Mystery of Jack Kramer's Toss

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Hand going to Right Twice

is a reason along with still head that this slice serve works so well. One can mentally be firing the shoulder rotors forward while the racket still is winding back. And rotors are more effective when upper arm is parallel to court with whole arm right-angled. The mechanical advantage is greater than if both halves of the arm started out squeezed together. Also, from the right angle, your arm has half the distance to go to get itself flung passively straight. At that point the fact that the elbow also is rising does not matter. The firing rotors with first movement forward immediately centrifugate hand to right. In a thousand-frames-per-second filmstrip of this very fast, continuous throw seen midway we could say, "Oh, my arm is straight. Now it's time to pronate."

Despite what anyone says, however, and despite the semantic distinction that says that word ("pronate") applies only to muscular forearm twist, muscular shoulder twist contributes too same as in a Federer-type forehand. And so, as in that shot, you have a choice. You can push the racket head left from your hand, abandoning the precision you so carefully built up. Or you can go with the flow and pull the hand away from the strings. This and only this won't mess with the straightness of their flight.

I sing BOTH of Ralston type slice serve and Federer type topspin forehand. In the serve due to spaghetti arm the hand flies toward opposite fence but also to the right. In the forehand due to a solid connection between arm and body the hand flies toward opposite fence but also to the right.

In the serve the hand then gets out of the way of the slicing strings by shifting to right again. In the forehand the racket butt never stops or slows down since it is firmly connected to smooth body rotation. It is rather the racket tip that seems to get stuck in a puddle of mud as the racket butt, uncaring, is unaffected except to spear to right more.

In the serve the combination of all motions brings racket up then down low and even back toward body preceding an easy, floppy bend of arm to bring racket up to final position. In the forehand the racket butt suddenly drives left to get out of the way of the shearing strings and to initiate big sideways recovery movement toward center including the human head.

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Watching First Video: "Developing a Slice Serve"

Ralston's hand, racket edge, arm and elbow all go toward palm tree. The elbow starts from left of tree then goes straight at it. The arm comes up and to left from its starting right-angled position with upper arm parallel to the court. Things cancel each other out. Result: Everything goes at the tree.

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Top down back, Bottom up forward

There is a slit at the bottom of Ralston's shirt just over his right hip.

That slit winds back about half an inch then immediately winds forward about two inches before upper body chimes in.

None of this will matter if primacy of the arm work hasn't been first accepted and drilled.

This sequence of backward and forward rotations is unbroken-- there is no pause.

It has life of its own. It moves his head two or three inches left from the palm tree before his administration of the truly powerful, still-headed part of his stroke.

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The Server and The Partridge

A woman on High Knob Mountain in Virginia, Anita DeFranco, used to call me "The Server." Whenever she and her husband drove past the tennis court on their way down the mountain, there I was. I was shocked to learn she had depersonalized me to this extent. She certainly knew me by name and could hit back my serve with ease.

Anyway, I've never stopped. If I don't have a match on a given day, I'm on court, usually at dawn, trying to adjust the slack in my serve.

And similar stories have always appealed to me-- not least that of Polly Scott, Eugene Scott's widow, who made a speech this summer at her husband's induction into Newport's Tennis Hall of Fame.

She was serving basket after basket of balls. "It's getting much better, honey," she said. "Isn't it?"

"Nope," he said.

Gene Scott then worked on Polly Scott's serve, which became good enough so that they could play top-flight mixed doubles together.

What a frightening thought-- that you can work endlessly on your serve and not have it get better. (Been there, done that.) Moreover it can get worse and even A LOT WORSE.

At sixty-eight, what has helped me most is applying the video models of Dennis Ralston serving slice ("Developing the Slice Serve" in this website) to my own thrust-and-hop.

After several months of doing this, a couple of things have become clear. First, my regular opponent, The Partridge, despises what I am doing. For, if you are a right-hander consistently hitting wide slice in the deuce court as a first choice, your serve down the middle doesn't have to be very good. Yes it needs a little topspin but not huge kick. So if huge kick doesn't come naturally, why waste your time in the pursuit of it?

No, set up a single pyramid of four balls out wide instead and go for it. No other target will splat so well. And when you hit it, give yourself the reward of walking around the net, reassembling the pyramid, and returning to your high-rise basket.

So, do you want to hit the pyramid hard? Yes-- so hit it soft. Like Theseus telling what he has learned about lovemaking in the Amanda Elyot novel "The Memoirs of Helen of Troy," however fast you want to go, go ten times as slow.

Will such unrelenting target practice affect your technique? Of course. It's revised every idea about serving I had.

Right now I don't try for conscious rhythm until the tossed ball is reaching its acme just as my wrist is concluding its early flex by pointing racket tip at the left fence.

I might use an easy cadence of three from there (count one); (count two) to reverse continuous upper body rotation while keeping it even and slow; (count three) an easy throw utilizing muscular extension of the triceps out toward Ralston's palm tree.

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Precision Serve Subordinating all to Hitting a Target

Winding back all the time is both advisable and not. NOT, because it screws (literally) with toss. So try just winding the back shoulder as one half of a shoulder blade clenching.

Now let this motion flow into the other shoulder blade clenching combined with UBR (upper body rotation) and the armwork to the same parameter as before.

The back shoulder clenching idea comes from Greg Papas, but I may be applying it a different way here.

More precisely, UBR should happen during the drop, be replaced by first clench until ball release flowing into second clench and resumed UBR-- with everything described happening at one even speed.

The idea of sequenced clenches is novel and should be fun to try.

The second clench may counter UBR so that upraised tossing arm may point at a single spot despite the motion.

To do a little math: 1 2 (1+2) = backward rotation phase; or, 1 2 3; or,
thirds of a count? No, not really since I'll only count from third third; i.e., the (1+2) with arm-bend and wrist flex sequence just ending at this point as well.
Okay, don't get mad: TURNTURNTURN (all backward).

Sounds complicated. Is it? Not really. First, for simplicity, you can develop a seamless UBR UBR serve with no pause between backward and forward shoulders rotation under your still head, just a change of direction.

It feels pretty good. But you would be justified in saying, "There is a joker factor in here, a design flaw, and it has to do with toss."

The flaw is that your front shoulder is going back during the business part of your toss; i.e., that upward motion while the ball is still in your hand. So stop tossing shoulder but let the hitting shoulder plus its blade unit keep moving instead.

Chime this from ball release into a resumption of UBR plus clenching of second shoulderblade toward first.

After a day or two of this, the motion will seem just as natural as the full UBR UBR serve did.

As you take the racket back, the arm bends slightly past a right angle and the wrist flexes. Do this by feel; i.e., allow overlap if that feels best. Think of the organic backward windup to any really good throw in any sport.

Now slow rotation forward of the shoulders starts, with upper arm parallel to court. This winds hand and racket, which still had a little momentum, down by twisting shoulder rotors.

Sounds like I'm pre-loading rotors for a big release of them, and that's possible, even effective, but is a different kind of serve, not as precise in my case (and maybe in yours, too). So I think of this bunching of the rotor muscles simply as a way of making some hammering room.

Now I fire everything with triceps out toward Dennis Ralston's palm tree. That of course is the ephemeral image in one seminal video strip, but I can set up a racket cover standing against the back fence. I walk down the singles line, continue to fence, place the cover to my right (I'm right-handed). That's where I'll aim my arm and racket head, and after some wrist extension and forearm-and-shoulder pronation the straight arm will come down and then bend up at the elbow for an easy, floppy followthrough to my left.

This serve, though slice out wide, works small adjustment in other directions as well; and, I'm very lucky.

For the court where I do everything is across the street from a women's home for recovering alcoholics.

One of the women, Morna, a tennis pro, is always out on the porch when I play my match. (Sometime try saying "Good morning, Morna" some morning at seven in the morning.)

Morna says, "I can never tell which way you're going with your serve."

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Elimination or Inclusion?

Nothing is ever over. Logic says that if you have developed a serve in which body rotation is more about aiming while loading than direct propulsion, you may be able to eliminate an extraneous element or two maybe picked up from earlier serves with different goals.

I'm not going to bore any interested persons (and couldn't care less how few these are since tennis players are already a minority of persons in the world anyway) with a rundown of material previously covered but will refer to post # 50.

There I outlined a three-part wind-back of upper body to assure stillness at moment of toss.

Why couldn't one divide the motion with a pair of segments rather than three? First, backward upper body rotation. Second, a clenching of right shoulderblade toward left (which you hold still).

If the racket is moving, its movement can blend into UBR going the other way.

Of course, if you plan on bringing left shoulderblade toward right you will have to do it now during the forward UBR, which moves the upraised tossing arm a lot and complicates things.

Which method hits the target and with more easy pace and break?

There is the answer.

After taking these ideas to court this morning, I am mainly going with the plan in post 50, but like having the options of a pure UBR UBR serve and this one, as well.

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More about Palm-altered Tosses, French Slices, and Tennis Writers

Tennis pros of the teaching variety here in the United States are obliged to use the English language, and we are all dependent upon them and therefore justified in asking if they are English majors.

Same thing for tennis writers. One can read the first two biographies of Roger Federer and immediately understand that the authorial language is nowhere in the league of John M. Barnaby, E.C. Potter Jr., Bill Tilden, or Eugene Scott collaborating with Ivan Lendl.

Belatedly, I discovered Potter's book "Kings of the Court." This writer is the best I have ever seen in commenting about Tilden (other than Tilden himself) or for that matter any early stars of international tennis.

In writing about history and Henry Cochet he says, "The indoor court became a garage for army trucks." And Cochet took up tennis again after World War I "with the same balls he had used in 1914."

So there has always been a certain charm to French tennis even beyond Suzanne Lenglen, Jean Borotra, "the bounding Basque," or Rene LaCoste's use of a notebook to defeat Tilden and Johnston. How could one not love French tennis players after observing them lose their Davis Cup tie in 2008 Winston-Salem. There was Michel Llodra almost but not quite flummoxing Andy Roddick and succeeding against the Bryan brothers with his wide slice serve, Arnaud Clement's unbelievable consistency, Michel Matthieu's and Richard Gasquet's human limitation clearly existing only in the head.

One assistant at Joel Coliseum started watching the French team warmups. Then he followed them to the different bar than that used by the American Davis Cup Team and sat right next to them blown away by their magnetism and individuality even though he never studied French.

I'm plenty glad the Bryan brothers took revenge for bronze in Beijing but will not forget the French fans in Winston-Salem either, who in turn were blown away by three renditions of The Marseillaise sung by a young Pavorotti at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

I asked Google if E.C. Potter Jr. was related to British humorist Stephen Potter, who wrote about oneupsmanship as it applies to tennis.

I'm still not entirely sure but don't think so.

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Other Possibilities after Watching Ralston again

1. No backward rotation of upper body. No or little arching. All forward rotation.

2. Clench right shoulderblade during the toss, thus keeping tossing shoulder still. Turn upper body more while clenching left shoulder blade.

3. Clench clench flowing into forward UBR (upper body rotation).

4. Don't do the second clench.

Simplification:

What one ultimately wants is a motion as simple yet effective as Dennis Ralston's. Knowing the influience that Pancho Gonzalez had on Ralston and knowing somewhat about the Gonzalez serve (having tried to imitate it for months or years at some point) can help.

The toss and takeback are all arms. One can see this in the three article videos of Ralston. There now appears to be no backward rotation of upper body whatsoever, just the exact positioning of shoulders that he wants at address.

Not to be too hard on myself, however, the takeback of the hitting arm, more horizontal than the traditional jingle serve "down together up together" naturally accomplishes what I have previously described as clenching the right shoulderblade toward left.

Whether there needs then to be a clenching of left shoulderblade toward right seems doubtful. This would be optional. Such experiments are easy to run if one has the desire, interest, time and patience necessary.

"The shot you practiced is the one you play with," Stan Smith famously said in his joint VCR with Vic Braden and Arthur Ashe.

Today however I violated that rule and yet did well against a tough opponent (The Partridge) since by now all the slight variations I've been discussing (and trying out) feel much the same.

The whole adventure seems a good illustration of Nobel Laureate Craig B. Mello's statement about research in science.

"You're either completely wrong or partially right."

Wouldn't you rather hear me say that than "Eureka! I've got it! 6-0, 6-0! Life will be perfect from now on!"

I wrote this post before the match, incidentally, which went to 6-0 before rain started.

What hits the target the most?

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Mystery of the Jack Kramer Toss

The person who has written the most about this is Vic Braden. And as he showed in early VCR's, the mystery is largely about keeping both palms pointed down so as to simulate the visceral feel of a great windup in baseball or call of safe at the plate.

This thought is a bit annoying as an idea maybe should be. Turn both palms down now and rotate upper body like Luis Tiant. (Oh, sorry, he pitched for Boston in the time of Carl Yazstremski and would turn his back to the hitter/receiver like John McEnroe serving.)

I'm sure that if you did the exercise you felt the feel. An idea itself, however, is nothing but idea until someone puts it into practice, which means it must be individualized first. Do prominent servers nowadays keep tossing palm down? Querrey, Federer, Dementieva, everybody-- palm up. Except maybe Ivan Ljubicic whose palm is neither-- looks to me to be pretty much vertical with maybe a slight lip at the bottom to push the ball.

Man, I don't care what anybody does, I'm just out to steal what I can. I really like the look of Ralston's slice but hate the way his tossing arm twists while it's up high. So many people do this. And no one in the history of tennis has ever bothered to explain why it's such a good idea. Talk about ANNOYING.

Okay, so half a dozen people led by Jack Kramer keep tossing palm down. And hundreds, maybe thousands, don't keep hitting palm pointed down more than a little. Best to follow one's own star.

I'm big on three-segment takeback (see post # 50 for more ideas about it).
Using a Ljubicic type toss grip one can slightly thrust both connected hands up then get just enough of an upper body twisting backward baseball like feel as hands do their simultaneous gravity-assisted and separating thing. To be more precise, tossing hand goes straight down as hitting hand goes down but mostly back and maybe even up a little.

From there, during upward part of the toss till release, hitting arm goes back in horizonal fashion which moves right shoulderblade toward left. The body-- especially the front shoulder-- is still.

As ball lifts out of hand the backward upper body motion resumes accompanied by countering movement of left shoulderblade toward right. The two actions combine to give you a good, thrusting, pointing up at the cresting ball maybe like never before.

Personally, I like this since I'm using a toss that slightly bends the arm, and I miss all the old advice about pointing a stiff limb.

In the combined movie "Match Point" and "Wimbledon" (from old age they ran together in my mind) the Kirsten Dunce loving fop wins Wimbledon because he remembers to point his stiff arm up at the ball.

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Hold Everything.

If you can get a good "pointing" through simultaneity of two motions you can get a good toss the same way with one of the two contributing motions being the baseball type windback that you prefer.

In a UBR UBR serve then you need to coordinate LEFT shoulderblade movement with duration of the upward toss. That would be from low point of tossing hand through release to crest.

You know the configuration of arm you want at the conclusion of BUBR (backward upper body rotation). And FUBR should occur at the same low speed. There are old-fashioned spring clocks with disks and pillars between them. The whole mechanism twirls one way then the other with no pause
in between and may also be called a pendulum although it doesn't resemble the more familiar type.

If kinetic chain wants to play with the other children in this game it can simply adjust and not be its usual, bullying self.

What kind of pool player are you, reader-- dead stick like Steve Mizerak or Allison Fisher, The Duchess of Doom? Or do you take the stick back and immediately change direction almost as if it's attached to a spring? The answer could figure in determining if this is the serve for you.

How's it all going to work? The inventor strolls through his Batman's cave seeking a carelessly laid tennis racket.

count 1: up together
count 2: the separation moving right shoulderblade
count 3: the upward toss moving left shoulderblade
count 4: FUBR bending back hitting arm
count 5: the throw.

The big choice then is whether to keep shoulders still for the first two counts or to start BUBR right away at top of the drop. I make my choice-- from top of the drop. Then I revise to three counts only (the other two are still present but I ignore them).

1: toss to crest
2: FUBR as ball falls a little
3: throw

The tossing arm will move to left more while it is upraised than in the serve of the immediately preceding post-- something to be expected and therefore useful as cue.

Bottle to Morna on porch after ten balls served (because cats and dogs started to come down): "I hit the target and may have figured something out so it was worth it."

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A Choice and Search for Cues

The cues: Right elbow goes back to take legs down. Could that actually happen? Of course not. It's a fanciful idea. That's why it qualifies as cue.

1. Then left elbow goes forward as part of toss to take legs down farther. The body is naturally turning back because of set of feet. But mustn't body always be still for a precise toss? Not if body moves down from the toss just as carefully. Total backward body turn is 25 degrees. Toss arm smoothly up from body as you toss body smoothly down from arm.

2. Or, right arm smoothing back takes legs down and legs stay at one level while left elbow going forward activates upper body turn (backward). Total body turn is 25 degrees. Knee bend is half as much for this one.

The energy output is enormous after either of these two choices, forming immediate forward body turn of 125 degrees or a ratio of one to five, which equals violence with no restraint whatsoever especially from the gut. In # 1 you relegate extra windback of upper body (natural, reflexive) to forward rotation of total body which again is a function of extending legs combined with splay of feet; i.e., you need to think very little. The last bit of BUBR is just as passive as shoulder rotors cocking in other words-- a simple matter of staying relaxed. This question of how much windback to relegate as passive action is very interesting. My accuracy improved, for instance, when I flexed wrist back pro-actively BEFORE any FUBR.

In # 2 the passive windback is further simplified and relegated only to bent arm. There can be no ideology at work here: The choice is whichever of the two possibilities works better and may have to be determined in more than a single serving session.

However, wouldn't # 1 be more elegant? Both movements of the shoulderblades toward spinal column done in succession would take legs down-- highly workable.

The only reason NOT to do this would be to keep passive windback simple and relegated to keying back of bent arm only. Do we up the ante by lagging upper body, too? And what does this do for spin, pace and accuracy?
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Watching big servers, look for circus trickers who are moving their head at contact vs. the still hub ones. Then make the sensible choice for yourself.

The challenge to keeping the head still is greater for anyone who uses a maximum of legs.

The head itself may finally rotate slightly before, at, or after contact but it needn't go up, down, left or right.

The rising body can go around like a tilt-a-whirl in other words, with the head remaining an absolute hub in space.

Kicking bend into the body can do this provided some of the available bend was already taken. The legs by themselves would raise the head. The bending body by itself would lower the head. Similarly, the legs by themselves would take the head right. And the bending body by itself would take the head left.

Legs and bend together can keep the head still-- the most important cue of all.

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Placement vs. Romanticism

"You're completely wrong or you're partially right."
-- Craig B. Mello, Nobel Laureate in Medicine

I'm completely wrong in saying that straightening the legs is going to take the body to the right. Pete Sampras seems to go more to left when they are straightened.

After nine baskets of balls with target over three days, however, I've decided to stick with the fixed hub idea of my previous post. Sampras and Federer do something different. They raise (with legs) the head as much as half a foot before they keep it still.

This might work for YOU. It involves more body tilt AS ONE GOES DOWN, and it works for me, too, but with no appreciable improvement in power while worsening placement.

Keeping head still for longer (in the beginning) is a workable idea since the upper body can double-wind during legs thrust.

"double-wind": a term used by Charlie Pasarell, who was instructed by Welby Van Horn. Pasarell doesn't define it but surely must mean that his shoulders
tilt down toward the court even as they wind back. The excellent photographs of him in the book "Mastering your Tennis Strokes" (with all kind of reference points in the background) show legs straightening but his head rising only an inch.

Of course people use much more legs nowadays. If you're 68 like me, however, you might be happy to use both legs just enough to clear front
foot so it can freely rotate and not send you to the knee doctor.

That may not sound like a lot of leg power, but it's enough to pre-load
the 80-degreed forearm on shoulder rotors and the gut muscles as
well.

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Splash

Your house has flooded. It's floating away. You're on the roof, but you want to work on your serve.

Right now your windup consists of two parts: 1. That which happens while the tossing hand drops down. 2. That which happens while the tossing hand and the ball rise up.

This is awfully schematic, isn't it? But you wouldn't want to mess with the toss. What if you melded the whole takeback into seamlessness, however, no longer making any distinction between the arm straightening and the arm winding up.

Instead, without changing those basic actions, you think only of the beginning-- the tossing hand and racket touching together-- and the end-- the wrist flexed with arm bent at 80 degrees and your hand cocked at some distance back behind your right ear.

SPLASH.

A typhoid shot at the very least.

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An ABC of UBR for Kick

Term: UBR (Upper Body Rotation)

It is my theory that if one seeks constant development of technique throughout one's tennis career one should become a pirate, which doesn't necessarily mean playing like Raphael Nadal.

What it does mean is becoming a thief early, walking around a huge array of full tennis courts like Pancho Gonzalez and saying, "I'll take that one. This looks good. No, that backhand's not for me."

Then, further along in the career, one talks to people, studies videos, even reads.

Finally, one steals from oneself.

That's where I am with my effort to generate more kick down the center to complement my hard, low slice out wide.

I'm so glad I spent some months abandoning all other ideas and worked with a single target out wide, using Dennis Ralston in his TennisPlayer article as a model at least from the waist up.

I stole Ralston's windup, and I'm very glad. Of course he might not recognize it-- no matter-- this is just part of being a good thief. You make stuff your own.

So here I am, all wound up to hit slice, with my wrist cocked, pointing my racket tip at the left fence.

But watch Max Mirnyi getting ready to hit second serve kick. His racket is all the way around pointing at front left fence post; i.e., across the net. So, how could I get around more? Easy if I steal from Chris Lewit and Scott Murphy both at the same time, and get so low that my heels rise up on my toes-- something I said I didn't want to do, but legs and ankles feel strong enough by now despite and thanks to knee surgery. And I'm not going to do it all the time. I'll stay flat-foot until take-off on my slices same as before.

Murphy has shown in his TennisPlayer articles how easy it is to raise elbow naturally as a result of other body motion. I'm starting here from a higher register-- upper arm parallel to court-- but the principle is the same.

Now I'm in the very high elbow position that Lewit advocates for "long runway."

Here comes some theory and the "ABC" I talked about. When elbow is getting this high (and back), it's getting closer to head. If at the same time the two halves of the arm squeeze completely together for a butt scratch (compared to the 80 degree arm angle I limit myself to for slice) the hand obviously is low and close to body, and the racket is close to body, and the left arm can have folded into body-- so you're pretty streamlined.

So use this fact. Your upper body can A rotate fast from the gut before you fire triceps, B while you fire and C afterwards at contact (ABC).

Many people think, I'll bet, that triceps is directly accelerating the strings with so much momentum that once arm is straight it accelerates from the shoulder toward right fence. Maybe. The idea I want to explore, however, is that the straight arm stays solid with shoulder, so it's really your gut that scrapes the ball. "Put your stomach on the ball" might be the cue.

Firing the triceps then would accelerate the racket in a huge way-- by widening its orbit and thereby converting all power from the gut into racket head speed.

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Low Slice vs. High Kick

There are, for sure, players with useful topspin slice out wide in deuce court-- that's just not the way my serve has developed.

I was slow in mastering kick, so didn't go that route on all serves, as Chris Lewit advises.

I am positive, however, that he can teach any idiot good kick within two years, and am interested in his idea that all serves should be topspin serves at least for the two years. I have known other tennis pros who felt exactly the same.

What I see is a big difference between serves which use triceptic extension exclusively and those which centrifugate the arm partially straight first.
This latter group preloads and fires the shoulder rotor muscles that Brian Gordon has written and illustrated so tellingly about.

On my slice I can do it. First of all the forward racket motion starts from farther behind the head. On both kinds of serve the greatest power seems to come from legs and gut.

Did I say I use platform stance? In that kind of serving, because of the splay of the feet, there is Total Body Rotation both ways as legs compress and then extend. And this TBR includes the hips, completely taking care of the hips requirement (with no extra wriggling of them necessary). I put this in because everyone always wants to talk about hips.