A New Year's Serve

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Centripetalating

How is centripetalating a serve different from short-arming it, which almost everybody agrees is bad. It isn't different if you've decided that a chin-up at contact after first zapping arm straight is in order. You wouldn't have to rely so much on your head and eyes coming down with the weight of your body. I guess that would be the reason for the experiment.

The following serve is bad news, not only for anyone trying to return it but for anyone trying to imitate it.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/high_speed_archive/pro_men/andy_roddick/andy_roddick_v1/andy_roddick_v1.html?AR1stSAdSide-0274018-0001.mov

But notice how straight Andy Roddick's arm is at contact and how his head is going forward and slightly downward, also at contact.

Note on the language in this post. If you don't want to centripetalate, then centrifugate or Watergate or fumigate (finally, a real verb).

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Wrist in Three Forehands for The Middle Class

I agree with don_budge that no forehand is ever going to work properly unless the wrist movement within it is unconscious.

So before I purposefully forget, I want to note the wristed difference in the three senior moment forehands I've ordered for myself.

In a Ziegenfuss, since arm goes slowly out toward the ball, laying back of the wrist can be slow (yet late). Since I wouldn't call this a flip would I call it a mondo? Probably.

In a maximum sweep forehand (but all in the slot until end of the followthrough), wrist lays back slowly and gradually all through the backswing and sometimes but not always through contact, too.

In a Federfore there is a flip. It is late, violent and abrupt. It is high-risk but always with potential for high reward. Is this shot mediocre when not hit perfectly? Yes.

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Continuity in the Donald Budge Serve

The first person to win a Grand Slam did not have a bad serve.

Here it is again.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DB1stSRear.mov

In looking for how the various parts of it blend together, the hips to jack-knife sequence may seem most bizarre to those who adhere to a straight body philosophy (nearly everyone).

But there they are, like it or not, hips that rotate on one leg only followed by a big jack-knife of upper body forward.

Toss was two feet into the court, according to the tennis authors Talbert and Old.

Dunno. I think by now I'm ready to say that the hips rotation and the jacknife are simultaneous, not sequential, and that the hips spinning right send the jackknife veering left.

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Down Time from Injury is Think Time

The usual constraint of on-court testing is gone, and with it all those pusillanimous experiments in which one does not go far enough through lack of imagination or fear of injury.

One should have no worries if one is quietly ensconced in a warm, safe place.

When exactly, talking "twist," does Stosur's pre-load of her upper arm cease in one of her kick serves? When, in other words, does internal rotation of upper arm that is forward movement a person could see-- begin?

Does anyone actually think it starts with Samantha's hand somewhere behind her neck? I vote for the moment that the upper arm points straight up at the sky.

If half of Roger Federer's forehands are hit with arm beginning to scissor and half with arm straight, in which half do more of Roger's ue's now occur? It's eine Frage, Roger, not a frog.

And which of these two diametrically different strokes helps the other more? No one wants to "snatch" at a forehand, so I vote for the straight-armed version as set-up for the scissoring version.

My reasoning derives from the ideal of centrifugal-centripetal balance at contact. Tennis players and golfers ought to remember Percy Boomer, the old Scotch golf pro who wouldn't mind a little upward action from toes and ankles just as one hits a golf ball. That thought threatens fatal uplift of the head, but done properly, Percy Boomer's argument goes, the head only rises a few fractions of an inch.

Surely this principle applies to tennis strokes. To which ones? And using which device/devices? Body coming down in a serve? Arm slightly scissoring in a serve? In a forehand? In an overhead?

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Three Forehands for The Middle Class

Here are three eastern or strong eastern forehands freshly mimed in the shower. Hit them in order in a half-hour warmup before actual match warmup.

1) Ziegenfuss (ten minutes). A small C-loop followed by slow sweep of arm followed by spring-don't-swing followed by catching racket forward left. This is a formy forehand but boy is it useful, with double-bend structure the best. Since the stroke is junior, don't worry about turning the shoulders back overly much. Keep everything natural and relaxed.

2) Sockdolager (ten minutes). Do turn shoulders back overly much. Do it with unit turn and continue with pointing left arm across. Take wrist back a little at a time, sometimes all the way through contact. Backswing is parallel to court, i.e., is as level as humanly possible. Use double-fulcrum backswings and double-fulcrum foreswings, which means that arm is to sweep from the shoulder in both directions along with the body rotations you apply to this task. Transition between backswing and foreswing makes a lower register loop from golf-like pressing out and relaxed turning of hips. Arm straightens during the transition, which adds to the feeling of long sweep. Either catch racket or let it go where it wants.

3) Federfores (ten minutes).

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Montaigne and My Tennis Book

Once upon a time, Montaigne was stuck in his inherited Dordogne chateau. How he wanted to go outdoors. How he longed for his daily horseback ride.

Impossible.

The whole landscape was ravaged by the religious wars of sixteenth century France. Indoors in the chateau one was relatively safe. The fighting and killing lasted week after month after year and, frankly, whether one survived or not, it got one down.

If he picked the smallest horse in his stable, Montaigne reasoned, nobody would notice him. I’ll do it! He rides across a flat and heads up into the mountains, followed by attendants who have saddled up, too.

One of them, a lusty, tall fellow mounted on a huge German horse with no sensitivity in its mouth lingers with all the other attendants behind the small Montaigne on his smallest of horses.

The group of attendants has ridden with Montaigne many times before, so they know enough to maintain a discreet distance.

But the lusty, tall fellow isn’t content. He wants to feel a rush of air. So he forges ahead of the others and loses control.

They all are on a narrow twisting path with a blind curve between them and Montaigne.

The huge horse rounds the corner and clobbers Montaigne from behind. “He turned us both over and over,” Montaigne writes in the essay USE MAKES PERFECT, “topsy-turvy with our heels in the air, so that there lay the horse overthrown and stunned with the fall, and I ten or twelve paces from him stretched out at length, with my face all battered and broken, my sword which I had had in my hand, above ten paces beyond that, and my belt broken all to pieces, without motion or sense...”

The attendants decide that Montaigne is dead. They start carrying him back to the chateau. Part way there, he starts to move, and pukes up a bucket of clots of blood.

Montaigne continues:

“I will not here omit, that the last thing I could make them beat into my head, was the memory of this accident, and I had it over and over again repeated to me, whither I was going, from whence I came, and at what time of the day this mischance befell me, before I could comprehend it. As to the manner of my fall, that was concealed from me in favor to him who had been the occasion, and other flim-flams were invented...” (Translated from the French by Charles Cotten.)

For my tennis book, I stress what Montaigne “will not here omit.” While allowing that the accident was “light” (since he survived!) he insists that he learned from it, and if anybody wants to know more about death, they need only to approach it—closely—something that happens naturally in most lifetimes.

Similarly, if anybody wants to know more about tennis, they need only to approach it—closely—which means not shying away from the intricacy the way most players do.

If tennis, reader, seems a minor topic compared to death, I apologize. But Montaigne, who always has more to say about anything, has much to tell us about becoming “more personal,” and that is especially important in tennis.

You’re supposed to stick to basics and not really say anything about yourself. But Montaigne understands the fault in this. “Instead of blowing the child’s nose,” he says, “this is to take his nose off altogether.”

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Lloyd Lob

The Lloyd of whom I speak is neither the Chris Evert ex nor the comedian of early film but Lloyd Budge, Donald's older brother.

To hit a lob, he suggests in TENNIS MADE EASY, ship the racket forward a foot or so before you send it up.

Seems like a good idea to me.

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So someone other than me can try this last interpretation of mine of the Don Budge serve before I do.

My mistake, I think, was in assuming that the hips rotating on rear foot then continue to rotate on front foot, and that this all is, in essence, a single move.

No. The hips do rotate and pivot back foot as racket rises to a vertical, high position-- "high trophy" if you like but not stopping or slowing there.

Leg drive then works with arm load and pre-load as in more modern serves.
There's just less of it (leg drive), but there is, interesting to me at least, jack-knifing of the upper body and from a firm butt although it's always going to go back a bit.

As I opined before, motion at the top of the serve carries the peg-leg forward, I'm quite sure.

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Four weeks of no tennis. Stretching exercises. Heat and cold. Compression. Common sense. Will heal. If I'd been standing on my head the swelling (accumulations of blood) would have been at knee and above.

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Right. When you hear that hammer blow, you know it's the crack of doom.

[don_budge]

Sorry John...

Really sorry to hear that John...when you read this you know that I am sending my best wishes to you.

I have seen that injury several times recently and it is fairly common...particularly among aging weekend warriors. That popping noise is really disconcerting. The calf and achilles tendon seem to be weight bearing areas and as we are pushing and shoving off of them like we were 25 again...they take on a great deal of stress. Last year I had some inflammation in my achilles and fortunately it healed nicely. But ever since then I have been a bit more conscious of strengthening that area of my leg to prevent the worst case scenario. I am doing the work out regimen that Mark what's his name wrote up this past several months.

Please keep us posted and I know that I speak for every one in wishing you all of the strength that it will take to rehabilitate from your injury. Go with God.

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Halloween in December

I am perfectly happy to report a new iteration that will blow away all previous iterations of my present serve, which as you already know, esteemed reader, grew out of a numbing of the right leg through my experiments in leftward lean.

Also, my left leg, weakened by meniscus tears and repairs six years previous, collapsed during a wide ball bouncing left beyond the tramlines when I knew that my doubles partner wouldn’t follow, and so I made the shot but then sprang unnaturally back to cover the hole left behind me.

Well, that’s what happens when you use your legs a lot as a young man. As a member of the Brown University Cinderella crews, I recently attended a fiftieth anniversary of our championships in which, out of thirty or so individuals, one exhibited two good knees that were his own-- the varsity coxswain. My theory is that oarsmen learn to push so hard with their legs that later in life they still know how to do so, and therefore injure themselves in activity other than when they row.

So even Roger Federer is going to have bad knees. As will all the modern tennis players who think they are Air Jordan in overcoming their full body weight every time they serve.

I’ll say one thing, reader, to prove that I like you. After your first meniscus repair, make sure during the subsequent rehabilitation that your quad is working properly since your specialist may not check.

Otherwise, like me, you may become a “gimpy-grumpy,” the actual user-name of a person here in this forum before he became too moribund to write.

Or, almost as bad, you’ll fly to the right for a distant ball which all three other persons know you’ll never get. But you will reach it and hit a winning shot. Absolutely incredible in view of your uneven gait!

But on the next point you’ll hear a snap in your calf muscle similar to a hammer blow and you will yell.

“Walk it off, John. Maybe you can still play.”

And then it’s over and your team has won. Same person: “I don’t know about that false injury. I actually was beginning to feel sorry for you.”

I, you, she, it or they will feel uplifted and next play tennis two more times before, while lugging around a bunch of heavy bronze sculptures of Cupid for silent auction in a church fair, your (my, their, our) right ankle and foot may begin to swell.

The same lady who approaches the irreligious me any time I enter that church was unaware of my edema and said, “So, John, have you succumbed to Jesus?”

It was off instead to my personal physician and then following her direction to the hospital for a Doppler test. The verdict: “You don’t have a blood clot but you do have a hematoma and an appointment with...”

So I’m sitting here with both feet up on a bed waiting for the appointment and writing with a pencil. The right ankle and foot are triple the size of the left.

A good time for a new iteration of the Don Budge serve.

There really is just one video that feeds this challenge, again and again.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DB1stSRear.mov

“Nissessity is da Mutha uv ennervashun” is my natural pre-verbal voice, which does require translation, I realize, to my adopted voice: NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF ENERVATION.

No, invention and not enervation.

Let’s start with J. Donald Budge’s initial stance which unlike all conventional stances past and present sees the two feet as parallel to one another.

That’s static foundation. Moving foundation, different, will be a sequence: sway, hips, shoulders, hips, legs, arm, i.e., 123456, which, although not planned serving rhythm (that is still to be evolved and likely to be 1234), is certainly a good learn rhythm reflecting what will happen.

We—you, listener, and I, talker—have extensively discussed the “threshing heels” at the bottom of the healthful Don Budge serve—a kind of foundation once again.

Differences this time are A) nature of second half of the thresh with a hips turn to begin only at the end of it, and B) the way arm coordinates with body and C) There is no further hips turn associated with leg coming through.

Although Don Budge and his coach after older brother Lloyd, Tom Stow, both have stressed that no weight shift occurs until tossed ball changes direction, I take this to mean that there is indeed forward linear travel that embraces the early toss.

First one sways, tall. Then front knee bends so that front heel comes up. Then front heel goes down (usually) as rear heel comes up. How far down, though? All the way to the court or not—your choice.

The sway and front knee bending constitute forward travel but without much weight. As front knee bends the hips turn backward.

As thresh completes with the two heels trading elevation, the racket has risen to where it is parallel to court, and the hips have stayed where they are while the shoulders wound back more.

Next, the hips rotate forward, pivoting the rear heel to prepare for a pigeon-toed take-off by one foot only. The arm meanwhile has risen to the trophy position everybody talks about, although in this particular serve there is no pause there whatsoever. The racket is always on the move.

But the hips rotation, unique, needs further elucidation. The front leg, holding firm, is not involved.

Now comes thrust of the legs with both of them pushing in the same direction upward. But how hefty is the rear leg’s role? Not very since its start was not from ball of foot but tippy-toes.

I’m prepared to say that the leftward lean started by rotating hips moving along the baseline is continued slightly by rear leg lightly pushing off of the court.

This is important since internally rotating arm and hand are throwing just then. One wants centrifugal and centripetal forces to balance at contact. The head may move a little therefore but not go wild.

It is racket only that brings the leg forward. That leg is a pirate’s “peg-leg,” the opposite of more active left leg in the more contemporary Air Jordan landing, which occurs on balance with rear leg thrust out.

So, will this whole scheme turn out to be the ultimate iteration beyond which there is no other? Will I have from this moment, unarguably, a great or even good serve?

I certainly believe so, and that is my method, with my passionate belief in present experiment or hypothesis the essential ingredient every time.

One iteration and then its reinforcement and then another and another until the last iteration unless there is still another in the works—the way that people learn.

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Coriolis Force

A hurricane in the northern hemisphere revolves counter-clockwise while following an often curved path. For the right-hander then, the hips spin to the outside in a small circle which then develops into a larger circle forward as jackknife muscles also come into the act. All this can be foundation for a powerful arm and hand throw.

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From Three Dimensions to Two

The tennis coach Ralph Waldo Emerson, equally good as Fred Emerson and Roy, said, "Simplify, simplify, simplify!"

If you are in the tennis stroke invention business as I am, and as I believe the 47 per cent all should be, you may come to my conclusion that the best event possible is when you remove something from a stroke.

The thing removed could be too much sequence or a psychological something or purely a wrong idea.

In examining the service motion of John McEnroe-- an absolute no-no and worst imitation possible as I was soon informed by knowledgeable persons-- I noticed a double-bend of the hips.

By that I mean that John McEnroe's hips stuck out, simultaneously, in two different directions: 1) toward the net and 2) toward the side fence.

I subsequently noticed the same phenomenon in many other top players.

Athletically, this is possible for anyone though complex. Psychologically, if you can do something more spare, double-bending hips could be a disaster.

In the following serve, the hips, rotating, go out toward the side fence as shoulders, counter-rotating, go out slightly toward the opposite side fence.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DB1stSRear.mov

Is this not enough body bend, or stringing of a long bow, or winching back on the pulleys of a crossbow, or loading of a blunderbuss or whatever you want to call it?

The hips once started are going to keep going so that what was side bend is now going to be straight forward bend aimed at one's target.

At any time during this process one can send the shoulders forward from the hips as little or as much as one wants, adding weight to the shot.

More simple, this seems to me.

Note: One's front foot could also be flat as hips spinning against front side firmness glide out to one's right. At that point the hips change fulcrum from back foot to front foot and spin in a broader, more forward way, bringing the rear leg around, or perhaps letting it stay almost in place to rise a bit. These serves are oldies but goodies.

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Thanks.

I will, and thanks for the focused detail.

I'll bet old Dennis, who is exactly my age, could do Long Toss. What does one think? 175 feet instead of 350 just to be safe?

http://www.jaegersports.com/blog/category/videos/