A New Year's Serve

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Another FETF: One of These Experiments Ought to Work with Repeatability

In tandem with turning body, make a small loop out front that points tip at net. One could think of this loop as drawing a cannon or torpedo aimed at one's target. Or again as dowell-ended pinwheel.

The smallness of the loop should make the task of stopping it easier. The bottom part of the loop involves keying the forearm to finish the shape of the torpedo.

Then and only then comes neutral stance step, mondo, wiper and push.

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Sure, I would be happy to tell that story but very quickly. I was at a New Year's Dance in Colombo, Sri Lanka and didn't have a date. At the table where I was sitting were two young male school teachers and an absolute knockout, a real piparoo but not from Kalamazoo who had to serve as feminine principle for all four of us, the fourth of whom was her very good looking husband. I'm making this part up but the knockout was so angry with her husband for his sexual transgressions that she was ready to take on an American lover.

I received invitations from both couples and hooked up with the males first. This involved a long bus ride north to Anuradhapura (and if I spelled that perfect poem correctly it's the first time in my life). From there the buses grew smaller and smaller until one let me off on a black asphalt road with jungle on one side and a rice paddy on the other and a shack a quarter of a mile away in the middle of the rice paddy.

I got to the shack and was greeted by the two teachers, who showed me in fact where in the shack I would be sleeping. I think there may have been some talk about vipers crawling into one's sleeping bag during the day. Anyway, in the middle of the night one of the guys went out with a hurricane lamp and then shouted back to wake me up: "John, come quickly, you may see a serpent." It was a small viper with nice markings spiraling down the concrete gutter that ran along the bottom of one wall. The teacher killed it with a shovel. The next day certain villagers gathered around it and went "ooooh." If this thing bit you you would be dead in 28 seconds. If you stepped on its snake corpse the same. So they buried it.

Then it started to rain. I think we played chess. At nightfall we took a Land Rover through the jungle to another rice paddy. Along the way, in the headlights, we saw hundreds of snakes, including cobras, slither to either side of the road. They had been up there to absorb the heat from the black asphalt.

Now there was another shack. And a bunch of other people. To get to the shack we walked along ridges between the big puddles. (And you could hear the snakes slither to either side in front of you.) "John, you go first. If the snake bites anybody it is the second person." We got to the shack and then went out to hunt at two hour intervals all night. Well, I wasn't hunting, just was a sidekick. I saw some bright eyes in a bush. The other team was the one that encountered the elephant. I might sound racist when I say their skin was very dark from all the sunlight in Sri Lanka but hope not to. I say they were dark because it is hard to imagine skin that dark turning pale, but I swear to you it tried. The reason they were so scared was that the elephant wasn't moving anything. That meant it was about to charge (25 mph), knock somebody down, stomp on his head.

Then I took buses all the way to the south of Sri Lanka, to Hambantota. Best dinner I've ever been to. Ten people, the whole family of the knockout's husband kept interviewing me about the Kennedys (JFK was recently president). The stars outside were unbelievable. The knockout gave me her address, in Lavinia, south seven miles from Colombo with instructions for how to get there and a time for me to show up when her husband wouldn't be there. Either the directions were bad or I didn't read them correctly or I just got lost but I sure did take that bus.

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Forehand Not As Good As Expected

This is so disappointing: a new forehand is great one day and mediocre the next. Should a person then go back to an old forehand or stick with the new one or invent a new new one?

I'll take choice # 3 . The simple idea that one can hit a forehand at all from cheated over waist level position, that one can just prong the forearm at the ball in order to activate the pinwheel on the end of a dowell must have implication for next sketch in the design parade.

Keep pinwheel on end of dowell, say I, but come to this seminal position through more traditional route.

Why though must one get racket tip way back? If one doesn't really have to take it back at all, in fact can come at ball from the opposite side, then surely one can reduce takeback on the traditional side.

I'm thinking, "Just fly bent elbow toward right fence with a little curl down to end the 1 of 1-2, then key forearm to inside and down and you will be there in pronged pinwheel freeze point.

You never freeze when playing tennis of course but rather are like a tranquil elephant always moving something. (But if he becomes fully still watch out-- I learned this in a rice paddy in Sri Lanka.)

A health-minded alternative to this might be to think about one hand backhands. Have a short one that is a double roll. And a long one that has the same forward roll but substitutes a waterfall for the backward roll of the short one.

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Service by the Numbers

Numbers don't have to reflect what's going on or even to add up. They can be cues.

And so, this serve where g = 3.33 mph: g + 3g + 9g + 15g (triceptic extension) + 27g + 9g + g + 0 .

The pluses aren't addition. They just add up to a serve.

15g or 50 mph is the speed one wants at transition from triceptic extension to UAR (upper arm rotation).

Now, to fill in the numerical equivalents: 3.33+10+30+50+90+30+3.33+0 .

Pretty complicated for an athletic event, right? But we're dealing with cue as for an entrance in theater, and cues are things to mush around until they become memorable.

I say go with the third and sixth units, which coincidentally are both 30 mph. In other words, have a 30 mph serve. Forget about the 90 mph at contact in order to let it happen.

Focus then on two things: 1) 30 mph from initial lift to racket aligned with right side of body and 2) 30 mph as racket movement transitions from crane position to arm bend.

30-30 serve. Let her go.

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When Stroke Discovery Comes in a Doubles Match Should One Deny it?

Probably. Better immediately to use the discovery but pretend it didn't happen.

I'm speaking of a realist of course which obviously I am not.

I'm more interested in peak experience as in one forehand that was ten times better than any of one's others in the match.

Then if one can spare a few brain cells to figure out what one did one can have a good day.

Kept tip down below and to left of ball so that when push rod unfurled, the fan on the end of it was cleanly perpendicular to the target no matter where that target was. The shot was an FETF, a forward emphasis topspin forehand in which there is absolutely no loop or arm swing to the ball, just a push combined with a swamp buggy fan rotating counterclockwise for a right-hander.

When I made the freak shot (freakish from being so clean), everybody on the court chirruped nicely.

To my partner I said, "Now if I can just remember how I did that." But I had been working on my FETF through self-feed at the park. I just didn't set up with racket tip to the left of the ball and quite so low.

I'm not saying that every forehand I subsequently hit was 10 times better than normal, just 5 or 6 times better, so I would recommend this shot to anybody, perhaps thus ruining their game once and for all.

Nor do I have great expectation for the next time I play but would like to be pleasantly surprised.

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Report

Am hitting some of these balls too high (none too low). Am looking for a new cue to combat this. Initial guess is as follows:

A basic idea in tennis instruction is that the nature of any spin is formed by which edge comes off of the ball first.

But this, the see see, is "the pro shot," "a skill shot," "a special shot."

Regardless of what actually happens on the ball, I wish to preserve constant bevel of the closed racket face by imagining that its lower edge is rising first.

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All Brush, No Weight

Engineer 2 does not like the previous post in which he feels that quality of spin has deteriorated through failure to get one's racket tip low enough.

To listen to engineer 2 we'll coil like a snake to side and down low with arm severely squeezed as if trying to go through the eye of a needle.

Now we pitch the hitting shoulder down as we do on all of our forehands. What's really different is that although hips rotate, they don't rotate hard or far, and the two feet remain flat (but not locked!) so that balance transfers easily from one to the other.

In a normal grounded forehand the rear heel now would come up to complete the angular push. In other words your hips would complete a second half of rotation. No, we've used all the hips we're going to: The shot with rod (forearm) finally pointed at the target rather than parallel to the net will be all flip and wipe.

But do we want that much sequence? Maybe the whole forward shot can happen within the gentle framework of balance transfer from outside to inside foot.

Then: Need a little more weight to get ball to target? Widen the stride. Less weight to bring ball down on target? Narrow (verb) the stride.

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Snake Coil See See-- New Way to Approach it

If one claims that one's game contains a constellation of backhand slices, how many kinds of slice would that be? Well, there are seven main stars in Orion, so I'll start there. For forehands of any kind, I think I'd like fewer rather than more, but one has to be a see see, "the topspin angle."

To adjust to the see see purpose one's new snake coil then push-rod FETF (forward emphasis topspin forehand), one needs to understand that closing the strings by lifting elbow to the side no longer sends ball into bottom of the net-- not if one remains steady in one's hallucination of a swamp buggy boring through the Everglades.

The boat's giant fan spins evenly around one's push-rod, which aims at the short target. Lifting the elbow is likely to shorten the upward spin part of a half-cycle, but one can perhaps find a subtle way or ways to compensate for this.

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One New Shot Suggests Another

We have the idea of, usefully, cloning rhythm of our McEnrueful backswing onto an FETF (forward emphasis topspin forehand).

If the push-rod nature of this shot (# 2908) is as good as I think it is, there appears no reason not also to combine it with a weird loop entirely new to me, reader, if not to you.

Backswing now consists of body turn while hands are separating combined with compression of elbow as if you are trying to send both halves of your arm through a needle's eye.

From there one can hydraulically re-straighten arm to right angle as hitting shoulder banks down to the seminal position of # 2908, a level push-rod slightly out from body toward side fence and pointing racket tip at the ball.

Note: I never understood precisely what the past forum member WBC meant when he advocated "forward emphasis forehands" so now have used this phrase alone to invent two of them by and for myself.

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McEnrueful Backswing Morphing into FETF Backswing

A McEnrueful is an imitation John McEnroe forehand. Here is one hit by John McEnroe himself (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...tLevelRear.mov).

The distinguishing feature is the timed down and up backswing. Usually McEnroe then puts a lot of upward leg drive into the shot. In the space of this leg drive his hitting shoulder, aeronautical, banks and unbanks.

The intermediate, if crazy enough, can learn this shot only to find that it won't stand up in fierce competition. The more workable shot for him is presented in the video above.

But how rhythmic is the backswing for any of these shots? Very. So the intermediate who has come this far would be unreasonable not to continue to use it with an ATP3 (Association of Touring Professionals Type III forehand).

Requisites: 1) Good grip. A strong eastern will do. 2) Unlike McEnrueful, the banked down shoulder will stay down for the hit and only come up afterward. 3) Now we get personal enough maybe to defy all possible labels. The down and up backswing ends by pointing racket TIP under the ball so that the banking down levels out the racket and points the tip right at the ball. 4) Everything else is concentrate: orange juice from a small container with no water added and including the mondo and the wipe.

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But, if backswing for FETF (forward emphasis topspin forehand) is now an imitation of McEnrueful backswing, how is it imitation? In the rhythm and speed but not the details.

Details: Since racket starts waist high and cheated over for anybody in the McEnroe mode, the arm is bent. Let it stay that way.

And since we want soon to be pointing racket tip at the ball, we needn't do much, in fact, it makes sense not to use a McEnrueful's immediate separation of the hands.

Left hand stays on racket with human head and body left to do all. The head leans toward the ball. The body turns toward the ball. These simultaneous moves are the down of this down and up backswing.

The up of it will be very different from anything known to man but is indeed known to two children on a see-saw.

The racket tip goes down as the elbow rises up. Wheatley's 1-2 rhythm is at work here (down and up is the 1). Now it is time to hit the ball.

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I admire good articles and posts on complete tennis matches but don't see why a single shot can't contain a world of experience (as in the last sentence of LEVELS OF THE GAME by John McPhee). For me last night this happened twice. The first instance was a huge poach by a doubles opponent who happens to be a very good net man.

The serve was to my forehand in the deuce court. If it had been a great serve I would either have had to hit behind the poacher or lob. But the serve just bounced in the center of the box and hung stupidly in the air so that I had all day to do whatever I wanted.

I simply used the extra time to adjust my aim point. I've never shot skeet or a duck and don't intend to start now but imagine that the shifting aim point just in front of the streaking poacher was like that. All I will say is that the measured McEnrueful down and up backswing allowed me to do this. The ball passed six inches in front of the outstretched racket.

The second world of experience happened on an overhead. Instead of hitting a full slam I used abbreviation as described on page 67 of TENNIS BY PANCHO GONZALEZ.

"You hit that one very clean," my friend Ken Hunt then said.

Sure I did because there wasn't the usual internal arm rotation stuff as on a serve or full smash.

The cue that will work for me is a chopping block set on its side up in the air and directly in front of me. But strings will be open to the ball the whole way to it. To complete the image there is an axe head attached to the strings and perpendicular to them and I split the ball into halves.

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Self-Dialogue Before Self-Feed

Engineer 1: On second thought a vertical forward swing starting from the elbow hinge changes pitch out front even faster (and therefore more unreliably) than long arm version of the same thing.

Engineer 2: No, it would if palm were in the lead. But not if the yoke between thumb and index finger were leading with wrist still configured straight at that pre-mondoed point.

Editor's note: In living room swings the racket reaches the exact same "push-rod" point whether Konta-like high road or the present low road described here.

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The Great Therapy Continues

Some might say that all present thought is a disaster. And I make no distinction among pronouns. Self-feed has honed the new shot to razor sharp. Tonight's tennis social would be the perfect occasion to unveil the thing.

Except I may in the three rounds of doubles end up playing against Zi-Zi the house pro.

Last time my partner started off by hitting a perfect shot to Zi-Zi's forehand. "Why are you being nice to me?" Zi-Zi said. "I'm not going to be nice to you."

Thanks to that little bit of help along with mild flaws in Zi-Zi's partner we won the set. But Zi-Zi is apt to come back into my tennis life at any time and I'd like to be prepared.

"You play with the shot you practiced," Stan Smith said. On the other hand if I go to the park this afternoon for self-feed I'll be too tired and sciaticized for effective play this evening. And there is the little matter of work. At least I don't have to do another bibliography of some dead person's book collection for unlikely sale.

Here is the problem: I see more paring down of my FETF-- my forward emphasis topspin forehand-- hoving into view. I'm squeezing arm twice which is one time too many.

So I'll take the low road by brush-sliding elbow past bod as bod turns past the ball. This will send racket tip down. How straight or bent the arm will be right then I don't know yet. But I like the idea of the two halves of the arm squeezing together as hitting shoulder banks down in first half of the subsequent foreswing to put the racket length level and parallel to the court.

Racket tip, not racket butt will once again point at the ball. From there everything in the Konta-like-elbow-kept-in-short-backswing-but-high-road-shot will remain the same.

This shot will be snakelike. A snake can coil its head slowly or quickly, rearwardly or forwardly, but if forwardly old hiss factory may prove less dramatic but more accurate.

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Subtract One Element

This is fun. It makes me laugh. At the same time though I seriously think this is the way that any optimal design for a good new tennis stroke comes about.

Nobody gets the design right away. At least I don't. And as you know, reader, I make no distinctions among the various pronouns: I, you, he, she, it, we, they and you-all.

So the design here is coming along fine but we ought to cut something out. I nominate first straightening at the elbow while elbow is held in. Just let it go out as arm re-straightens to a right angle. This will create a more pronounced air cushion.

Enough to hold elbow in as arm squeezes from the biceps muscle for the first time. We got the shortened backswing that Cliff Drysdale made a big deal of in the case of Johanna Konta. My short backswing may or may not be exactly the same as hers but so what-- both of us at least keep elbow in for a good long while. Let's just not make the sequencing of the provocative new backswing too lugubrious and challenging and slow.

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More Liquid-- Tried and Reviewed

One cue derived from today's self-feed-- and I view any "cue" in the stage sense of a jog to some actor's memory-- is a level section of sideways racket travel to initiate the forward stroke.

This happens as one squeezes biceps for a second time.

The racket comes sideways toward the body if one is using a strong eastern grip and elbow has gone slightly out and up and stayed there.

At the same time the hitting shoulder banks down preparatory to a more horizontal body whirl.

The combination produces level, sideways racket motion going down to leave the racket tip almost pointing at the ball as in a Jack Sock forehand although this rod forward position has been more easily arrived at.

Also, I think I learned that elbow moving forward away from the body does not open the strings if push rod position has already been achieved. A push from body, upper arm and elbow is then to be combined with twist from the upper arm. The two different motions are at right angles to one another-- probably the central idea in all the writings of the great tennis technician John M. Barnaby. One sends weight forward or withholds some or all of it every time one delivers a spinny shot.

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Liquid

Now we give the same shot an infusion of liquidity. Initial squeeze of arm-- liquid. Straightening of arm to right angle-- liquid. Elbow traveling out from body-- liquid. There in a nutshell is a short unified rising backswing with nothing propulsive or repulsive about it.

Now comes second half of the shot the beginning of which is equally liquid. That is where rotating hips on flat feet (in neutral stance version) take the rear shoulder down which is a procedure familiar to us from our McEnruefuls.

At the same time the arm, liquid, squeezes again but this time to align the rod as axle of our fan on boat in the Everglades.

Second half of shot may be defined as "the hit," but that doesn't mean that half of the half wasn't first all finesse just the way that all of the backswing was.

Next: The shove including mondo as arm re-extends to right angle and wipe and subsequent return to the bod.