A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

The Only Player Capable of Changing His Ideas about Grips

His name is Hockey Scout, and he has self-declared that he knows nothing about tennis grips.

The other participants invited to the 2015 GRIPS Conference to be held in the mountains of western Antarctica-- motto: "Get a Grip"-- have mostly returned initial questionnaires in which they reveal an average play time of 45 years in the game.

Furthermore, these same participants-- admittedly not the whole gene pool eventually expected to show up in the craggy black mountains being denuded of their white clothing every day-- have readily declared that they have never ever changed their forehand or backhand grip.

In serves the story is different. The average there is four changes per 45 years.

The Conference Committee, because of Hockey Scout's declared ignorance, has issued a proclamation of hope that someone somewhere will at least consider a new one hand topspin backhand grip.

To this end the Conference Committee Sub-Committee for Investigation has dispatched an emissary to the Ukraine to see first if he can locate Hockey Scout.

Second, he will find out whether Hockey Scout has a two hand or one hand backhand.

If two hand, the emissary will leave the Ukraine.

If one hand, the emissary will spend 15 minutes in which he asks Hockey Scout to place the heel of his right hand on the left side of top panel of his racket.

The understanding will be that Hockey Scout, after the emissary has left, will reverse the new instruction since Hockey Scout is from Canada and therefore left-handed.

The idea is that by the time Hockey Scout shows up in Antarctica just next year he will have fully adapted his new grip to match play.

The first feature of this grip however is not heel of hand on left side of top panel or even on pointy ridge to left of that or on first plateau to the left of that.

Rather-- and here is the hard part-- the GRIPS Conference emissary will ask Hockey Scout to extend his thumb along the back panel and then withdraw it to a 45-degree angle across back panel and even with forefinger second knuckle on opposite side and then further withdraw it until it is fully tucked against or over second finger (or third finger if counting in from pinkie).

The object of this exercise will not be to impose something on Hockey Scout that he won't want but rather to show him how, throughout, the entire shape of the hand keeps stretching and re-arranging.

So that, with thumb fully parallel with racket, for instance, the racket will form a 90-degree angle with the arm.

About which the late Ed Faulkner, seven-time captain of the American Davis Cup Team, declared, "THUMB STRAIGHT UP left vertical panel tilts racket face forward, puts forearm at 90 degree angle to racket, destroys timing and control."

Pulling back the thumb to slantwise cross should produce a 45-degree angle of racket to arm.

Further pulling back of thumb to full tuck provides about a 35-degree angle.

In addition to Hockey Scout, our Conference emissary seeks interviews with Victoria Azarenka and Xandr Dolgopolov.

[bottle]

Carry Experiment to its Logical End

Assume a backhand grip with heel of hand on 8.5, thumb stretched parallel with strings (you will have to hit TOO FAR out front although most tennis instructors do not think that possible). Ivan Lendl is a player who warned about loss of power when hitting a one-hander too far out front.

Now place thumb on a diagonal across the back plane of the handle (plane 7). Now tuck thumb around racket and against middle finger. Now tuck thumb between middle and ring fingers with middle finger locked over the top. Now tuck thumb against pinkie with ring and middle fingers locked over the top. Now tuck thumb under the pinkie.

Reader, this knowledge won't hurt you, especially if you are relaxed and aware of speed of the oncoming ball and are determined not to sprain your thumb.

I assume you will begin with self-feed, experimenting with sharp angles.

Obviously, some of these grips are "stronger" and more comfortable in that they offer more support against impact.

But don't be confused by the adjective "strong" so loosely hung by everybody on the noun "grip."

"Strong," reader, can have many meanings.

Martina Navratilova has suggested that when a player has just hit the ball into the net, he can change his grip and use the same swing to clear the net the next time.

Similarly, when the player has just failed to hit an angle as sharp as he wants, he can try the next notch of grip outlined in this post.

He should experiment with different stretches of forefinger and middle finger on front side of the racket as well. See how far forefinger is past thumb in old photos of Pancho Gonzalez' backhand grip provided by Phil Picuri.

The principle here is that thumb and fingers affect the internal set of the hand as if it is a piece of pliable rubber or plastic. The various appearances, while not dramatically different from one another, are significant when translated to where the racket head will naturally fly at contact.

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Making the Choice

Of the various grips discovered in my previous post, I really like the one where the thumb is tucked against the ring finger with the middle finger locked over top.

See this as somewhat similar to an interlocking grip in golf although there two hands are involved with right pinkie intertwined with left index finger. That is the grip my father, a very good golfer, used and not the overlapping grip taught to me by a Ben Hogan protege teaching professional in Lakeville, Connecticut when I was 16 years old.

As I look down on my new tennis grip, right side of right forearm is not set at 80 degrees to strings or 45 or 35 but at no degrees-- there finally is a straight line.

This grip won't require more than an hour to feel natural and comfortable.

I expect to unleash topspin backhands at sharper angles than ever before.

But I am so ungenerous that I hope no one else will be able to benefit from this idea.

In fact, tennistas always tell you that hands and wrists come in different shapes and sizes that deeply affect (or should more intimately affect) one's tennis grips. Another wild card: thinness or thickness of racket handle.

For the record I broke my wrist in two places while skiing down an Indian Burial Mound in Granville, Ohio when I was 13 .

So-- but who knows-- am I writing here just for myself once again?

[bottle]

A Bit of Choking Up on the Racket?

Re # 2133, to create a new pressure point with the second joint of the thumb calculating down from the thumb's tip:

Ivan Lendl is a player who successfully choked up on the racket for his huge backhand.

The heel is a half-inch or so up from the butt knob.

[bottle]

Less Care to Grips

You might get lucky and find a good grip or two that way.

On the other hand, such romanticism (or careless negligence) could be what is wrong with American tennis and American politics...and America.

[bottle]

In Search of a New Name

A great new grip deserves a great new name, but I used up my powers of imagination to invent the new grip.

Just as Annie, member of the garden crew that employs us both can't handle the name "Bot," I can't quite handle Interloch, Interlaken or Goofball Grip, the first auto-suggestions that came to mind.

Annie, a former Dodge as in the Detroit Auto Show, tried on Bob, Bart and Bad Bot before settling on Bat.

The mother of four, Annie is a good gardener. Anyone can see that as we plant plat after plat of magenta New Guinea Impatiens, the only Impatiens that won't immediately die from The Impatiens Plague.

But Annie says, "Bat, I get hyper sometimes and pretty soon I'm going to start ordering you around!"

Perhaps she has noticed that that is what our mutual boss does, who goes by the name of Hope.

"Bat!" Annie cries, "Go home and go to bed. If you don't rest that leg it's never going to heal!"

[bottle]

Reiteration for Hitting More Sharply Angled 1htsbh's

Put thumb along back plane of racket handle but never play tennis this way. We put the thumb here for one reason only: To reach a more perfect understanding of how the whole hand reassembles itself as we place the thumb in different positions.

Next comes the first of our three hitting grips. Thumb slants across back of the racket. Thumb is even with middle knuckle of the index finger on opposite side of the handle.

Now we wrap thumb against middle finger. Index finger is farther up the racket.

Finally, we go one notch more by placing thumb under the middle finger which locks it there. On other side, index finger is even farther up the racket in relation to this.

Play, reader, with all three hitting grips. That would be bold but you can do it.

Remember, I had some sort of a connection with Katharine Hepburn, and that is precisely the sort of thing she would say, in fact she is documented as having said those exact words.

"You can do it!"

Note 1): As thumb gets internally placed farther down the handle you may want to choke up a little, i.e., replace whole hand a bit farther up toward the strings.

Note 2): Sit on a chair next to a bed. Place a book on the bed (in my case ED FAULKNER'S TENNIS). Using the spine of the book as reference, touch the spine with racket head.

Now try all four grips described in this post to see how their progression produces ever more acutely angled shots.

[bottle]

Pictures are Better than Your Words: a Chauvinistic Disease

The cure: Use images more. Put more imagery in your words.

Then get out your paints and see if you can beat this without becoming grotesque:

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him, -did you not?
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.

He likes a boggy acre,
A floor too cool for corn.
Yet when a child, and barefoot,
I more than once, at morn,

Have passed, I thought, a whip-lash
Unbraiding in the sun, -
When, stooping to secure it,
It wrinkled, and was gone.

Several of nature's people
I know, and they know me;
I feel for them a transport
Of cordiality;

But never met this fellow,
Attended or alone,
Without a tighter breathing,
And zero at the bone.

-- E. Dickinson

[bottle]

Reader, Get a Grip on Your Grip

Like a crippled dog with a bone I won't let go of my new revelations about improved grip.

In what sense though are they new? Do thousands of other people already know them? Is this just the latest instance of me having a daydream non-existent talk with my ex-wife, who during the 20 years when we were together was higher rated as a tennis player than me although I could always beat her in singles. (Well, 90 per cent of the time.)

I would explain to her one of my better tennis inventions. "Oh yeah," she would say. "I think that's what I've always done."

I guess that if the book ED FAULKNER'S TENNIS could wonderfully and clearly illuminate thumb along vs. thumb at slant in a one-hand backhand grip, then I can't claim the misty bouquet of ideas proceeding from this fountainhead as original or my own.

The teaching pro Doug King in fact has very wisely suggested that all tennis ideas live in a grab-bag with no one claiming ownership of anything.

Some think that when I talk about The Tower of Babel I am getting religious or something in a tennis discussion. No, I am pointing at the true difficulty of effective communication in this very secular world inhabited, reader, by you and me.

To lift this thought one step higher, I am talking about The Tower of Bottle.

My opinion is that Ed Faulkner was able to illuminate a great essential of holding a tennis racket that I have never seen explained even in feeble attempt by other teaching pros or tennis-playing grandfathers.

The fact that it took me as long a period of time as my marriage to understand it may or may not be relevant but certainly ought to announce that more than routine thought is required here.

The principle is that the hand is like a piece of molding plastic or clay that can readily change shape. My criticism of all the other tennis writers and teaching pros I've ever encountered is that they implicitly think that the human hand is a bronze claw.

All the talk is about which plane or ridge the big knuckle sits upon and which the heel of the hand sits upon.

Well, that's half of a good tennis grip.

The other half concerns how far up or down the handle the thumb is.

And how far up or down the first two fingers are on the opposite side of the racket.

With same one hand backhand swing, contact will be farther around on the ball the more the thumb is down.

Or the more the forefinger (the index finger) is up.

Thumb can be down while forefinger is up-- that will mold whole hand.

Reverse this idea for less angle to a shot-- why not?

Send thumb farther up or down with forefinger in one spot. Send forefinger up or down with thumb in one spot.

These experiments should finally get anybody the contact point (and possible clean hits) that he or she wants.

And no, I'm not advocating that one makes the adjustment while hitting the ball. One has to be ready in time with the right grip. But to me, there now is much more choice in that than there ever was before.

[bottle]

Corresponding Oppositeness for Forehand

Has to be. Goose and gander. Where is the index base knuckle? Where is the heel? We're probably more aware of index base knuckle, i.e., are aware of where.

So where, in an ordinary Federfore, is heel of hand? Would more consciousness of this subject produce muffed or better forehands?

It is my contention that people who are steeped in William Faulkner, James Joyce and Herman Melville (just to mention three novelists, living though dead, who happen to be male) know more about the unconscious than those who aren't.

Specifically, they know more about the transition either way between the conscious and the unconscious than people in a mental ward who have been subsumed by the unconscious, who altogether have been too overtaken by it.

Real life: Psychology class walks through a mental hospital. One student asks, "What's that card game you're playing?" Answer: "Why, Crazy Eights, of course!"

So, are the card players great tennis players, too? Just my friend Jane if she's still alive, but she learned her game previously outside the walls of the state mental institution where she ended up.

I think the proper learning sequence in tennis should be conscious first, unconscious later. Even then, however, "unconscious" should more precisely remain "semi-conscious."

Where is heel of hand in a Federfore? In a McEnrueful?

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/avancedtennis/john_yandell/pro_returns/part_1_compact_classical/index.html

From the article:

As we have seen, on Roger's forehand groundstroke he uses a modified eastern, with the hand shifted down just slightly toward a semi-western. But on the return, the hand is further toward the top of the handle with both the heel pad and the index knuckle on the third bevel down from the top.

To persist in our question, now not for a service return but for a regular forehand:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/high_speed_archive/phantom/Roger_Federer_Court_Level_HD_HS/index.html?dir=Forehand/RF_FH_Arm_Action&stroke=FH%20InsideOut%20ArmAction%20CourtLevelRear1%20500fps.mp4

To my unpracticed eye, base knuckle is on 3.5, heel on 3.0, but the real question is not my accuracy of observation but what I myself am going to do.

Fool around is what.

Thumb and forefinger appear at about the same gradation if the handle had upon it the markings of a ruler.

In at least one of these great full screen videos of Roger Federer a person can clearly see where first knuckle of thumb is (7.5), which might help the person understand heel placement (2.5?) or higher on racket and less behind it than the person thought.

Now for one McEnrueful:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/johnmcenroe/mac_forehand/mac_forehand.html?MacFHShortCourtLevelRear.mov

The grip is too hard to see. But from McEnroe’s autobiography we know that he would like to place index knuckle on 2.5 if he were a right-hander. That leaves heel placement to be figured out, assuming the same straight wrist and an identical hand in every way to that of the figure outer, which seems doubtful.

Think I’ll try putting thumb up the handle a little for a short cross-court in both cases-- Federfore (ATP3) and McEnrueful.

[bottle]

Backing Off from One's Extreme Backhand

Sprained ankle though healed enough for self-feed wasn't ready for gimpy geezer doubles play.

It is fine to have many imaginings when one is out of service ("We need you back on the circuit," my friend Ron kindly said).

In fact, I believe that many imaginings are good when it comes to tennis although I know that many coaches and players will always disagree.

They want a still mind. Not me. I want a still but active one.

But the self-feed session all on its own led to immediate conclusions.

1) Stick for now with thumb at diagonal and index finger's middle knuckle even with that thumb enabling a nice minimalist flat backhand with racket always on edge.

2) The flat backhand contains no spearing in it, and I have come to equate spearing with either forward or backward roll that for most players is going to impair consistency. Double rolls are easier to maintain in slice backhands than in flat and topspin backhands.

3) For more topspin, try same minimalist structure (from racket shoulder high and cheated over backswinging in connected fashion so that step out puts it after forward hips turn parallel to both sideline and court).

Spear (pull) with knob during hips turn the same as a good hitting baseball player. Flatten the wrist to over-close the racket at same time. Build pressure between the two hands at the same time. Then "cut the wire" to catapult the tugging front arm. The speed of this delayed punch assures same clean contact as in the minimalist flat backhand but with more topspin.

Note: First idea here to hit this shot off exact same preparation as flat seems sound but requires some extra turn in of racket head behind hand-- necessary if one kept racket vertical.

Instead, do keep racket vertical but pull it a bit farther around the body so that you can spear straight at the slightly outside ball.

This orchestration will create contrast in backswings of topspin to flat (body connected backswing for flat, arm and body backswing for topspin) but more similarity between slice and topspin preparations with both behind neck or opposite shoulder-- about the same amount around.

4) For slice, straight off, get the racket head parallel to court or almost. Spear then declaring that spearing is backward roll. Close on ball with or without last instant flattening of the wrist.

[bottle]

If he Feeds with Topspin, You’ve Got Him, He’s Toast

Asking the internet where Roger Federer and John McEnroe place heel of hand on racket in their respective forehands, I received the following answers.

http://tpatennis.net/how-john-mcenroe-developed-the-best-hands-in-tennis/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXcsblS3Jl4

Tom Allsopp’s very provocative and convincing essay on feel doesn’t happen to answer my specific question despite what the internet thinks, but who really should care about exactly where McEnroe’s heel is other than John McEnroe himself?

Unless such information would help some inquiring player come up with a better version of his McEnrueful to balance his Federfore (ATP3).

I’m thinking today that I’ll start my McEnrueful with heel and base knuckle both on 2.5 and then let racket butt slip up as I start my final racket work up.

Another way of putting this is that while base knuckle will stay in one place the heel of the hand will slip to 3.0 for a greater proportion of topspin in the topspin/sidespin arm-rolling-during-contact mix.

As for body motion I want neutral step-out with Ben Hogan’s exact hip action wedded to John McEnroe’s uniquely delineated top of a backswing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QL_6M_xZvq0

If the grip flop proves deleterious I’ll revert to the firm Australian I’ve maintained up till now and started with in this specific description.

[bottle]

Simplify! Simplify! Simplify!

Who said that-- Ralph Waldo Emerson or Henry David Thoreau or both? Say it yourself reader and you'll know who said it unless you can't remember what you said.

Along the same line in a one hand topspin backhand I think you should decide once and for all whether to come at the ball open or closed. I'm saving the third possibility, square, for my one hand flat backhand.

In the closed category three simple words can easily change everything you think: "Cut the wire!"

So-- take the racket farther around behind thee. And back deeper. With wrist flattening as it goes there.

Since the arm now is adjusted early the way you want it with only a smidgeon of arm bend left for you to straighten, you can glom on two simple goal motions simultaneous with forward hips turn:

1) Spear with the racket as though you are shipping a long log through the mouth of a Danish wood stove.

2) Build pressure (start a tug-o-war) between your two hands at the same time.

Then: Cut the Wire.

[bottle]

Step-out Central Backhands

Like Comedy Central, I choose step-out central one hand backhands. The non step-out variety is for hot dogs of sound body and mind.

Since the step-outs per Arthur Ashe's conviction are 45 degrees to the net they always turn the body a constant amount.

For a flat backhand, the shoulders can turn the racket not more than pointed at side fence. The step-out can finish the job by turning the racket toward the rear fence.

That's solid connection, baby. Remember, the racket started at shoulder level cheated over left for a right-hander.

For more topspin the paradigm shall be different. A little simultaneous arm movement added to shoulders turn will point the racket at rear fence as in classic instruction.

Step-out next will turn the racket more. Try this for slice, too.

[bottle]

Cut the Wire One Hand Backhands

The baseball coach/writer Charley Lau Jr. wants tug (pulling) of the knob straight at the oncoming ball to come from the lead arm.

And I am right with him on that. Well, you can't push with the guide hand and create a tug-o-war, can you?

I don't pretend to understand a professional baseball swing, specifically where and how the hands separate. Sometimes they don't separate at all. Sometimes the hands part before contact, at contact, slightly after contact.

I therefore am only thinking tennis when I talk about "tug-o-war" and envision a backhand where straight arm starts its solo a moderate distance before contact.

If the separation started later one would be talking about two-hand one-hand structure like early Bjorn Borg.