A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Two Different Strokes Within Rosewallian Slice

Stotty of Great Britain appears to live near Wimbledon and to attend The Championships like no one else. His first-hand study of Ken Rosewall's backhands and backhand volleys, some decades ago, was accomplished, clearly, from a nearby seat. Much discussion happens in the pages of Tennis Player about which video camera a coach should buy. Well, the Stotty camera is very good.

Stotty and I are not the only persons to like the following clip from the 1954 Davis Cup tie between America and Great Britain. One reason I like it is the anonymous narrator telling me that any study I do of Rosewallian slice will have a big pay-off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR7kvBGntW8

The three sequences of full slice in the video are what I think of as linked double roll in which there is nothing else between the rolls.

The following photographic sequence of Ken Rosewall however shows a stroke that is closer to the repeating videos of Trey Waltke.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/classiclessons/trey_waltke/the_slice_backhand/the_slice_backhand.html

The racket turns over on the backswing. A small amount of added backward roll then takes place on the foreswing. Followed by straightening of the arm to the outside (a push). Followed by forward roll which involves both the "barred arm" as Geoffrey Williams would say and wrist flattening from concave to straight.

That two such different constructions should exist within the Rosewallian arsenal should come as no surprise to someone paying attention when Stotty pointed out Ken Rosewall's almost infinite variety.

Variety as a characteristic of any good player who likes to hit a lot of slice also is not a new idea. Somebody with a single backhand drive, a pair of good forehands, and a triad of serves might be considered a reasonable person.

Volleys and slice, however, imply a constellation of shots.

[bottle]

Hmmm. They're all kicking the other foot back. A sensible person should look into this?

[bottle]

Reprise: More Grist for the Service Mill

I was looking for a clip to substantiate my point of view that leaping up is not necessarily the best way to develop the most powerful serve; notice I said, not necessarily. I was and may still use this clip in a comment relating to the thread about the now almost mandatory "kickback" of the modern serve. Said movement does not exist in my favorite model, the Michael Stich serve.

But here is an interesting slomo video of some top athletes generating maximum power in a throw where the front foot stays on the ground a long time and the rear leg swings forward without kicking back. No foot faulting either!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfeD7kDOMWo

I was hoping this might generate some interesting comments.

don

Don't know that my comment will be interesting, but I've been working on more whirl to compensate for not getting racket low enough due to rotordedness in the shoulder.

[stotty]

Copying smart

In Wimbledon coverage, I found myself impressed with Jim Courier when he suggested that all of Dimitrov's strokes were imitation Federer in an overly literal way.

Courier didn't say one can't learn from Federer. But he did indicate that the best game one can come up with must always contain elements of one's own individuality no matter what source or sources it came from.

Copying can be subconscious or downright deliberate. Dimitrov seems to fall in the latter category. Pancho Gonzales had the best idea. Steal the best from everyone, then make it your own...smart.

[bottle]

Courier on Grigor Dimitrov

In Wimbledon coverage, I found myself impressed with Jim Courier when he suggested that all of Dimitrov's strokes were imitation Federer in an overly literal way.

Courier didn't say one can't learn from Federer. But he did indicate that the best game one can come up with must always contain elements of one's own individuality no matter what source or sources it came from.

[bottle]

Shoulders Forward and Down, Rump Back just a Little

I really think this view of a Boris Becker second serve shows the kind of arm compression I've been working toward.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/borisbecker/borisbecker_serve/bb_2nd_serve/bb_2nd_serve.html?BB2ndSDeuceCourtLevelSide1.mov

"Arm compression" could mean too many different things, but what I'm trying to say here is that the two halves of Becker's arm, upper and lower, press together while parallel to the SIDE COURT behind him.

The arm then opens (bounces?) to about a right angle at which point upper arm twist can effectively add to the power brew.

Michael Stich, in some of his serves at least as I recall them in old split frame magazine pieces, had arm even more turned around so that racket might even roughly point at left net post.

I'm sure that other servers do press their arm together this way but at a later point in the cycle.

For someone who's thinking "more whirl like a modern shot-putter, please," this idea could be useful in an overall design that starts out more circular and then gets straightforward to press weight from slightly jack-knifing body length.

[bottle]

Re Durie Tip in # 1664

If your best serve has you lowering the tossing arm to initiate throw before the hitting arm flies up it, then use a photographic technique involving a radioactive or perhaps emulsification cloud conceptually drawing on the Higgs Field in space.

Your arm will create a real or perhaps imaginary image for the hitting arm to fly up.

This shouldn't be hard. Another way of putting it is that the hitting arm can fly up the memory of the tossing arm.

Remember, reader, an electron is both a particle AND a wave, and now it's there and now it isn't so never be too set in your ways.

[bottle]

Cue Control

Cue control and analysis are not the same.

That's true of both billiards and tennis, but, if, in tennis, the best cue is a verbal one, as often happens, some subtle progression of thought may have occurred.

On my one hand backhand side, I feel I learned something very specific from all my self-feeding experiments in double roll.

First, The Czech Book idea that a mid-swing change from short arm to long arm will accelerate the racket head is accurate but may more effectively apply to Bottle's serve than to his ground strokes.

The idea of prolonged double roll starting with only mildly bent arm in which neither roll is overly sharp and which includes a collision between ball and strings during the second roll can lead to:

1) an inside out swing

2) a nicely formy edge on follow through (A) or a beveled racket followthrough (B) or both but at different times in the followthrough (C).

3) more control in getting racket around to outer edge of the ball.

[bottle]

Magic?

If advanced players are engineers or magicians, then a top coach, once his charge has surpassed the basics stage, is always a magician.

A big part of the great coaches' magic is that they freely steal from one another without attribution (which takes too long and might be polite but is really not much more than a millstone). And they always have their antennae out.

They listen for anything that anybody has to say about tennis, hoping to find a helpful gem in some offhand utterance which ordinary tennistas would find trivial and unimportant.

The gem might even come from some TV announcer at Wimbledon as when former singles world number five Jo Durie, or was it her broadcasting partner (and does ownership ever matter?) said that when serving, one should send up the tossing arm and then fire the other arm hard up the first arm.

[bottle]

Taking a Curve at Salamanski Airport

It is a busy day at Terminal One. The air traffic controllers in the tower are ready to give up.

The line of planes waiting to taxi onto the main runway is backed to some outlying hangars, and from there another three miles to a passenger parking lot.

But all of these planes had better scatter, and the pilots know it, and they separate in surprisingly good order, one to this side, one to the other.

For down the center comes the rotorded server aircraft that everybody has heard so much about.

This guy doesn't taxi onto the runway but rather races there. As he takes his final turn he all but tips over but then goes straight and hits the ball.

[bottle]

Cliff Drysdale Repeats His Most Provocative, Implicit Idea Ever

Cliff Drysdale, the South African TV tennis announcer, has discussed his friendship with Jack Nicklaus many times.

And how one day, he, a formerly top-ranked player on Tour, was on court with the great golfer and asked him why he kept changing his strokes.

"I've changed my strokes every day of my life," Nicklaus is reported to have said. Nicklaus has been watching Wimbledon 2013 from the audience.

This time Pam Shriver brought up the subject of re-creation. She obviously was familiar with the recent ESPN Magazine article on why Tiger Woods has overhauled his golf stroke so often and not always for the better.

Drysdale indicated that Nicklaus routinely changes both his grip and his swing.

Golf and tennis are never for him a set piece the way they are for 99 per cent of the people who do them.

[bottle]

Three-Forehands-in-a-Row Set Piece

A set piece in theater is some small passage in which one can do and say the same things exactly the same way night after night, which can free one up to be more creative and thoughtful and improvisational elsewhere.

Here is a devious plot for when you see a three forehands by you situation coming up anywhere, perhaps in doubles starting off of a forehand service return.

1) ATP Style Forehand

2) Continental Penetrator, Light

3) Continental Penetrator, Heavy

I'm sure I've already described the technique for all three shots.

They are my shots, not yours, reader, anyway.

But I'm willing to discuss any one of them, endlessly, so long as there is no didacticism requirement involved and I will be free to expound in a neutrally self-interested way.

3) is of special interest since its method is just being worked out. The oncoming ball is off to the player's (my) right. Instead of my usual bowling down and up in tandem with unit turn and pointing across, with all of this continually turning the body, I will simply bowl down.

Or maybe drop the racket. Or lower it in a prolonged, hydraulic way as I approach the projected convergence with the ball.

Now the hips reverse. Now the upper body fires. And through both, second part of a bowl or small rise of the racket takes place building pressure in the arm, i.e., loading it.

[bottle]

For Rotorded Servers Once Again

You are rotorded! What does that mean? You can't get the racket low enough behind your back.

So what should you do? Abandon tennis for another sport? Abandon at least any goal of playing tennis at a high level?

I've brought this topic up a lot in "A New Year's Serve," where no person other than myself has ever weighed in.

(This is simply not true of other topics.)

My ongoing search for best solution, complicated by leg problem, has me turning my initial stance way around (to lengthen runway SOMEHOW, by curving it in this case) with feet a foot apart and combining knee bend and body wind in a seamless, stepless brew.

A Boris Beckerian model might prove useful.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/borisbecker/borisbecker_serve/bb_1st_serve/bb_1st_serve.html?BB1stSDeuceFront1.mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFPPz0Iy5A0

He however can get racket tip very low.

The more turned around stance is to compensate, somewhat, for that.

So how will this work?

My proposal is a whirl of summing body and compressing arm which then starts to extend before more vertical action takes over.

See post # 5 on the subject of verticality in this link:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/bulletin/showthread.php?t=2385

This total action should apply to flat, slice and kick serves-- all three.

[bottle]

Quality of Encouragement

Mark Miller, the director of teaching at the Eastside Tennis Facility, Detroit, has the uncanny ability of encouraging a player always at the right time.

Might just be a word connected to something that happened on the court ("good"). Might be perceived danger: One time while doing cardio tennis with Mark, I hit my feet together which caused me to fall and skin a knee.

"Keep your feet farther apart," he warned thereafter, reasonably, and I did so, and the incident didn't repeat itself. Only in the months while various scabs came off and the skinless area grew slowly smaller did I realize that my interaction with a very abrasive surface wasn't due to dangerous technique but rather to tennis shoes with the wrong toe box.

Another time and certainly before Mark knew my name or anything about me, I happened to hit an ace while playing doubles.

From a couple courts over Mark noticed the ace and commented upon it with contagious enthusiasm.

Did he go out of his way to do this?

As I said, he was a couple courts over.

I am not surprised that Mark Miller, tennis teaching pro, connects his brief statements to the exact time when they are needed.

Because everybody hits an ace once in a while. But the player who takes it for granted or ascribes to it too much significance is apt to hit fewer aces in the future than somebody who registers the experience in just the right and grateful way.

Today, while self-feeding, I hit a drive one-hander.

"Classic," Mark suddenly said from off of the court. "I have a friend with one, and he's in the Hall of Fame."

Mark, I once heard from persons other than himself, was in a previous life a coxswain of an international championship crew rowing out of the Detroit Boat Club.

I still am not surprised. No one knows more about encouraging people and getting more out of them than they think they want to give than a champion cox'n in the sport of crew.

Sometimes, the cox will even lie, like Mouse, our cox.

"Twenty strokes to go!" he shouted once near the end of a big race. Then, "Just ten more!" Then, "Gimme ten more!"

[bottle]

Topspin Forehand: Free the Elbow!

Design 88:

Initial lifting of the forearm gets the racket out of the way to site the ball with the elbow.

The elbow then starts on its complete journey which can keep you (me) from thinking about anything else although all kinds of other stuff is happening, too.