A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Putting an Extra Timing Unit into Continental Penetration Shot

If you (I) plan to get your shoulder muscles going forward even as your racket back-bowls up, I insist that you (I) do so while upper body is rotating/driving forward, not just the hips.

I read a forehand article once in which Tom Okker asserted that most players don't spend enough time actually hitting the ball. At Rock Creek Park, D.C., I watched Arantxa Vicario-Sanchez's coach make sure that she countered that tendency by timing her forehand over and over with a stopwatch.

In the formation of most forehands there is so much to think about, the worst item of which is kinetic chain: Everybody always needs a drink of simplicity.

But when one temporarily foregoes the complexity of one's constantly developing ATP Style Forehand, say, and hits The Stripped Down Penetrating Continental instead, one may be poised to think about kinetic chain without harm.

So, if the hips firing and building tension precedes shoulders firing to do the same thing, arm actually firing and shoulders actually firing are no longer simultaneous.

You will have added microseconds to the duration of the shot.

I will not say you'll add a beat since the overall stroke taken together is still too fast for a rock 'n roll or dixieland groove.

But you can now make contact farther in front, I think.

There is more arm delay. The last instant hybrid roll (both up and through the ball) will permit you to do this even though many teaching pros will expect-- mistakenly-- that you will hit the ball up into the sky.

[bottle]

Does The Beat Go On?

So, Cher, does the beat go on or not?

Ken Rosewall makes a nice skunk tail pretty high but not too far back.

But skunk tail from farther back with arm not as bent-- with good but not right angle at the elbow-- works best for my eastern backhand drive, allowing more space in which to accomplish a smooth and easy double roll.

So should I change my slice to make it more consistent with my drive, the very slice so recently praised by knowledgeable tennis-mastering Stifel-Steiffels in West Virginia?

Those players at the Stifel-Steiffel Family Reunion were not all Steiffel-Stifels-- some were only Stifels. But a Stifel once married a Steiffel and the result was Hope's mother Louise, whom I interviewed in Middletown, Connecticut before I ever met Hope. Then I went out with Hope. Then I didn't see her for 46 years. Then I received an email from some joker broker who wanted to flirt with my sister but knew where Hope was. What it all comes down to is that if you are German you pronounce Stifel Shteefful. But if you are more American you say Stifel as in the Eiffel Tower. And always pronounce Steiffel like The Steiffel Tower unless you want to say it like the German Stifel, which means boot, which is the inverted shape that your size 44 forehand loop ought to be.

The moral is: "Don't listen to the Stifel-Steiffels even if they think your slice is pretty good."

Go ahead and change your backhand slice elbow setting to be more consistent with your drive and change back later if you must.

[bottle]

Reducing Scope

Obviously, in one hundred viewings of the same film, one can see something different each time.

What experiments has one oneself been conducting recently? That will make a difference in what one wants to see.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DBBHRear.mov

How much forward roll is there in this video? Some. Otherwise, J. Donald Budge would have hit a lob here since racket face was quite open to begin the forward swing.

Why doesn't he have to roll more? Because he swings way out from the body (like Ted Williams), i.e., with considerable scope. More scope forms a less compact stroke but helps get the racket tip around in time. And compactness does come immediately afterward in the high followthrough.

Racket rolls to slightly beyond contact, I would argue, and then STOPS ROLLING as it lifts.

One can work out variations on this. In a double roll design, where racket first rolls open and then closed but all within a unified and succinct and inside out forward swing, one can take a shorter path to the ball since more forward roll instead of long scope brings the racket tip around.

[bottle]

Re-Thinking Continental Penetration Shot

The upswing will be more controlled, slowing down, if hips are going the other way and forward pressure is building in arm to counter the racket's upward movement.

Ideally the racket will just change direction with no pause.

But if one is building forward pressure in the arm as it is back bowling upward, then forward freedom of arm action is on the way.

This substitutes another racket speed contributor for the "cast arm downward" design I previously expounded.

Hips can continue through the contact. Ground force will fly up the legs and through contact whether knees are bent or not. The proof of this is a reductio ad absurdum: If there's no starch in the legs you fall down on the court.

The stomach muscles continue through contact also. And independent arm travel. And arm roll, which transforms this into a hybrid shot: As Steve Navarro has pointed out, the strings roll up while rolling through.

This is a big learning order, one of the high end items on anyone's menu but worth whatever money, I mean energy, one is willing to expend.

[bottle]

Self-Authorized to Self-Feed

I, "the one and only Bottle" in Luke Jensen's words, am self-authorized to think endlessly about tennis technique which you, reader, are not-- not if you want to play well. That is why you should have conversations with me.

Thanks to six gardens being tended to by Hope and Helpless Inc. it seems like a year since I've been to a tennis court when really it's only been a few days. I'm not counting Hope's and my driving over to Rochester Hills where my 10-year-old friend Maxine always wants to go outside and hit academic balls high above the blacktop road.

Maxine-- could be Maximene-- is the greatest Dorothy there ever was in the history of THE WIZARD OF OZ, far better than the menacing Judy Garland. In a 75-person production, the witch's hat fell on the yellow brick road. Maxine-Dorothy: "Don't touch it, Toto!" On opening night they gave her a Kansan bucket with two old-fashioned laundry rollers at the top. That was for the scene where Dorothy throws water on the witch. Well, she suddenly had to figure out how to get rid of the rollers first. Audience tension rose. The water finally got out. Because of the obstacle, both the audience and the witch melted better.

When, near the end of the production, the wizard had trouble opening his bag containing brains, heart, courage, WD-40, etc., Dorothy-Maxine said, "Can I help you?" When the temperature was a hundred degrees and Maxine and I were alternating hits of a soft foam ball against a soft aluminum garage door, she noticed that my knee was clicking a bit too much and I was sweating from the forehead a lot and said, "Are you all right?"

Because of all her theater, now Amaryllis in THE MUSIC MAN, I thought that maybe Maxine was lost to tennis. No, the other day a varsity player from one of the Michigan universities, in five minutes, taught her a two-hander that is simply unbelievable.

So that's about Maxine and Maxine's possible future. Now about my own. When I'm hitting the foam ball to Maxine (she prefers regular balls having played in tournaments from the end of her first week and having won a few times with a forehand only), I can see extraordinarily well the cockeyed spin from my Rosewallian slice along with its precisely variable axis.

Which reminds me how I really like the idea of a double roll on any one-hander. And I think I suggested I prefer to make contact on the second roll rather than during the "cusp" or afterward.

The one-handed drives I see this week on TV Wimbledon seem to roll after contact-- I don't like that. I prefer the "roof" followthrough of a Petr Korda.

If I get to a court today, I'll try everything I don't like and what I do, but we have to drive over to Rochester Hills first to get a dog since Maxine and her entire family are flying to Costa Rica to do some social work.

[bottle]

Very interesting and timely with Wimbledon going on. Has immediate implications also for any server desiring to put less strain on his front leg. That certainly would not be me as a young man with an overdeveloped front leg from rowing and every desire to get maximum power out of it. The counter-argument that everybody on the tour nowadays serves the other way has never seemed sufficiently solid given what we know about authoritarian-susceptible personalities.

[stotty]

Kick back

The Stich serve has three anomalies:

1 no kick back

2 lands on the right foot (as do Becker and Stotty)

3 strange hand/wrist movement around the trophy position

Kick back seems more violent with those who serve and stay back for obvious reasons. Kick back always just seems part of the run to the net with serve volleyers of the past...

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

...so is the lack of it all that relevant in the case of Stich.

Lew Hoad has no kick back either...

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

[tennis_chiro]

For another perspective

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

[stotty]

Reader, if you think there was any substance in the previous post (# 1646), I urge that you re-read it for today's emendations, e.g., the fish flies have grown a quarter inch from my study of them this morning on the glass of a storm door on this house.

Yes, the uppercut from a balanced, loaded position. A powerful platform if ever there was one.

[bottle]

Note on Tennis/Literary Progress

Reader, if you think there was any substance in the previous post (# 1646), I urge that you re-read it for today's emendations, e.g., the fish flies have grown a quarter inch from my study of them this morning on the glass of a storm door on this house.

[bottle]

Thanks for the Grand Prescription

I got it in worse words from a North Carolinan doctor some years ago and re-fill it every month as I bring along (as in "grow") my ATP Style or Gordon-distilled forehand, not double bend but straight arm division.

Uppercut to someone's midsection seems also what John McEnroe does with his continental/eastern cusp straight arm forehand when one thinks of his use of hips and legs.

But I only want to do that with the Gordon-- for orchestration.

Maybe as I continue to master the flatter and more penetrating version of my 3.5 Gordon, the non-lifting legs of my 2.5 continental will fade away like a tadpole evolving in reverse, i.e., I no longer will have need of a John McEnroe forehand backswing anywhere in my game.

For the time being however I love it perhaps because it's me at 16 with the self-invented forehand I had then only in disguise.

That was a 3.0 eastern grip. When you think about it, 2.5 and 3.0 aren't far apart.

The rare pendulum start feels golfy, not goofy. Then I crank with hips (they go round but inch out toward the net, too) as I very actively force the straight elbowed, straight wristed arm straight down at the court.

Transverse stomach muscles take over as hand rolls racket head both up and through the ball.

In the Gordon, now, I try not to depart overly much from Brian's description. I do wonder however-- which could lead any minute to a self-feeding session at the Lake St. Clair courts amidst the fish flies (a peculiarly indigenous brand of inch-and-a-half-long "Mayflies" key to the novel THE VIRGIN SUICIDES by Jeffrey Eugenides)-- whether arm could trail behind the longly backswinging shoulders more, i.e., could (during unit turn only) "feel for the ball," ono, it's Oscar Wegner making a ghost appearance, eek! He'd be right again once more.

That would be a lag before the lag. Could be just what I want (longer freedom from shoulder in both directions while still keeping arm within the Type III slot). If it works.

P.S. I like Novak Djokovic's statement this week that the more you practice the greater the likelihood of your getting "into a zone." I see this as also true if you "practive" instead of "practice" though to a lesser degree.

[tennis_chiro]

Imagine an uppercut to the midsection

Forehand force comes from many places, even the oncoming ball. To maximize the contribution of one's hips, one may need to stay down, i.e., keep one's knees slightly bent until one has actually hit the ball.

Imagine the force your legs provide if you were to be driving an uppercut to someone's midsection. The tennis swing should be a lot freeer, but there is an element of that leg action.

don

[bottle]

Stay Down Shots

Forehand force comes from many places, even the oncoming ball. To maximize the contribution of one's hips, one may need to stay down, i.e., keep one's knees slightly bent until one has actually hit the ball.

[bottle]

And try going back at .5 mph while building resistance for a headstart on the 2 mph.

[bottle]

Re # 1640

Go 2 instead of 1 mph.