A New Year's Serve

[Guest]

Ford Hospital, West Bloomfield, Michigan

Am on a couch here as my partner Hope starts her therapy for a knee replacement. I think she came through the operation well although neither of us slept very soundly. Not much I can do until we get home. A perfect time for me to think up a totally new forehand.

I'm telling you, both readers and malevolent reader, the simplicity meme that drives 98 per cent of tennis players is not a good idea.

"You'll win." Just hit the same old boring shot, Vic Braden said. But if you constantly change your strokes, striving always for something better, you will win too. And with more pleasure.

In rejecting simplicity, I don't mean simplicity of design, which is essential. I mean that if you never try to change or improve your strokes you are a simpleton.

Never mind. I understand that simpletons have fragile egos along with a tendency toward formula. They go only with what makes them win rather than with what would make them win better. One needs more than natural ambition to constantly invent.

Of course there is a price, too, one worth paying, I have always argued.

First one learns the basics but after that can identify if one is curious enough many different ways of hitting the ball.

To build on what has come before (yes, I dare to think my experiments matter or MIGHT matter), I propose today a leading with right hand rather than with opposite hand on racket to initiate one's turn.

Rotating hips next raise the left hand and lower the right all as continued motion.

In terms of cue, the rotating hips put strings on lower inside edge of ball. The arm then rolls to back of ball. The arm then rolls strings to upper outside of ball.

In actuality, I believe none of this happens on the ball but rather before the ball so that strings do get to the outside of the ball.

The shoulders rotation and pulling of the power cord put heft on the ball. And I think it important to note that this is a shot I have not yet hit, a shot I will put to trial soon. But right now (in pantomime without a racket) I like the way the small loop or quick waterwheel melds into hips rotation and then aeronautical banking of the shoulders.

The arm rotates on the ball while pushing out.

Did hitting wrist stay straight? Of course not. If one has mondoed for a long time one will mondo now.

But I ask, since I know there are differences in degree of hand yield at the contact point of different forehands: Is one still mondoeing at contact, i.e., in spite of all the force going forward are strings going backward a little to try to catch the ball before you fling it?

What did you do, whack her in the knee cap cause she said something logical?

[bottle]

I'll whack you, simpleton. The logic will be that you deserve it.

[bottle]

Report

Once play started, I quickly discarded the new shot and therefore was able to do well. Before that the new shot worked in a brief self-feed but turned out to be too deliberative for competition, at least for now. Would it, with persistence, become good? Possibly, but would it be better than what I already had (very symmetrical, rounded, waterwheel-like basic shots) although one really needs to know, if interested in truths, that the waterwheels themselves are wild departure that is only a couple months old?

The simpletons who don't like these posts think they are too much about me. To me, they are about invention-- of anything.

[Guest]

I'll whack you, simpleton. The logic will be that you deserve it.

I'll bet you're incredible at whack a mole..maybe you should start another riveting thread on that.

[bottle]

Churl (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...l%20definition).

[Guest]

Churl (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...l%20definition).

You're going too far. I think you're just a little combative at times.

[bottle]

Only a Thing-Woman can Save your Backhand

Her name is Katie Kata, and she is neither flesh and warm soul or sex object.

To understand her, read this 50-page thesis (http://www.moirian.com/BAlkmelocco.htm), a bizarre recommendation not at all typical of myself, I believe. For how often does a tennis player (you, my reader), read an academic paper? This could be the right time to start.

In my novel THE PURSE MAKER'S CLASP the person most resembling Katie wins a Maine state art contest and then drowns in a collapsing fish factory.

In actuality, she is alive and wrote this brilliant thesis, which is about mythology, science fiction, fairy tales, video games and quest.

Every kata (http://www.dictionary.com/browse/kata) is part of a quest. One breaks something down into discrete parts small enough for one to master. Only later does one put them together whether learning a foreign language or one hand backhand.

Well, the search or quest for a one hand backhand clearly is lifelong even if one has used the one one already has to defeat a hundred other players. And even if one's name is Tommy Haas, Bea Bielik, Justine Henin, Carla Suarez-Navarro, Amelie Mauresmo, Roger Federer, Ivan Lendl, Arthur Ashe, Domenic Thiem, Nicholas Almagro, Stanislas Wawrinka or Richard Gasquet.

The kata that may best work for this particular lifelong quest is worthy of a personalized name. She is not an old bearded man or a gnarled dwarf with huge fists and biceps that one meets out in the woods only when thoroughly lost.

She is quite simply a beaufiful woman who helps.

The kata, "Katie Kata": Bend down with your arms crossed to hold your sides. Straighten whole bod so that arms stretch out in a high Vee.

Part of this exultant stretch is a clenching together of the scapulae or shoulder blades. This final action could (but don't let it) shoot the racket around. Instead, shoot the racket up.

[bottle]

You're going too far. I think you're just a little combative at times.

Well yes for chrissake, I'm a tennis player and a real one.

[bottle]

Throw like a Girl, Churl

Remember, reader, the 50's and early 60's which still were the 50's, when "to throw like a girl" meant to throw from the elbow? An earlier manifestation of the same phenomenon developed in the 30's: the Heil Hitler salute.

You've got to do this, Yevgeny Vassilievitch Bazarov (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...TF-8#q=Bazarov), lest you spend any of your precious ISR on the way up to the ball. You make that mistake, reader, and your shortened ISR will create a downward component in your spin, just what you don't want.

ISR, of course, is Internal Shoulder Rotation, which is a pun in that it has two different meanings. One has to do with direction, the other with anatomy.

So let's look at a shot-putter (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NM5DLcSvRtw). Turn off the sound. See the triceptic extension. No ISR at all until the arm is straight and the ball is ready to leave the hand.

(But if you have the curiosity of a normal human being, turn on the sound now and watch the video again.)

[bottle]

123-- Let's Fall in Love (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhxFKwUyGsA)

My giddiness does not extend this time to a new girlfriend or any other living creature (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...ie=UTF-8#q=ewe) but rather to a thing, i.e., my new serve.

Tennis serve went wrong pretty much from the outset in adapting its double form, i.e., tossing mechanism with one side of bod; and winding and hitting the ball with the other.

Let's call anything that knits these two functions closer together simple editing, i.e., a more integrated serve.

So it's one two three: One, hips rotate with hitting hand slowly racing ahead of tossing hand on their mutual level path. I'm all for scapular retraction and arch of the back to take racket more easily back during this initial count.

Two. Toss and shoulders wind (one and the same) to take racket down on opposite side of bod.

Three. Fast catch and fling of the ball.

Although I'm busy right now performing the role of "knee replacement coach" as defined by Ford Hospital West Bloomfield, Michigan, I hope to get to an inside court and try this serve out for the first time tomorrow night.

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

[bottle]

Evanescence (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...nce+definition)

Of equal interest to the overall Isner-Johnson match recently fought out in the antipodes was one slo-mo sequence delineating a Stevie Johnson forehand.

This shot was characterized by its great extension. By its contact way out front. By its right-to-left windshield wiper occurrring only after the arm extension. And by the windshield wiper taking place both during and after the contact.

If all of these assertions are true (and I welcome thoughtful challenge) the perpetually confused tennis player may ask, "Could completing arm extension before the wipe be a good idea? Or should both happen at once? Or either of these possibilities at different times?"

My personal conviction, incidentally, is that the minute the tennis player becomes unconfused he becomes an arrogant punk.

[bottle]

Tossing into the Serve

would seem to be the next step in a logical progression of service development well under way.

Previously, one may or may not have been successful in producing toss-into-the-serve component, a good idea as all ideas are good that produce any degree of added integration in classical service design. Those serves however were different form. One sometimes has to learn something all over again.

The Friday night tennis social at Detroit's Eastside indoor tennis facility is the best means for this particular player to measure positive or negative change in stroke design.

Call this weekly event a tennis mixer and you won't learn anything. Call it a tennis social and you might.

I arrived an hour early and started self-feed. Half an hour into it a young kid asked me if I wanted to hit. This is an aspect of self-feed that the retarded bastards who criticize it will not have thought through.

The young dude gets to hit against an old guy advancing weird and zany strokes-- in other words, might learn something, i.e., how better to deal with the unexpected.

The old guy gets to hit with a young dude who hits the cover off the ball.

In actual play, I lost my serve once near the end of the three sets when I was bone tired and the never before tried serve began to seem new.

So the 123 idea was fine but beckons to new improvement. How about including backward shoulders rotation in count one? That puts toss and fast catch in count two.

Everything else in count three.

[bottle]

Tennis: Not Golf on Wheels but Rowing through Air

The contributor WBTC (world's best tennis coach), unable to keep forum members happy enough for the effective conveyance of ideas, was nevertheless truly provocative in everything he had to say.

Central to his vision of the modern game was the notion that the forehands emphasize their rearward component too much.

Translated, could that mean, "Hit out front?" Yes but maybe don't swing through the ball from back to front, too, and don't have huge loops behind one and possibly some other stuff.

Hit too far out front and you lose power, Lendl pointed out. Hit out front and you hit too flat, Wegner felt. In his first book he used diagrams and text to advocate late contact, i.e., contact almost behind one. And Lendl, an excellent golfer, discussed the difference between basic golf and tennis strokes in the first of HIS two books.

Hit a tennis ball with all the linkage in a full golf swing, he opined, and you throw all control out the window forever.

So one might seek other analogies.

The notion I'd like to bring across from rowing (and for all strokes not just forehands) is that of "fast catch," of perfect interaction between one's strings and the ball before one flings it with topspin.

In rowing, aside from the first stroke one takes on a given day, the water is rushing past at the approximate pace of a champion miler in track.

That's not the speed of light but nevertheless is quick enough so that you, if you want to catch up to it without missing water must do something quicker than the human eye.

You lift from both shoulders. Yet do this in a very unconscious way as if using the oar handle to pick a fly from the back of the person in front of you.

Do this with mastery and you turn the water into concrete against which you then can pry (or explode, depending on whether you are following instructions). Do it perfectly and you don't miss an inch, a centimeter or a millimeter.

Perfect interaction between one's blade and the water is one of the many things that rowing through human history has always been about.

To simulate this interaction in tennis employ Roger Federer to hit a forehand from behind you and by your right side so that you can put your own forehand on Roger's forehand as it zips past.

To return to rowing, now, one finds it easier to achieve a firm catch into a headwind. Why? The water is moving more slowly. Eventually, however, one can learn just as firm a catch in a tailwind.

And fast catch is what we want all the time in either sport. But the actuality is that oncoming ball is easier to put a solid stroke on than Roger's ball coming from behind. One uses the oncoming speed. One adds to it one's own.

So how about an exercise where one person tosses a ball from behind, soon to be replaced by a ball machine until the ball machine pops one in the spine? The idea is a reforming of one's tennis stroke design until one learns to hit all solid strokes, then apply this new knowledge to easier oncoming balls. On reconsideration, why not just imagine all of this?

Summary: Devise strokes so efficient that they stop the ball to make it feel like concrete.

[bottle]

Next Step in More Integrated Serve

Steps one and two are out of the way. Step three now gets a bit of modification. As the player (I myself) tosses, he squeezes the two halves of his arm together while performing ESR (external shoulder rotation).

This combined squeezing and counter-rotation of the upper arm is the famous cootie check of Vic Braden. He assumed a small mirror in your palm. And elsewhere while demonstrating said, "This little move will make you famous by next Friday."

So what's so great about the squeeze? It's a squeeze as if against a spring, thus anesthetizing one's countering muscles for faster triceptic extension. To squeeze and then extend may take less time than just to extend.

And what's so great about the ESR, which happens internally within the shoulder? The skittle of the upper arm gets spun one way while trying to spin the other. (Drive bands attached to bony bumps achieve this.)

Again, an example of pre-load.

Does upper arm continue to do ESR as it extends from the elbow? Perhaps from the racket momentum already started. But any muscular effort other than triceptic extension will slow things down.

[bottle]

In this Particular Service Development Program

How long can you hold a mostly wound up pose before you toss?

An hour, a week, a year. The pose is "mostly wound up" in that hips have wound, then shoulders have wound, but upper arm (humerus) has not yet wound. Or "twisted." Or "pre-loaded," the term that implies the build-up of conflict or spring one wants.

We have posited, in this design, the toss to be simultaneous with Braden's cootie search, the little palm-down move intended to make us famous by next week.

I held serve this morning after I remembered the sideways component of palm grazing head from right to left. Spring-loading the arm by squeezing the two halves of it together is by itself not enough. There always is unforgiving detail to remember when one is developing a new serve.

Holding in doubles with the new serve was in any case a pleasure. But I want to teach myself something essential; namely, to slow the hips-shoulders sequence, to slow it way down, to slow it and stop it altogether and then wait for a year before the toss.

One won't do this in actual play. One will seek rhythm there in the shoulder winding up toward the sky before one performs the actual toss.

But delay as exercise is in order. There is a place to delay so take it in order to build confidence. How slow can one go through the early phases of this new serve? Very slow.

Eventually in going slow like this one should be able to feel the toss and cootie search as a great gathering of added force.