; it’s a pointed critique of what the modern game rewards. Wood limits power and enlarges consequences. You can’t just take a full cut and let graphite and string tech bail you out. You have to construct points, improvise under pressure, and win with feel.

“Touch” is the tell. Coming from one of the era’s great serve-and-volley artists, it’s both personal and political. Novotna built her tennis on hands, timing, and nerve at the net - skills that became increasingly marginal as baseline power surged, courts slowed, balls got heavier, and technology made pace cheaper. Her wistfulness carries a quiet indictment: that the sport has engineered some of its own artistry out of existence.

There’s also an emotional subtext about identity and craft. Athletes who mastered a disappearing style often experience the shift as a kind of cultural erasure: the game they trained for is no longer the game being played. Novotna’s line reads like a defense of tennis as a varied, conversational sport - angles, slices, half-volleys, feints - rather than a volume contest from the backcourt.

The brilliance is its simplicity. She doesn’t ask for rule changes or condemn today’s players. She just names what’s missing. In doing so, she frames “touch” not as a soft extra, but as a lost language worth fighting for.