Tennis, at its essence, is a footwork sport. It rewards small, precise steps and perfect balance. Its icons—Roger Federer, Rod Laver, Martina Navratilova and John McEnroe are perhaps the best examples—are often described as graceful performance artists, cut from the same cloth as Mikhail Baryshnikov.

Yet there is a counterintuitive, rather revealing truth about tennis players: They can't dance.

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