A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Short Angle Egged

The year is about to change.

Therefore, reader, the time has come to ask just what kind of a reader you are.

Do you want to undertake this all grip challenge I urge upon you? Or to resist it in every possible way?

If the latter, you'd better re-view this Tom Avery film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb_Rch1MOUQ). And this film of Novak Djokovic (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...ShortSide9.mov). And then choose between them unless you have still another philosophy or even methodology which you have failed to share with the world (https://video.search.yahoo.com/video...=yhs-fh_lsonsw).

"When you've figured something out," the three-man said, "keep it to yourself. Never tell anybody."

This was half a century after we both rowed on the same eight-oared crew. He was the three-man, I the four-man, but we still discussed such matters.

Me, I henceforth egg my short angles, which certainly does not mean that I roll over them. And I will tell this to anybody. I do shortest of short angles off of my McEnrueful. Which is like my beautiful Ziegenfuss, only without the attractive but primping loop. And it puts an exceptionally good push on the ball. And topspin can be administered to any quadrant of a tennis ball-- we all should know that by now. No, my short angle is rough and tough, even a bit crude, has plenty of spin but goes fast.

[bottle]

Multiple Grips

Nobody else says to play with multi-grips. But have these commentators or commentatoes-- whichever the word that best applies-- put in the work on the great thumb change? And if they aren't Thumbelinas, are they qualified to make the judgment?

A person who can change grip as easily as he or she can hit a forehand, a backhand or a volley is in the unique position of being able to reduce variation in the production of some shot.

"Lift your elbow if you want to close the racket more by contact," the coach says.

True advice but easiest to follow? Which is easier to implement-- a small adjustment of the elbow or a small adjustment of the thumb?

And will the small adjustment of the thumb move the whole hand-- like a piece of flexible ectoplasm-- into correct, i.e., the perfect position that accords with one's deepest desire?

Not if one has failed to relax and is holding the racket in a death grip.

[bottle]

Tweaking All Three Forehands

Short Angle

One probably can't study the Djokovic models enough. In this one there is a kind of bobble in the racket work as Djokovic sprints forward to the ball (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...hortFront6.mov). A bobble can show that someone is human, also that he is resilient if he still gets off a good shot. What, though, did the person wish to accomplish? What intention caused him to change horses midstream? I'd guess that Djokovic wanted his racket at a different level (lower) to produce tightest topspin in this forward emphasis shot. Here's another, without bobble, which probably shows what Djokovic always wants (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...ShortSide9.mov). Now I'm looking at this second one again. Maybe what I first saw as a "bobble" is just use of the racket and opposite arm as an aid to good running.


Contrast these dinky little shots with Djokovic's sockdolagers. We all know that most of the time he hits incredibly hard. And if he came forward a short distance as opposed to a great distance he will hit his normal full shot like this one (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...1%20250fps.mp4). Or this one (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...t%20250fps.mp4).

McEnrueful

We (I) have repeatedly asserted that this shot is a slap-shot as in hockey. It is based on the slap-shot I tried to develop at the age of 15 when I was home from school with infectious mononucleosis. The ice floe I was standing on disengaged from the bottom of the Connecticut River and started moving out on a back-eddy into the shipping channel. I jumped and swam for shore and caught pneumonia.

Never mind that, there was penicillin. If the McEnrueful is a slap-shot, does the steepness at which the hockey stick or tennis racket first rises much matter? Surprisingly, it doesn't. Perhaps we should switch horses here to another image, that of a shoehorn. Nobody uses shoehorns any more, just fingertips to ease one's heel into a tight loafer, slipper or dancing shoe. But a shoehorn is a clear image. In the 19th century a person would stick the shoehorn between flesh and the back of a shoe. And pry upward and forward both to get the whole foot in. Precisely what the McEnrueful does. Because of body angle-- one's upper body is not upright the way that John McEnroe's often appears to be but slanted at 30 degrees like Rory McIlroy's-- the pivoting shoulders, specifically the rear or hitting shoulder, goes down. And if that shoulder felt the arm coming down first (proprioception), it goes down even better, producing a flat line drive with a smidge of core produced topspin-- just one way to flatten out one's forehand, in this case through specialism.

Federfore

One ought to play with the dogpat-mondo sequence. Could some sort of body transition occur part way through the mondo? When exactly does mondo occur in relation to the core rotations? "In relation to the rotations"-- almost a song and a very bad one. What if one just mondoed from arm alone and then swung? Or mondoed from the momentum of forward travel on outside foot? Or started swinging during the dogpat and only mondoed later? Which combination in self-feed produces the most solid shot? The spinniest shot? A pre-loaded shot? The best shot?

[bottle]

Frank Ruff: No Replacing Him

He played tennis. That's all I know about his tennis. And he would come into my office and read some of my tennis stroke designs up on my big screen. And he was a very good tennis player, I have since found out.

Hope and I did the food and drink after his funeral in his lakeside house which his widow Gretchen converted overnight into a museum of car design.

Frank designed the pentastar, the hood ornament on the front of Chryslers. He was a great sailor and skier and ski instructor (Novak Djokovic also is known to be a great skier).

Gretchen found a box of plexiglass pentastars-- enough for one apiece to everyone who attended the funeral.

Frank's glass-blowing son Jason, speaking in the chapel, told how Frank's boss once told him to submit a certain car design. But Frank didn't like the design his boss had in mind. So Frank submitted another. So the boss fired him. But the next day the boss's boss-- Lee Iacocca-- re-hired him after he saw the design.

The Dodge Charger, second year model, the one that excelled. And it was Frank who had designs of ram's heads all over the place. And Frank who designed a whole line of suitcases with ram's heads on the side of them. And I found and read a hand-written short story by Frank entitled "Rocky the Blue-Eyed Ram" in Frank's studio.

Hope lined up the food. Assisted by Hope's daughter Melissa, I was the bartender as befits my name.

One of Gretchen's daughters, flown in from Maine, saw me limping up and down the stairs. A nurse, she got me some ibuprofen and put out all the arguments for immediate knee replacement, not the least of which is that chronic pain further debilitates and puts a strain on the heart.

Okay, okay-- I get the knee replacement, a partial. And hope that I heal better than Frank. Because a knee replacement was the beginning of the end for my very good friend Frank Ruff.

Note: I was far from the only one affected by Frank's loss. Hope's 12-year-old granddaughter Maxine, my favorite hitting partner and Cameron Diaz look-alike, went up to Gretchen in the chapel and put her arms around her and burst into tears.

Because Maxine couldn't attend the reception due to two Saturday performances of Christmas Carol (she plays Belinda, Tiny Tim's sister), I made sure a couple days later that she got something.

"Hold out your hand," I said. And gave her a pentastar.

[bottle]

A Canned Furbelow

A player, gaunt, played with his grip
Ball glanced off behind him
More topspin or less
He didn't care
And picked up a second yellow ball
But heard a hell of a racket
His racket no, another racket
So he turned and saw
A tennis ball can dance
End over end
A cheerleader doing flips
Whack whack whack whack
Can a can swallow a spinning ball
And do a can-can?
Apparently it can.

[bottle]

ATP3: One Way to Keep Wrist Layback for Longer

Crank faster with the body to fool the wrist into staying back.

In fact, playing (experimenting) with the ratio of arm turn to body turn makes sense at almost all times.

The differences are not a matter of intricate detail that is going to bog anyone down.

The assumption or knowledge plateau here is that body turn and arm turn sum with each other, i.e., are simultaneous, and that wiper, a third element, starts early in order to have time in which to build up speed and get on outside of the ball.

[bottle]

Nah, use a short, barely slanting upward backswing for both short angle and McEnrueful.

[bottle]

Addendum

I'm thinking-- before I go to the court-- that just because I use a slap shot form for my McEnrueful, I don't have to use it for my short angle.

Easiest of all would be to use any grip at all-- anything under the sun-- so long as it's the grip that does the short angle job.

One then can use a simple bowl back (down and up), and bowl forward too, with all of this liquid and forceless.

The less exotic stuff you do with your feet, the better.

Fine at least this is in theory, but one will see how it does first in self-feed and then
in deuce court service returns in doubles-- may be a while.

[bottle]

Building the One Stroke on the Other

Here I am, hitting a McEnrueful (https://video.search.yahoo.com/video...=yhs-fh_lsonsw).

This shot proved highly successful at the Friday night tennis social. Modification to Federfore was good too.

Only my short angle failed me, landing stupidly in the middle of my deuce opponent's court rather than over by the outer tramline which would be just and right, i.e., just right.

This unfortunate occurrence, the culmination of weeks of self-feed, indicates that I was late on my service return. How could that be? Stroke too complicated and so is Tom Avery's too. And how did I ever get myself in such a fix?

If McEnrueful was good, then why can't short angle be hit the same basic way to be good too?

First, though, I have to make an admission.

All the stuff I wrote about glyph backswing (-~) on the McEnrueful proved in the actual heat of battle to be exactly that, just "stuff."

As the evening wore on, my backswing edited itself to a simple mild upswing.

And I waited with racket still sometimes just like a zipping hockey player terrifying through pausing at the top of his slap-shot.

Or like myself waiting although there is no time to wait and therefore hitting a perfect volley. Believe it or not, this can happen.

Well, here comes a hard serve out to my forehand side. As I already tried to indicate, I am playing the deuce court. And want to hit my return short in the opponent's deuce court and out wide in the alley, meanwhile coming in for the short volley to the exact same spot.

(I got that from Luke Jensen.)

Okay, everything is ready to go. But no silly loop, please. Reader, did you know that most but not all loops-- in tennis-- are silly?

Me neither.

Continuity of loop is overrated, I have concluded, and creates less precision about who does what when.

Of course my 75th birthday is next week so dementia may be settling in.

A different grip now but backswing the same.

Rhythm however is completely altered.

In the McEnrueful there's the backswing, the optional pause and the slap-shot (arm first to center handle followed by the hammer thrower's pivot). The option means that this shot consists of two or three beats.

In the short angle one can abbreviate the upward slanting backswing (I'll try seven inches today).

All forward motion until flick must be liquid.

So I'll perform a slow motion mondo during the forward seven inches, yes, from top of the backswing and going smoothly and slowly down and up a little under proposed contact point.

Like the McEnrueful, this shall be arm first body second structure.

But with a third element, the flick.

First beat: backswing.

Second beat: arm to body but forceless to put racket square out front.

Third beat: flick and followthrough.

[bottle]

The key point most people don't understand is that the release of the lay back of the wrist doesn't happen til well after the ball has left the strings. The "wrist action" that is perceived and is actually influencing the spin of the ball for the pros is the internal shoulder rotation (windshield wiper action) that does not actually require any wrist flexion whatsoever. One of the big points I have seen JY make is that Roger Federer's holding of that laid back wrist through the contact area is much longer than anyone else's. Yes, the wrist does flex and relax later in the swing path after the ball is gone, but if you start trying to do that, you are going to end up flexing the wrist while the ball is still on the strings, and that is not going to be helpful. Oh, you will hit the occasional "home run", but you won't be able to produce anything useful under real conditions.

Must confess, I only watched the first couple of minutes of the video, but that was enough for me.

don

I like this quote so much for going to the heart of a question I knew I must deal with. Here is the video again just in case somebody wants to know what Don and I were talking about (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndoyq4R5a48).

That said, I think there is a big lesson here-- at least for the very personal me-- in this video. Like Don, I'm not interested in the promotion at the end, at least right now. But I have a lot of respect for the person who, deciding to share something, made this video. For so long the members of this forum have discussed the findings of Brian Gordon and talked about the ATP3 forehand often in detail.

What they always left out, however, was a report on their own implementation of Brian's ideas. Well, I don't know how the teaching pro here received his information but receive it he did. And his interpretation is a little different from others I either surmised or have heard explicitly delineated.

Flip a little more to inside of slot, I would say. With racket tip actually flipping a bit out of the slot and behind the back.

Brian writes both about pulling racket knob forward and pulling right to left to generate racket head speed. The pro of this video reconciles both things without appearing to be an overly complicated person.

Maybe that is why I tend to believe him so much (along with experiments in self-feed of course).

In any case, my McEnrueful has a truncated backswing. So I feel authorized to lengthen my Federfore (ATP3). This modification comes under the heading of better orchestration of one's different strokes.

[bottle]

Shifting Imagery for the McEnrueful

Picture a promontory, with the roiling green ocean rushing by.

The granite on which one stands is still and silent while the wave-filled current is fierce.

If one inches one's racket perfectly sideways, the ocean will catch it and wash it away.

One wants this to happen so one sticks the racket into the current, which plunges down before it rises up.

At top of the wave, everything changes.

The white ocean is flat ice.

This is the slap-shot part of the stroke.

The racket handle plunges to halfway between the two shoulder nubs.

Now one performs a hammer throw from field and track.

Ordinarily, one does this with two hands, here with one hand centered in front of one's navel.

The ball, clobbered, line-drives across the net, sits down in the opponent's court and refuses to bounce up. It just stays there close to the cement, senseless like a commentato.

[bottle]

Learning Something Obvious (or is it?) About Neutral Stance Step-out

At the time I first got serious about tennis, I carefully watched the very good pro instructing me in basic ground strokes.

If he had time, he drew one foot up on toes sideways close to the other before final step-out or conventional hitting stride toward the net.

Why would he do that when he could just step across from feet at shoulders width or more on a diagonal to reduce necessary footwork?

I must have asked but not liked the answer since it did not stay with me for the past three decades.

I now think the proper answer has to do with turning the racket back.

Closed hitting step perhaps on a 45-degree angle toward the net as Arthur Ashe taught for backhand turns shoulder an extra amount beyond the internal turn one already is putting on it.

Same thing on a closed forehand. The more one steps across the more one's body turn. A certain tennis writer even advises that for the ultimate stab one should just flip racket from the wrist, step across, and hit.

Back to the question. In neutral stance configuration with feet side by side and parallel to net, stepping on a diagonal will turn shoulders a certain amount.

Not as much as stepping across but nevertheless a significant amount.

Should one be conscious of this? Absolutely if one seeks more accuracy in one's game.

Drawing inside foot to outside foot before stepping toward the net with inside foot does not by itself turn the shoulders at all and in fact more closely approximates a baseball swing.

Such knowledge has to affect one's ability to:

1) aim-- with effectiveness

2) put sufficent body turn on the shot

3) not self-block one's own shot.

[bottle]

Preparing/Initiating Toss with Arm; Tossing from Core

This radical departure from norm depends on revolving body to 1/4, 1/2, or 3/4 point of body travel forward and tossing from there.

In an up down and up serve the tossing arm eases up from shoulder even as body completes its subtle turn while traveling forward.

The two real agents of this toss are leftward lean and banking up of left shoulder since the arm has already done its thing.

In self-feed today (but practicing one's serve is always self-feed except in the rare instance of there being a pro to perform the toss for one), I tried to subordinate banking shoulder to leftward lean.

Flat-spined back in other words, by leaning to the left, can perform the toss.

The banking up will simply add some oomph.

Don't know how I am doing with this. Should be able to tell something from the tennis social Friday night if go light at the annual senior men's tennis association dance Thursday night.

[klacr]

To steal from one is plagiarism. To steal from many is research.

Keep on keeping on bottle. Take the elements you like and the elements that work and do something special with them. Bottle them up (no pun intended) and enjoy the process. The forehand can be a bugaboo for many, including yours truly. The goal is to feel comfortable and consistent with it. To hit it any day of the week and love the moment. remembering the work and frustrations that went into making it great, or at the very least, your own.

don is spot on with his comments. Listen to him.

Kyle LaCroix USPTA
Boca Raton

[stotty]

Players who half inch

I wonder if Borg half inched some of Tom Okker's forehand and made it more orthodox. The best do. Pancho Gonzales used to half inch parts of strokes from other players all the time.