The Most Entertaining Tennis Shots, Ranked by What Actually Makes a Crowd Lose It

The between-the-legs shot gets the highlight reel and the slow-motion replay and the commentator who forgets words for a second. It is the tennis shot everyone clips. But spend an afternoon watching crowds rather than the ball, and a different question surfaces: which of the great showpiece tennis shots actually makes a stadium come apart, every time, regardless of who hits it.

We watched a lot of clips for this. Not to crown the prettiest shot — pretty is easy — but to compare the three that show up most in viral footage and figure out why some land harder than their reputation suggests. We picked three contenders and judged them on the same three things: how hard they are to pull off when it counts, how much the crowd doesn't see them coming, and whether they survive a second viewing.

Which tennis shot gets the biggest reaction?

The honest answer is the one that combines surprise with stakes — and that is usually not the between-the-legs winner. A crowd roars loudest when a player does something that looks physically impossible and matters to the score. A flashy shot at 40-0 in the first set is a clip. The same shot at break point in a fifth set is a memory. Keep that distinction in mind, because it does most of the sorting below.

Here are the three we put against each other:

• The between-the-legs shot, hit on the run with your back to the net.
• The drop-shot-then-lob combo, where one soft touch sets up a second.
• The full-sprint passing shot, hit flat out from the corner.

Contender one: the back-to-the-net flick

You know this one. A lob sails over a player's head, they turn and chase it down, and instead of giving up they scoop it back between their legs without looking. The most-replayed version is probably Federer's at the 2009 US Open semifinal against Djokovic — set point, on the line, and he turned to the crowd before the ball had landed. That shot did everything a showpiece needs to do at once.

What's actually happening in the moment

Walk through the sequence and you see why it reads as magic. The player is sprinting away from the net, eyes on a ball that's falling behind their own body. They can't see the court they're aiming at. They have a fraction of a second to judge the bounce, drop the racquet head below the ball, and flick upward with almost no backswing and no visual feedback. Then comes the part the camera loves: they spin around to find out what happened, same as the crowd.

That spin is the whole trick of the shot's appeal. The hitter is as surprised as the audience. Everyone discovers the outcome together.

The catch is that most of these end the point in the hitter's favor by luck as much as design. The ball clears the net and lands fair maybe often enough to keep trying, not often enough to plan around. As a piece of theater it's near-perfect. As a repeatable weapon it barely exists.

Contender two: the touch-then-touch combo

Less famous, quietly more impressive. A player drags an opponent forward with a feather-soft drop shot, the opponent scrambles to reach it, and then — instead of trying to pass them — the player floats a delicate lob over their head into the open court. Two soft shots in a row, each requiring exact touch, the second one set up by the first.

Why this one is harder than it looks

The drop shot alone is a control problem. You're taking pace off a ball traveling 70 miles an hour and asking it to die just over the net. Open the racquet face slightly, brush under the ball, and decelerate the swing so the contact absorbs energy instead of returning it. Get the angle wrong by a few degrees and you either hit the net or hand your opponent a sitter.

Then you have to do the harder thing immediately. Your opponent is now charging the net, fully committed, reading you for a passing shot. Lobbing them instead means resisting the obvious play and trusting a second touch shot under maximum pressure, with your opponent's momentum carrying them exactly where the ball is going. When it works — Hsieh Su-wei built much of her doubles reputation on shots like this — it makes a professional athlete look like they've been tricked at a card table.

The crowd reaction here is different. It's not a roar. It's a laugh, then a roar. The laugh is the tell: people just watched someone get fooled, and that's a distinct, durable kind of entertainment.

Contender three: the full-sprint pass

The least gimmicky and the most physically violent. A player gets pulled wide, sprints into the doubles alley, and from a dead run threads a flat winner past a net-rusher and inside the line. No trick. No spin to the crowd. Pure speed plus pure precision at the same instant.

This is the shot that rewards a second viewing the most. On first watch you register the result. On the replay you notice the player was moving at near-top speed, fully stretched, hitting a ball that was already past them, and still found a target the width of a doormat. The difficulty is hidden because there's no flourish. Nadal and Djokovic have traded dozens of these; half don't even make the highlight package because they look almost routine in real time.

That's also its weakness as entertainment. A shot that looks routine doesn't make casual viewers gasp, even when it's the hardest thing on this list to do.

Scoring them on the same three things

The flick wins on the day-one wow. The sprint pass wins on respect from anyone who's tried to hit one. But the combo is the only shot that scores well on all three columns at once — hard to do, surprising in the moment, and rewarding on the rewatch — and it does it through skill rather than a successful gamble.

So the verdict isn't the one the highlight reels imply. The between-the-legs shot is the most clipped, and deservedly — it's a gift to a camera. The most reliably entertaining tennis shot, the one that earns its reaction every time rather than once in ten attempts, is the touch combo that makes a great athlete chase a ghost.

One thing to watch for this week

Pull up any tour highlight package and find a point that ends with a drop shot. Then keep watching three seconds longer than you normally would. Most viewers stop at the soft touch and the scramble. The real shot is often the one right after — the lob, the redirect, the second piece of touch that the first one set up. You'll start seeing the combos the camera operators already know to follow, and the game gets quietly more fun to watch.