A New Year's Serve

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Here Here. Ear to Ear: Ten Sources for a Very Simple Sliced Backhand

They are: Old films of Ken Rosewall, most complete tennis family in Cleveland Ohio, Trey Waltke, Stotty, Oscar Wegner, Chris Evert's assessment of Jack Groppel's game ("good slice"), national Czech book of tennis (bad glue in spine and fell apart), Barron's book of German tennis, John M. Barnaby, don_budge with his super cue which I shall always call "ear to ear" with an ear to ear grin.

Should I look into these sources more, explaining each in detail? I think not. But there they are for "students of the game," who, like Jack Groppel, over-intellectualize tennis and probably sex too.

But the tennis family in Cleveland still applies great force to my slice backhand. It wasn't the kid about to start college, the second ranked junior in the state of Ohio. I watched him play a Case Tech tennis recruit in a Cleveland exhibition match. But it was his twin sister teaching in a tennis camp and two of his three uncles, one from San Francisco, and his mother, a previous captain of the Yale women's tennis team who hit every one of her shots precisely on the sweet spot of her racket.

Neither the junior nor the uncle from California would play because of what happened at the previous Stieffel-Steiffel family reunion, when two of the uncles beat the Yale captain and her prodigy son. The family fell apart-- that's what.

But everyone else played and spoke up. We were high in a mountaintop resort in the panhandle of West Virginia. Why was I there? Because Hope, my girlfriend, was part of the family, and the reunion was HUGE.

Was I nervous? You could say that. But what is the best quality of an extended tennis family? A quantity of encouragement.

They had nothing to say about any of my game except for my McEnrueful and my slice. Both of which helped in the achievement of victory in the last match of the day. With a McEnrueful service return as the last shot.

I was still influenced by the 1950's video of the teenaged Rosewall hitting from a skunk tail in Davis Cup.

The skunk as I understand stinkers raises his tail to vertical when he is about to spray.

Someone at Tennis Player did not like the expression but Stotty did.

Later videos of Rosewall showed a slightly lower racket tip just before he goes into his tight rearward loop (see the Tennis Player article on slice backhand by Trey Waltke, who does the same thing).

Use the slightly lower tip position, reader, is my advice if you want it. While still keeping whole racket high.

A quick force-fed tight loop then to blend into a swing from ear to ear.

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Hypothesis: Tennis is Aspiration

And who wouldn't like to have a Don Budge backhand?

Just to intersperse with your Thiemie, your Federian, your Wawrinkit and yourTsitsipasoo.

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Reverse Engineering

After two months was finally able to get my vandalized car back and buy cheap groceries-- lots of them without using overloaded cloth bags during bus rides and military prisoner marches to pull my arms off. And made it to an outdoors court on the way home even though it was raining.

When people speak of reverse engineering, their listeners are frequently bamboozled as if by a reverse in football.

But I think I have a clear example here.

Vic Braden designed his backhand and other ground game by watching Don Budge's backhand through a knothole in Detroit.

He then mass-marketed his sit-and-hit to thousands if not millions of people picking up tennis during the tennis craze of the seventies and eighties.

So Braden engineered from Budge. And those of us who took the trouble to learn a sit-and-hit backhand now can engineer away from it back to Budge. At least I plan to, maybe have done so already.

Uncle Vic had you stepping with your inside foot while you lowered both hands in a little arc to your thigh just above the knee. The thigh could even touch the shaft between your two hands.

But Uncle Don doesn't do that, which is my argument. Don Budge, who stirred the pot to the outside now stirs the pot to the inside. And it is during this small swirl to inside-- more economical and a lot easier to do-- that the inside foot steps out.

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Is it True that People, Some of the Most Intelligent Teaching Pros in the World, Miss Stuff?

One great aspect of tennis is that people do NOT notice stuff, and therefore if you notice anything, just are an honest and open observer, you can be quite original.

Well, maybe just to yourself. But why shouldn't that be enough? Isn't tennis an individual sport? Can't you go to the court and give the thing a try?

Take the windup of John Isner's serve (and maybe of certain other big servers in the game). I didn't notice this myself but one of the talking heads on YouTube did. It wasn't Tomaz Mencinger-- he's really good. But do we only want to take advice from those who are good? What does the source of any idea matter if the idea itself is good?

Isner's racket goes up toward the right fence (more or less since he is quite turned around). That changes pitch a lot but so what? We want to let go of the minor considerations, right? We want to let go.

And also-- and this is me noticing something-- Isner doesn't wind backward on his serve. He achieves all the backward turn he needs in a static way, i.e., by the extreme stance he chooses.

I am always coming up with new ideas, have trained myself to do that, you could say. Some obviously are better than others. These two seem especially interesting.

On backward turn-- well, anything that subtracts from what you were doing is usually a positive in tennis.

On lifting racket toward side fence the racket gets high soon, which could help certain servers who can't get racket tip low enough. Could it be that they can fully coordinate leg drive with the racket drop by making that drop taller at the top?

In using this new direction of toss, one can take both arms up together or start with either one first-- that's three different options all of which I plan to try the next time I play just to see what's what.

Will my receiving opponent be upset by the changes? By one method more than another? Because right now all three are produced with about the same difficulty or ease.

A bit surprising but something like that occasionally does happen. After which you (I) move on.

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Counterclockwise Stir of Pot to Left: Weight on Left Foot

Counterclockwise stir of pot to right: Step of Right Foot.

Drop of racket: Weight on both feet but settling forward.

Spring up through ball.

(https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...l?DBBHRear.mov)

Here is where Vic Braden, the broad-shouldered homunculus, went wrong in his adaptation meant to ignite the masses.

The adaptation worked for him, Vic, but not for the masses.

The masses had shoulders that were too narrow. And more height to their build.

Hence, they couldn't step and settle like Vic (called "step-and-hit" in Vic's book TENNIS FOR THE FUTURE).

Here is the better way: (https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...l?DBBHRear.mov)

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DBBH in a Full Ground Stroke Arsenal

Coil drop hit. No hips. Just leg extension. Until pulled wide.

This outline subtracts time from hit of shot. And adds time to pre-hit of shot.

And is march toward more gradual acceleration for this shot (the modicum-of-topspin DBBH) along with two forehands.

The design is a bit complicated in that all three shots contain a drop, i.e, employ gravity.

The coil plus drop suggests an evenness of racket head speed (slow plus fast producing mathematical operation equaling moderation or modicum).

The even acceleration begins from this moderation. The whole stroke takes more time than before.

If using a forehand wiper, one will control wiper speed as if one had some kind of an automotive knob to turn. Fast shots = faster wiper, slow shots = slower wiper. Well, that's how I want to play.

Slices include both longer and more abrupt versions. Will restore the backhand drive that was receiving knowledgeable compliments before I started fiddling with that side.

Like a volley, that adjunct stroke is a two-count shot. But it includes elbow extension and roll and a block all in a single count, the second.

For any old age topspin I plan from backhand side now I shall rely on the DBBH with its modicum of that. The rest of the time I'll slice more, cross more, and chop more.

I know people good at hitting soft backhand top right off of the court, and at times I have done that myself, but I am in revamp mode right now just as anyone would be who has a continuing life.

Note: "Trump Derangement Syndrome": How I love that Orwellian phrase. Because it cuts in two directions that are perfectly opposite to one another.

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It has a lot to recommend it, as would almost any full-hearted attempt to imagine the future at this point in the anthropocene age. But for a dystopian novel I didn't find it-- ultimately-- strange, scary and depressing enough the way 1984 was and still is. But my oh my how 1984 got misinterpreted and distorted by the political right.

[stotty]

FROSTLANDS

I read an excerpt from the first chapter over at Amazon. I liked it. The book gets off to an intriguing start. I liked the author's style, also, which is important as I can't read a writer whose writing style I don't like. Although, strangely, I can go back to a book some years later and like a writer's style that I previously didn't like. Why is that? What happened between then and now that would alter my view of a writer's style? I've never figured that one out.

I like that very early on in the first chapter we get to know the main character is 80 years old, which in itself is unusual as most novelists never pitch their main characters that old. The author wants to make a point of it and does it so well.

Anyway, I purchased the book. So thanks.

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Grocery Bag Serves, Vandalism, Self-Driving Cars: The Future of Tennis and Mankind in Detroit

My car, vandalized, after seven weeks still isn't fixed. My mechanic has the used steering column we need in his shop but is out starting cars today since the weather is snowy and cold. Also, higher paying customers are higher priority.

So my doubles partner Bill Wright gave me a ride home from the indoor tennis facility to which I always walk across Balduc Field (haven't been mugged yet). I always walk slow as the cons advised me in the two prisons where I taught writing. And brandish my racket arrhythmically as I walk.

Bill took a detour through the crime-riddled streets of the larger Warren Avenue area which used to contain English Village with high end housing. He wanted to show me his self-driving car so we went out on the interstate, returned on Verner to Mack and came back south to the charity where I live.

Once in my apartment I looked up the name of the dystopian novel I just downloaded and read, FROSTLANDS by John Feffer. Had to because I'd already forgotten that name. Maybe I wouldn't have if the author had been more careful to include low temperatures from nuclear winter. The book's predecessor, SPLINTERLANDS, is a better title but now I don't want to read that one.

FROSTLANDS taught me that the future, if the book is accurate, will be exactly like life in a gated community. If you ever lived in one of those you know exactly how FROSTLANDS will be.

Bill meanwhile taught me the three levels of automation in the present self-driving cars. The car's radar as we drove allowed it to come very close to another car before it did its next thing, which as I recall was not to hit the other car. Every once in a while it beeped to wake Bill up. He might have been sleepy after all the tennis. Top level would be if I had walked to Eastside Tennis and didn't get too badly mugged in the middle of Balduc Field. Then, with the doubles and coffee over, I could have my smartphone signal the car to drive over from the charity and pick me up.

All very nice but in the meantime I want to improve my serve, which I'm doing with four balls in a grocery bag, swinging that thing around so as to keep tension at all times in the "handle" or stalk.

A very good use of plastic grocery bags. Especially if you are disinclined toward hesitation serves.
Picking up dog poops is good too. You turn the bag inside out on the poop.

But do these uses justify the existence of a prevalence that is doing such harm to the environment?

https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/53479-13-pounds-of-plastic-found-in-dead-sperm-whale

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Though Grateful for the Hesitation Serve Sidetrack-- Great for Stabilizing the Elbow-- I'm Happy to Return to Grocery Bag Continuity so Worthy of a Nobel Prize for Tomaz Mencinger

A plastic grocery bag is just one arrow in the quiver of all the badasses so glibly out to destroy the world.

Plastic bags are everywhere, polluting my kitchen cabinet as well as getting stuck in gills and killing ocean fish. Insist on cloth, dumbbells, until grocery store operators learn to do the same.

But for now the awful bags are here. So how can one use them?

Tomaz Mencinger recommends putting four tennis balls in one to loosen up one's wrist in one's serve.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sSwBnGHmQM)

This inspiration, boo-hoo, puts more expensive tools designed for the same purpose out of business.

The Tomaz exercises, like his others, seem wonderful to me, and I am more than glad to add them to the figure eights of my service narratives.

My personal method of telling one's serve over and over, is not one I necessarily recommend to another although it is right for me. Easily, it can prove deleterious to human relationship with wife or lover-- I know.

But now the racket rise behind one can come more from right to left. One need not freeze like a hunk of cheap metal from the trophy shop but can pass right through the skunk tail position.

Racket can then use gravity to wind down 160 degrees with esr, efr and wrist extension taking place in 20 degrees more.

The legs meanwhile can be exploding in opposite direction to place one's head ahead of one's arm at contact.

Under no circumstances should you be able to see your arm.

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I guess I should have mentioned that Vic held forth nonstop for most of the five-and-a-half hours. With maybe a short break here or there. You could walk away for half an hour and work with one of the other pros, then come back and pick up on the conversation.

There were a lot of courts under that tent.

But the other thing that made the whole thing seem like a circus was that Vic didn't just talk. From self-feed he hit one backhand after another.

I'll tell you this. They all landed deep, close to the line, and bounded high, almost to the top of the tent.

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Letter to an Old Friend who Suddenly Brought up the Subject of Vic Braden

I've written a lot about Vic Braden. A lot of it wasn't too complimentary and existed for more than a year in proposal form after I met with a literary agent at a Hollins graduate school reunion. The lady, whose nose was red from too much drink, admitted after the year was up that she knew nothing about tennis and so could not proceed further.


Then I met Vic Braden at Tennis Pro Day in Virginia and found him to be fabulous. On line, he answered every question even before that. And once sent me a fine letter, or his staff did, (on paper yes stationery!) from his tennis university in Coto de Caza. He was a short mesomorph with wide shoulders. He set up a target on the sideline close, very close to the net, and hit it on the first try with a soft slice serve. All this was under a huge tent with 500 people inside. With huge rain drops pelting the tent for five hours, an hour per hundred people. Tennis pros were there from all over Virginia. One worked with me on my serve. Vic himself asked me how I learned and concluded that, "You'll be all right. It just will take you longer."

His brother, a puny runt whom he had not seen in decades, drove to Winchester from D.C. He was a psychologist in charge of a huge government agency. Dysfunctional geniuses if you know what I mean.

I just wrote today about hitting one Don Budge backhand (the best backhand ever) in a match Friday night, and how this will encourage me to try more. The entire basis of Vic's famous book, TENNIS FOR THE FUTURE, was his hitchhiking from Kalamazoo College where he was on the tennis team. He hitched to Detroit and observed Don Budge hitting backhands through a knothole in a wooden fence.

So he then mass-produced a backhand for the tennis boom of the seventies. I learned it. It doesn't work. But it did work when Vic played my friend Harry Constant at Hillsboro College. And when Vic played Vic Seixas, the only player ever to win Wimbledon without a backhand.

Vic and I, he dead and I sort of alive, have different interpretations of the Don Budge backhands although there are some similarities.

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Stir the Pot to hit a DBBH

That would be a J. Donald Budge backhand, which you will never hit, but you might succeed in hitting the type.

I hit one the other day, interspersed with my normal topspin backhand, which is a much more abbreviated affair.

But the DBBH, done properly, might not take as much time to launch as one thinks.

I'll try it every once in a while on general principle.

When should we stop aspiring to a great shot?

I was playing ad court and no one was poaching. "Now," I said to myself.

As it turned out my opponent serving to me got quite far in for his first volley.

Already though I was far in too into my stir-the-pot-with-both-hands backswing.

The pot one is stirring is level, right? Has to be. If it weren't the eyes of newt would roll all over the ground.

So my two hands, hardly higher than waist level (here's the template-- https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...l?DBBHRear.mov) swing to the outside then bend themselves slightly to the inside and then...

Well, in a baseball batter's drop one arm straightens at the elbow, the other encircles the slim slope of young Esther Williams, not swimming but dancing.

To summarize, right hand for Ted Williams, left hand for slope of Esther Williams.

The shot made as if to land at the service line. The server volleyed it into the curtain behind me.

One shot, that highly effective, should have consequence since life is too short for anything else.

A normal person (that would be me) should want to repeat it.

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The Reality of Proposed Change and Actual Play against Decent Opposition

I wrote yesterday that I was going to reinstate my McEnrueful (#4533). So how many times did I actually hit that shot in three sets played last night?

Once, a service return which I muffed. And how often did the situation arise I mentioned in my post, a very short low ball way out in front but with time nevertheless to get there?

Once. And did I hit the shot? Nope. I forgot to try it. And looped my regular forehand into the net.

This is the reality I have come to appreciate from the amount of experimentation I do.

I start in self-feed to work on something.

The first time I play I usually will hit the new shot once.

I am just telling it like it is.

Later, one hits more. Eventually one owns the shot and get this-- for this is the controversial part-- one becomes a better player or at the very least doesn't bore oneself.

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Return of the McEnrueful

We want to be open-minded-- I know we do. I cut out (eschewed) my McEnrueful thanks to new information obtained online from Tomaz Mencinger. Just hearing Tomaz, who is good at explaining things, picked up my strong eastern groundies to the point where I didn't think I needed my composite grip forehand any more.

In many areas of overlap that is probably true. But in the case of a low ball very far out front that causes me to swoop in pretty fast, I miss the old shot, hence restore it now.

The McEnrueful is an imitation John McEnroe forehand acquired with instruction from nobody. A study of John McEnroe forehands in the Tennis Player archive led to a very solid, economical shot with no independent arm work in it at all.

Well, I guess you could say there is arm work in its down and up pendulum backswing, but does backswing count?

From apogee of backswing-- pretty low it seems to me-- the shot becomes solid. The racket, having just risen, falls again but this time in conjunction with turning hips in a neutral stance which lowers the rear shoulder.

Okay, so the hips have gone. Now torso twist takes over. The composite grip makes the racket face comparable to a seven iron in golf with just enough loft to clear the net.

Because the shot is so solid, and because one is still gliding forward as one hits it, one generates surprising pace. And unexpected spin for control that I can't explain.

And why would I want to if it's as good a shot as I say? When I used to hit it at somebody their reply would most often sail long.