Mystery of Jack Kramer's Toss

[bottle]

Today I Like this one Better

"My shoulder is the handle, my arm is the rope, and my wrist is the tail."
--Bungalo Bill

[jeffreycounts]

Hey Bottle - were you at the Davis Cup? Sounds like you were there...

[bottle]

Yes

It was terrific-- from James Blake's home run with his racket handle to
Roddick's and Llodra's unbelievable serves.

[jeffreycounts]

It was terrific-- from James Blake's home run with his racket handle to
Roddick's and Llodra's unbelievable serves.

I was there too! Amazing experience all around. I wish I had stayed for the consolation match though...

[bottle]

Cool! Sorry we didn't meet up. At India Davis Cup, also in Winston-Salem
as was last Spain Davis Cup, I got to talk with Eugene Scott, one of the
highlights of my tennis life.

[bottle]

"Once you've found something, use it, but don't tell anybody."

--Ed Ashley, # 3 on Brown varsity Dad Vail Championship eight-oared crew, to which Bottle Escher, # 4 replies:

Nah. Tell everybody. This is tennis, so compress your arm extension-- but
only if you understand precisely what that means.

1. Start with the quote from Bungalo Bill: "My shoulder is the handle, my arm is the rope, and my wrist is the tail."

2. Be a right-hander and hit serves down the center in deuce court first, for the sake of this lesson.

3. Keep upper arm parallel to court and at right angles to where you want the ball to go. Okay. But for how long? For longer than you thought. Until the upper arm has twirled furiously in its socket, passively extending the rope and cracking the tail through? Yes.

4. As tail cracks through raise your elbow and bend arm again, going into your followthrough.

5. Now for hard slice out wide pre-load elbow in a more forward and higher
place, out toward the palm tree. Will upper arm still be parallel to court? Nope. Will the two halves of your arm squeeze together? Sure, if they did when you served down the center. Will the essential arm action remain the same? Yes. Just at an angle and from a slightly forward and slightly more upward place.

6. Hit soft slice even wider to your left by controlled, muscular extension of arm simultaneous with rotors release, and followed by relaxed acceleration of twisting forearm.

7. Apply all this knowledge now to ad court.

[bottle]

A Warning

Serve # 24-B, which I expressed in posts # 31 and 36, caused some tendinitis for me as I became more enamored of it and hit the flat version more and more often possibly with the wrong string job.

The following serve is a hundred times safer.

How far behind yourself can you reach? "Everyone has to decide for himself," explains one famous teaching pro. Plan on pulling to the right and a different way of extending the arm may enable you to reach behind yourself more (this is me speaking now). Elbow may go all the way to the left-- upper arm up against the side of your head or even passing behind it-- employing extreme stance and bending backward, but abandoning idea of leftward lean at least for now-- saving legs for contact-- using PULL RIGHT (perhaps back to head) to start forearm pronation, which is more of a stubbing upward of lower edge rather than a wagging around. Perhaps you have only pulled one inch (with
a foot or more to follow) when forearm uncocks.

If literally getting hand behind head (i.e., to left of it) the arm would be bent and the range of motion not great-- the hand past the head with wrist against the back of head and no more?

But once arm is straight and slanted left the hand achieves four or five more inches of play to the left-- at least in my case it does and I simply don't know about other people, who may or may not be built differently with other injuries.

The hand is way up there-- very high. The elbow, too, has just come from low to high as part of a single blended motion that includes twisting from the shoulder. It doesn't seem possible that this new, extreme height could be a position of strength. And one recalls with terror the VHS film Vic Braden made showing himself with a model of the human arm-shoulder joint. With arm too close to body center, in his vew, he then pulled straight up causing
a dislocation-- the shoulder came right out of its plastic socket.

Okay, so be terrified-- possibly this is good for your health. But the next hand motion is not UP, it's toward right fence. You might well ask (and should) how can I extend arm on a slant to the left and then immediately pull it to the right? Won't the change of direction be too abrupt? How can the transition possibly be smooth, athletic and efficient?

The answer is in the twist of the whole arm that is occurring at the same time. The racket has some swing in it from the shoulder rotors, more effective up here in my case than down low. The shoulder ball is versatile like the single stick apparatus in a kitchen sink. One has to know what it can and can't do.

From this unique position of up left I don't see any need to pull more than an inch to the right before the forearm starts its pronation. The pull will continue out toward right fence. The first inch before uncocking of the forearm, however, adds considerably to racket head speed.

And this is the time to get simple, to make sure that one scrapes the ball at the time of greatest racket swoosh which must occur while the strings are going UP.

[bottle]

"Throw things overboard"-- Oscar Wegner

I admire service articles and posts that draw on the author's personal experience. That's not the only kind of account I admire or will steal from, but I do think there's unique power sometimes if the person is self-revelatory and honest. Consider Dennis Ralston's article on slice.

Like a lot of servers (the rotorded ones, I call them), if I want to accelerate from a full drop position with racket pointing perpendicularly to the court, I need to A., lean back and B., wind elbow up higher than shoulders line behind hand which is behind neck.

From this high rearward elbow position, one isn't going to raise elbow much higher during the contact, but one might shift it horizontally to a roughly same height position in front of the head.

So, following this idea, how could one extend the arm?

1. Muscularly, using the triceps with elbow kept back. That puts the hand out to your right.

2. Passively, firing the shoulder rotors with elbow kept back. That quickly
gets the hand out to your left.

3. A little of both resulting in a dependable serve that's a sitter for a good opponent, who will put you immediately on the defensive, so throw it overboard.

The idea of moving the elbow horizontally through contact seems to me a big one. It's particularly bizarre when serving wide in the ad court, because when you move the elbow along a horizontal plane it circles right to left just when you want the racket head to move left to right (and up). But don't be an ideologue. If it works, do it. Maybe the strings go up more than usual. Fool with stance.

Okay, so how do these two serves work and how should you employ them?

In 1., with your hand out right, the arm already straightened, you both twist and turn the elbow and release the cocked forearm during contact. Furthermore the twist is of the sort that puts the racket farther and farther in front of it.

I like this serve enough to use it in the four basic directions as well as during at-the-body attack.

In 2., with your hand out left, the arm already straightened, you don't twist the elbow since you've already done that, but you do uncock the forearm as the elbow TURNS (comes round on its horizontal track), the two motions countering each other and squeezing total movement up.

This seems a good option for at-the-body and down center line in deuce court and out wide in ad court, but not for the two others.

[bottle]

Service Friday

The best position for the fast spinning right to left serves is elbow high but WAY BACK. The WAY BACK means "not quite as high" and "more succinct
path for elbow" as it rises passively up in response to gross body-- sort of like the babe biologist Olivia Judson's description of asexuality in bdelloids.

That would mean less elbow twist going up but with racket tip getting just as low (perpendicular to the court) thanks to elbow being WAY BACK.

The next challenge is to make the kicker work from this slightly more rearward position. I have already postulated that elbow should remain back until arm has passively straightened (a method for use perhaps on kick serves only).

This is a return to whip serve genre ("My shoulder is the handle, my arm is the rope, and my wrist is the tail"--Bungalo Bill).

Like anything from Bungalo Bill, it hurt me. It hurt me when I hit it flat (because of more racket head speed than I usually generate). But when I hit spin with it I didn't get hurt. The upper arm wants to be parallel to the court, I think, and perpendicular to desired initial direction of racket edge. Next everything can change direction up and to right.

[bottle]

Saturday Service (regular match canceled due to bidnis)

Build on first serve above only with contact over head. Adoption of this alternative seemed indicated (overnight) by the speed suddenly generated by the right to left serves.

Once at court, found myself firing triceps first for about half of arm extension then achieving the second half with noodle arm and vigorous firing of shoulder rotors continuing the hand passively outward toward rear fence (and yeah to the right a little).

Think about using these two successive devices both of which take the hand closer to rear fence. Roddick is a package if ever there was a package but one of the items in it is hand going backward-- not merely upward-- before it goes forward. There is absolutely nothing wrong with acceleration that starts backward and then forms a big C upward and forward (I'd reverse the C's here if my computer knew how).

One has the choice, it seems to me, of bringing the top of the C
forward to the ball either from arm or body or both. Even the rotorded
player can finally use some cartwheel here so long as it's late enough.

Early leg drive plus early cartwheel assures the rotorded player a miserable,
downward-spinning life.

[bottle]

Five Percent of a Five-year-old's Oligodendricytes

Back in ancient history when there was a magazine called "Tennis World" and Gladys Heldman was the editor, Gladys said, "Don't ever bend your knees during the toss."

It is my theory that everybody immediately accepted this statement as the absolute truth-- I know I did-- and not many people have since challenged it.

In this method one either bends the knees before tossing or more likely bends them afterward, or both.

Since a serve takes a limited amount of time of which tossing the ball comprises a good proportion, bending the knees must happen pretty fast, and VERY FAST if you have the contraption serve of Andy Roddick.
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Recently, because my determination to learn a great kick serve at 68 matched my inability to hit it, I went back to basics, to some of the books that gave me my ideas about serving. (There are better ways to learn, I know, but I happen to like books.)

One book showed Stan Smith hitting a kicker with a continental grip which he described as one eighth of a turn to the left from Eastern forehand. Immediately I realized I've had my palm on top of the racket in the grip that Billie Jean, on the preceding page, advocated for hitting a slice serve (heel 1.5
knuckle 2.0). This has ensured for decades that I would always hit the outer edge when for kick I really wished to hit the inside edge of the ball.

Additionally, Jeff, a biker and Vietnam vet bartender had something to say.
Despite what the American Davis Cup team thinks after three week-long triumphal visits to Winston-Salem, Swaim's Grocery is the city's best bar.
Jeff went over to one of the wastebaskets full of old wooden tennis rackets that are all over the place.

He pulled out a Davis and made me demonstrate my service grip and motion. "You're probably hitting the right side of the ball." Jeff used to
win child tournaments with left-hand kickers though he doesn't have much
more flexibility than I. He turned my big knuckle all the way to 8.5, the sharp ridge to the left of the top panel.

With that serve I'm REALLY around the right side. I've been hitting the ball way left and way high, but I'll stick with Jeff's learning program because I'm curious if nothing else.

The thing about this unexpected tennis lesson, though, is that it has authorized me to experiment much more with grips. And then I re-read Charlie Pasarel saying that whenever he wanted to restore solidity to his serves-- quickly-- he returned to Eastern forehand grip for a short while.

So, okay, next I have my continental (heel 1.5 knuckle 2.5).

And my ready-made idea that one should never bend during the toss. There was a book saying the opposite, of course, but I pretty much ignored it. Even when allowing myself to be influenced, I would bend on hands drop, stop bending for the toss, bend more after the toss. FATAL!

Here I must leave half of you-- the half of tennis players unwilling to consider other sports. Two of the most subtle, rhythmic, athletic movements in human existence are the backswing in golf and the recovery in crew.

Since I am still a certified USRA crew coach, I must tell you: Recovery is all about how and when and how slow you bend your legs. Modern crews employ constant hand speed. The hands go out and the straight upper body topples over from the hips and the knees bend-- with all of this sequence determined by the original hand speed.

In time, with encouragement from the coach, the motions blend and overlap.

Fifty years ago the hands and upper body went out fast; then your butt slid up its little tracks. SLOW SLOWER SLOWERR SLOWEST BAM!!! (THE CATCH.)
It still sounds good.

Constant speed, however, is older and better dating from a caveman on a log in a pond. The caveman steps in one direction. The log moves a foot in the opposite direction. If one can get the oars in the water just then-- before the log moves back to its original position-- one has gained a foot. Which in hundreds of strokes adds up to hundreds of feet.

Oarsmen tend to be a different kind of athlete. Some of them were never destined to do well at tennis. But anyone who can master this most subtle trick in all of sport-- driving the oar just before the caveman's log goes back to starting point-- can master a slow timed serve in tennis; in fact, could probably master the timing of anything if properly instructed or self-instructed.

So, the constant speed of racket dropping (count 1), racket going back
(count 2), and racket rising (counts 3 and 4), is all accompanied by a single, attenuated coiling of the knees. And the attenuation; i.e., slow because spread out, is what prevents disturbance of the toss.

When comparing older modes of serving with the modern, one can watch the player's head. In older modes the player-- say King and Smith-- stepped with right leg, twisting the head, which meant the hips were twisting, too.

The same thing happens naturally (but in both directions which makes it easier to control) if one will simply splay feet correctly for the modern hop in platform stance. Starting point book description: "Your front foot should be parallel to the baseline. Set your rear foot about a foot and a half behind you, with your toes open 45 degrees to the baseline. The heel of your front foot is now in line with the arch of your rear foot."

Right now, since I can't see any upper body rotation in Stan Smith's kick serve, I'm just relying in my spin serve on natural (passive) hips rotation
from both feet as legs explode. I narrowed the above stance a bit.

It helps, too, if the tennis court where you are practicing is newly resurfaced in optic blue in a friendly neighborhood.

One early morning two weeks ago a stranger who apparently could not believe how often I work on my serve stopped her car and took something out of the trunk.

It was a Gamma 75 high rise ball hopper, never used.

She was recently divorced, was thinking about quitting tennis, had bought the hopper for two dollars at a yard sale and gave it to me for free.

[bottle]

Distinctions

It's fun discovering when people are full of baloney. People have done it to me and I have done it to them.

Many teaching pros used to criticize the huge cartwheel of Venus Williams when serving. A slow motion filmed sequence at Wimbledon today showed her still doing it. She didn't listen in other words. No, she's not ahead of the ball, pulling it. Whatever she's doing is perfectly dynamic. How else could she have equalled the women's record of 129 mph at Wimbedon?

As John McEnroe said, "I wish I could serve that fast."

When white people are being stupid about the Williams sisters they describe them as being the same physical type. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such statements only reveal the failure of the speaker to make distinctions in life.

And, as someone said, "Once you go black, you never go back."

(I said that to a black neighbor recently and she replied, "Where did you
learn that?" "Somewhere," I said.)

[bottle]

The Richardwilliams and The Yurisharap

I name the following two serves after the fathers of the two young women who hit them. The fathers need more attention, and there is a gender issue since I am the one here trying to steal some thunder.

Both Venus and Maria use a pinpoint system which means they can attain leftward lean on the fly.

Pete, Roger, Justine, Svetlana, Stan Smith also get some leftward lean on the fly but have already taken the bulk of it during wind-down of their legs.

The biggest difference in these groups, though, is that the second, the platform stancers, use asymmetrical motion in which they drive off of front leg only or primarily.

Venus and Maria, by contrast, drive off of both legs like Bjorn Borg and Andy Roddick.

Now let's compare the two girls.

Venus starts with a closed stance as if she were a platformer. But she steps, and pretty far beyond her left foot. This signifies power with a big rotary element that is pretty much horizontal. When anyone splays their feet like tour players, nice total body rotation occurs naturally as they go down. Which reverses and is fairly fast as they go up. But Venus is adding some horizontal leverage with the two feet, still splayed, farther apart. Such natural rotation twists the head through forward serve unless one consciously turns it back. And both of these women use the other kind of total body rotation, too, the cartwheel. Venus starts pretty much over her feet, thrusts longer straight up or on on a slight slant forward, does do delayed cartwheel then, adds pop from her gut then arm. The cartwheel in both cases goes BEYOND contact in complete disdain of a new primer in tennis that insists you must get your head still right under the ball. Venus gets to where her upper body is 45 degrees from horizontal. She has longsince hit the ball. By the definition of cartwheel that I am now using-- "the part of the serve that most moves the head"-- both Venus and Maria would be good candidates for serving blindfolded.

Maria's power though-- Caramba!-- comes mostly from legs and cartwheel.
She cartwheels so much that her upper body, assisted by backward thrusting hips (and Venus does that too) finishes parallel to the court, with her trailing
heel, Maria's, somewhere up in the sky. She cartwheels so much that to get ready she uses a conventional stance, one foot pretty much in front of the other, with left heel pointed into right instep, again the convention. She, too, is pretty much over her feet but gets her shoulders leaning back and hips leaning forward both at the same time during the bend. And she goes down on her knees even after she steps-- that's like Andy Roddick! Anyone choosing a slower option could be going down the whole time. To repeat, as her knees compress, that hip is going out. And her feet get squeezed together in a dynamic pose, right heel into left instep this time. And when the rocket blasts slightly forward the left hip goes out toward the net even more! And because the cartwheel is so big, she starts it sooner during the legs thrust than Venus. And like Venus, her head veers off to the left as her gut releases and her arm strikes straight, to the right; however, "to the right" by now means nearly vertical. It is my theory that the combination of hips both rotating and flying backward accomplishes head veer to left with no conscious effort from anybody.

Okay, so now a 68-year-old comes along with recent arthroscopy and some arthritis in his left leg. Which style will he choose-- one-legged or two-legged? Okay. Now, which model will he choose?

Well, Venus has a better first serve and Maria the better second serve.

So there's the answer.

[bottle]

To Get More Realistic

in this matter of applying the Richardwilliams and the Yurisharap to old age serving, perhaps one should use them both as first serves and retain one's existing second serve, whatever it is.

In my case that would be a spaghetti arm serve with upper arm first level in an early rotary move-- to rephrase, a serve which preloads and releases the rotor muscles in the shoulder thus centrifugating the arm straight which then rises up over the right edge of the ball.

For the two bigger serves, RW and YS, I find myself getting elbow extremely high very early to maximize the use of gravity in compresseing the two halves of the arm and to give me a better chance of forming upward spin.

Arm extension, then, I believe, should be very delayed and muscular, from the triceps, with straight-arm pronation occurring after that.

For Dennis Ralston type slice on a second serve, I believe one should start again from level upper arm, like him, but combine rotors release, muscular arm extension and elbow rising up all at once. I've also decided to keep back foot
down on both of these second serves, at least for the time being.

[bottle]

Megaleap toward What?

POCKET BILLIARDS AND THE MONITOR, WHICH WOULD BE THE CIVIL WAR SHIP. PROPULSON SYSTEM IN THE HANDS. KINETIC CHAIN AS USEFUL CONCEPT RELEGATED TO THE DUST BIN.

Now let's try to sort these headlines out. In pool, you can get your weaker doubles partner to obtain more accuracy by lining up the centers, at contact, of cueball and object ball toward the pocket. In tennis, at contact, there still is an object ball, which you have thrown up in the air in order to serve it to a precise spot. The instrument of propulson, however, is flat, not round like a cueball. The magnification of error is greater because of greater distance to the target, but the aiming is simplified if you throw your strings in a surgically straight incision through the air across the ball and at right angles to the target. As Dennis Ralston says in his "Developing the Slice Serve" article, "By relying on the hands you can be much more precise in controlling the swing and finding the same spot on the ball. Your timing is just better. The key to hitting the ball wide with more sidespin is only a slight difference in the way the hand moves the racket across the ball."

Everything works together to make a perfect throw anytime, of course. But upper body rotation has become a sensor rather than link three in a kinetic chain. Link one (feet to knees) and link two (knees to hips) can cool it and be still. And upper body rotation can become nothing more or less than the turret on the Monitor slightly drawing back and then reversing forward and slowly pointing its single cannon in the precise direction you want your ball to go. (I am a Yankee living in the South.)
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REVERSING "LONG RUNWAY" THEORY
This contrarian point of view can start with the Ralston article. As one observes the remarkable continuous video at the beginning one can establish two reference points.

The first is the palm tree toward which Dennis Ralston continually whips the racket head. If your tennis court doesn't have a palm tree, you can mentally extend the right singles line to the rear fence and maybe go two feet to the right and place an easily seen large target there-- a bag, a brightly colored racket cover standing up against the fence, anything.

The second reference point, equally important, is a pyramid of four tennis balls set two thirds of the way down the outside service line as seen from where you will serve.

I think I hit it once the first day, zero the second day, and 2,0,1,5,2,3,5(today). Wouldn't 15 be neat and approximate Michel Llodra? What we all want is Vic Braden demonstrating this serve in Winchester, Virginia. He splattered the pyramid on the first try, and of course then quit with the large crowd assuming he would hit it on every attempt thereafter. But getting near the target is more important than hitting it once one can decide beforehand on which side one will barely miss.

Now, "long straight runway" postulates a huge knee bend, possibly of either type in my earlier descriptions of the Richardwilliams and the Yurisharap. These serves work for me in that they look good and I get the ball in-- but not with sufficient racket head speed for the venomous spin I want.

So it's back to basics, which would be Dennis Ralston. Does he get racket tip pointed down behind him at the court? Nope. Does he employ a huge knee bend? Nope. The longest, straightest runway possible for acceleration up to the ball? For that, he would at least squeeze the two halves of his arm together.

From Ralston's right angled arm winding backward and reversing direction it's what works. Having had debates about whether the arm should extend triceptically or passively or in a combination of both (and I know I've argued all three viewpoints), I simply use what works best and try to be humble about it.

In a classical down together up together form of toss like Dennis Ralston, the arm ends at a right angle, which means there's just enough muscular tension in it to hold that shape. Call the ball and racket tip reaching their first high points at the same moment count one. Count two, very stripped down and simple then, pre-loads the shoulder rotors against slow upper body rotation forward as wrist cocks too. Count three fires those rotors spaghetti-arming the hand right through perfect position for a slice serve, at least in a mild continental grip with big knuckle on sharp ridge at top of Eastern forehand panel. That would put hand to right of strings. Did hand go toward netpost? Possibly. But I'd rather concentrate on the racket head now, getting it to go from early right at the palm tree, down the outside, into the roots and back toward the server-- all this from the rotors-- before you bend your arm for a slow floppy followthrough up from the court.

As Dennis Ralston suggests in the article, mastery of the essential consistency in wide slice is most difficult of the four basic serves, but its principles can be applied to hitting another side of the ball.

So, is the acceleration path in these serves straight? No, it goes both up and down. I'm sure the racket head is decelerating by the time it reaches the palm tree's roots. Nevertheless, acceleration occurred both before and after the ball.

I'm thinking of an airplane that takes off quickly (a Maule) rather than one that goes all the way to the end of the runway and crashes from not enough acceleration.

Fire the rotors in one long blast. Arm was right angled then straight as it passed the ball and chopped down. There was a moment where the hand moved right from the strings to keep the strings doing straight.

Through repetition, I believe, one can eliminate the palm tree, concentrating instead on hitting the same spot on the ball. And one can eliminate the second target, the pyramid of four balls, on the day when one plays a match.