A New Year's Serve

[tennis_chiro]

With respect to 995 & 996

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/roger_federer_09/rf_backhand/rf_bh_center/rf_bh_center.html?RFBHCenterNeutralStanceCourtLevelFront1.mov

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/roger_federer_09/rf_backhand/rf_bh_center/rf_bh_center.html?RFBHCenterClosedStanceCourtLevelFront1.mov

In both of these clips look carefully at the frames from contact to 2 clicks after contact (in the closed stance clip, we start with just after contact and the frame seen partly above and partly below the net strap; in the square stance moving away, we start with the frame seen completely below the net strap to it being completely above on the next two frames, or even three).

First, run the clip back and forth with the arrow keys and notice how little the shoulders move as the racket face moves through the critical hitting zone and just beyond. Of course, Federer keeps his head still and his eyes at the contact point more than anyone, but the stationary nature of the left shoulder is striking.

Second, observe the static nature of the position of the wrist relative to the forearm. The shaft of a the racket is laid back from the line created by the extended upper arm and forearm as the face of the knuckles of the hitting hand point towards the target. Federer holds this angle and the static nature of the left shoulder until he can just barely see outgoing ball under the racket head (or he could see it if he let his eyes up from the contact point). To exaggerate, I ask my students to put a halo over my head, but it's really just necessary until they can see the ball under the racket head as it goes out.

NOW, go back and run the arrows a couple of clicks further back and further forward and you will see the shoulders turning prior to the contact and after the racket gets past that third click position. But they were completely stationary, at least in terms of rotation, during those three clicks beginning at contact and maybe just barely before. But after that brief contact zone, the static position of the wrist and the shoulders is relaxed. This is a fundamental characteristic of the classic Eastern topspin backhand and I'm sure you would see the same elements in Korda's backhand or Edberg's backhand. It would perhaps be slightly different in someone with more extreme grips like Henin or Mauresmo. If you could find the clip, I think you would see it in Ashe who was famous for his backhand drive as well as his serve and volley. Laver had similar mechanics although he had a little more topspin. It would be interesting to check some Rosewall backhands for the movement of the left shoulder, although the movement up on his sliced backhand would have been slightly less.

Bottle, this is the position and configuration you should be trying to emulate to get your one-handed backhand to work! Not as much spin, but very stable.

don

[bottle]

Lookee, lookee, he's apt to do something different with his rear foot on closed stance shots.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/roger_federer_09/rf_backhand/rf_bh_center/rf_bh_center.html?RFBHCenterClosedStanceCourtLevelFront1.mov

[bottle]

Oh yeah. You can see that by 2009 he'd already dropped the third roll. Why not? It's just a useless flourish.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/roger_federer_09/rf_backhand/rf_bh_center/rf_bh_center.html?RFBHCenterNeutralStanceCourtLevelFront1.mov

[bottle]

Rolls for Breakfast

Some wake up when there's no light outside and write mystery fiction, romance novels and chicklit-- and make a lot of money.

Others wake up at the same hour and think about how the arm ought to roll in a one-hand topspin backhand.

The roll ought to be late, no? Perhaps a better word would be "delayed." Delayed roll was what John McEnroe was advising when he criticized Greg Rusedski for not keeping his elbow in, no?

Delayed roll is what the golf pro in Lakeville, Connecticut was teaching the 16-year-old Bot when he got me to hit 40 consecutive very nice six-irons, no?

Reader, you weren't there, so I apologize for subjecting you to that, but I know how all the sudden, extra power worked, and I think that Don Brosseau or Nick Bollettieri or Bill Smith is advising the same thing whenever he talks about temporarily transforming one's racket butt into a flashlight. The racket goes straight, delaying, then comes around fast.

Some of the most effective coaches of one hand backhands, I believe, are good at discerning whether stored energy is making it through the hand or not.

In golf "the forearms roll" is the way the last instant burst of energy usually is expressed if words are the medium. Whether this roll involves the elbows, too, I cannot say, but think not, although I don't play golf nowadays and life would be simpler if I didn't think about it at all.

Maybe don_budge, a golf-AND-tennis pro, would explain his ideas on roll.

One thing is for sure. don_budge's description of picking up the real Donald Budge's leatherless racket and discovering how heavy it was is probably the best potential insight anyone in this forum will ever receive as to how the famous Budge backhand actually worked.

Rackets that come open or closed to the ball is the first big distinction to make.

One would expect that John McEnroe must be in the open category what with the light continental grip (almost eastern forehand!) that he uses. In fact, however (if videos don't lie) he starts with a very flat wrist and then humps it as he straightens the whole arm, with all of this preceding elbow roll up to the actual hit, in my view.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/johnmcenroe/mac_backhand/mac_backhand.html?MacBHCenterFront.mov

Greg Rusedski: Two backhands from 0:19 . Yes, John McEnroe is right. Greg doesn't keep his elbow in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VEh5J9uMCc

Now Federer. We know he uses an eastern grip. How does he roll his arm? And are there two rolls or one? And where does the rolling stop?

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/rogerfederer/rogerfederer_backhand/rogerfederer_bh_arm_action/rogerfederer_bh_arm_action.html?FedererBHArmActionFront.mov

Answers:

1) He rolls from the forearm as he straightens his arm as he swings his elbow.

2) Three.

3) From contact.

[bottle]

In Response to a Private Post Re # 990

No, I haven't been lucky enough to meet Gauri Nanda, the inventor, but we, or should I say I, own a red Clocky.

When I gave it to my friend Hope for her birthday she almost threw me out of the house. So it is I who leap out of bed to silence Clocky under a bureau somewhere.

Gauri Nanda, who seemed to answer to the name "Gori" in one of her filmed interviews, does not live in Michigan but perhaps once did since her parents used to own a newspaper in Rochester Hills not far from here.

The Clockies and Tockies and other products of the Nanda Home Corporation are manufactured in China, and if you carefully watch all available videos, you will see Gauri on the cover of Ink Magazine and know that she lives in California.

I think she would make a good older girlfriend for Ryan Harrison. She could transform him from a young Telemachus into a viral winner of major tennis tournaments and a real man.

[bottle]

FHV Concept: "Make Lever Longer"

That means you could move the broad U of arm and racket from the shoulder, then freeze into a solid unit, which you could call "a backboard" for a least effort block as first choice.

You just made the effective lever longer-- you took it from arm to arm-and-body.

To stick a volley more you could continue the original arm motion with a bit of shoulders rotation, with your head playing the hub.

To stick still more you could make left shoulder the hub and still see it from corner of your eye after the ball is gone.

Note: If I never articulate this stuff I never try it.

[bottle]

Quit Scrimping on Alternatives?

A famous tennis instructor said, "Serve one way or the other but not both."

This statement rather blew me away with its assurance that there are just two main ways to serve.

But I go with it here.

First challenge then: To distinguish "THE OTHER WAY" from the modern big league serve with which we're all more familiar. I ask too, "Would this OTHER WAY be preferable for someone over 50, particularly if he'd messed with partial versions of it earlier in his life?"

And, "What's the relative availability of helpful information for these basic kinds of serve?"

To my mind, alternative 2 starts with Vic Braden and continues with Jack Broudy, who tried to deepen Braden's figure eights by turning them into Moebius Strips.

In a primarily rotational serve, e.g., in which leg drive has been subordinated, Broudy wanted hips to rotate in a second dimension a bit downward or upward rather than on a purely horizontal plane.

How to do this easily and well has never until now become perfectly clear to me. Perhaps I would have understood sooner had I driven from Winston-Salem to Chapel Hill as Broudy wanted me to do. He was giving a demonstration of his ideas at the University of North Carolina.

Lessons in Latin Dance provide an easy answer. One leg bends as the other straightens. This gives a basic blueprint for a platform stance version of this serve. Eventually of course-- as in any complex athletic move in ANY sport-- subtle distinctions may blur or meld or somewhat overlap.

[bottle]

Clocky Teaches Tennis (Four Stars)

Clocky convinces a band of tennis thugs to drive into New York City and load a neon sign from Times Square onto their flatbed truck.

The sign, intended to replace all tennis teaching pros, is here in Detroit, is lighting up right now, is shaping bright yellowred letters into headlines as we speak.

DON'T EAT MONDO BRAND HOT DOGS. THEY'RE BAD FOR YOUR HEALTH.

REMOVE THE MONDO FROM YOUR FEDERFORES. 15 PER CENT MORE ACCURACY.

FOREHANDS: BEND YOUR WRIST BACK A LITTLE AT A TIME AND BLEND THIS ACTION WITH YOUR BACKSWING.

REVERSE ACTION FOREHANDS: IT'S THE ARM, STUPID, NOT THE WRIST.

ONE ARM BACKHANDS: ROLL RACKET SQUARE EARLY LIKE ROGER FEDERER BUT KEEP ELBOW STABLE THOUGH ROLLING TO FORM A SHARP CORNER AS YOU WHANG YOUR STRINGS AROUND COMPACT AND FAST LIKE ME, CLOCKY.

DANCE STEP TENNIS: START WITH SERVE. ROCK FORWARD BACKWARD FORWARD BACKWARD. EACH TIME YOU SHIFT WEIGHT END UP PERFECTLY BALANCED ON STRAIGHTENED, PROPPING LEG AS OTHER LEG BENDS. TOSS WHILE GOING FORWARD. SHOULDERS DON'T ROTATE HORIZONTALLY DURING THE TOSS BUT HIPS UNDERNEATH THEM DO. IN WHICH DIRECTION? THE DIRECTION OPPOSITE FROM WHAT YOU THINK.

But who is Clocky?

http://clocky.com/videos/

[bottle]

Steffi-Slice-- Go With It!

That's backhand slice where you take the racket back roughly at shoulder level, with shoulders already tilted, and you keep them that way.

On the forward stroke you use your hitting hand as the fulcrum of a see-saw. Which means that the racket tip goes down while your elbow goes up.

Pretty fancy, eh? Yep it is. But more fanciness is about to come all through the huge quickness of this part of the cycle. Not only does the elbow, which has become the next fulcrum, plunge down but the racket tip hurls up.

So how fast does the elbow plunge? And who's on first. What's on second, honk-honk. (Baseball.)

Well, the elbow is not plunging so fast and so far that the net worth of the total arm construction is going down.

It's not just math but a visual problem. You need to stand to the side. (A video camera will do.)

If you look at Steffi-slice from the side, either Steffany's or Roberta's or Wulf's or your correctly imitated version, the racket tip hurls up more than plunging elbow takes it down.

Net worth goes up in other words!

This notion has excited me. Germans and even we Swiss-Germans love the intricacy of such stuff.

But one more bit of fanciness remains. That's the jack-knifing of your body from the gut toward the side fence to keep strings on the ball a slightly extra amount.

One needs talent to hit this shot but not genius.

[bottle]

Pivot Common to Good Tennis and Good Dance

Our dance instructor John Perna made it very clear that the hips movements he briefly showed us were advanced technique for future Latin maneuvers we might or might not do.

I try to understand it all in terms of what one knee alone is doing throughout the whole figure of a box step. I decided to concentrate on my weaker knee for this.

This led to a dramatically new appreciation of when a knee should bend to include contact in tennis. When both knees are always straightening together, is not the player losing control and going wild?

Ivan Lendl threaded his left knee through his right to hit a backhand. Roger Federer doesn’t do that but often sends his bent or bending left knee sideways to counter. The protective lowness of Miloslav Mecir was a characteristic of his game.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/rogerfederer/rogerfederer_backhand/rogerfederer_bh_center/rogerfederer_bh_center.html?FedererBHCenterRear1.mov

Roger’s hips in this video rotate during contact, no? His left knee, countering, also bends, no? As his front leg straightens, no?

Me, I’m trying to apply the new dance idea to serve, to forehand, to backhand just to see what will happen.

Listening to music and moving legs and hips would be more fun than so much figuring out; but, on the other hand I had an hour of free time coming this morning at our club, and Sebastien, the French teaching pro who used to hit with Tsonga was there and made sure I got the best court, the isolated teaching court with a million-ball basket on rollers which he said I could use.

I tried forehands, backhands, serves. All worked pretty well. That’s the trouble with my experiments. I’ve run them so often, just dropping balls for the ground strokes, sometimes I can’t see where it’s all going. And none of the shots was worse than what I was doing a month ago. But were they better? Maybe. It’s possible. Got to give each experiment its proper duration.

I realize most people think such behavior is nuts and you’d do better hitting or playing with someone or working with a ball machine.

No you wouldn’t. The best you can do is a lonely court with no one around and a million balls to hit, just from a stop, if you want to think more than usual and value your own new ideas. Alternatively, you could take a shower but make sure you take it alone.

A bunch of people brainstorming wouldn’t do better, it turns out. The people in large brainstorming groups become even less creative than they already were, according to impeccable studies reported last week in The New Yorker Magazine. Loners do better, came up with twice as many ideas. Reporting later to a group is a different idea that may work surprisingly well due to a building design that leads to numerous and "natural" informal discussions among the people in that structure.

Anyway, such a building, famous at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is known for the large number of significant ideas it has produced.

If you are one of the solitary ones (and I refuse to call us "nerds," the usual practice), you should remain open-minded about each and every experiment. Often that means being very critical about it.

But I can’t see how anything that improves balance: tai chi, yoga, dance classes, etc., can ever be bad for tennis.

Serve perhaps was most interesting. I’ve often been hung up on not turning the shoulders while I tossed, I think. That’s a good sentiment, but keeping the shoulders still doesn’t mean the hips can’t rotate rumba-like underneath.

But I didn’t for the most part like the multiple weight shifts I discussed several posts ago. A few serves incorporating them were interesting, but best were those where I left some of the planned weight shifts out.

[stotty]

I'm amazed by how much words-- particularly words that are searching for something-- can mold or change some future action.

I remember some bloke once said (don't know who but his words have stuck with me forever) "The limits of my language are the limits of my world"...or something like that.

It's very true.

[bottle]

Orientation of Rear Leg

On all of these improved hip turns (and I do suspect before applying any reality tests that old models were lousy, especially the ones where you turned your hips and your legs followed), the front leg had better straighten in line with your foot or you could get hurt.

The bending rear leg, all swivelly, offers more latitude. Let's start by aiming the lowering knee toward a corner post every time-- just to provide some sort of a constant.

Out on a dance floor you need only imagine a tennis court to do the same thing.

[bottle]

Spin-off

I'm amazed by how much words-- particularly words that are searching for something-- can mold or change some future action.

The forehand off of a round conventional loop suggested by # 984 gets arm
far forward even before the step-out.

You're back there cranking on your rear foot. Then the arm goes out-- slowly.
Then you complete your step, crossing a bridge to balance on the other side.

Maybe the arm and leg should go out together slowly-- just to start. Who knows?

In fact, one could be slowly cranking one's arm through running and skips right up to final placement of the propping foot.

Then, I'm thinking, the time has come for a Latin dance step. My design won't be any good if it doesn't work in both spheres-- tennis and dance.

To allow more time for smoothness, I'll divide final neutral hitting step into one third and two thirds.

For one third, slowly drag foot straight out of a train station. For two thirds straighten front leg while bending rear leg.

This is quicker and more economical than putting foot down before you ever turn your hips.

[bottle]

Mercer Beasley, Latin Dance Division

Mercer Beasley, tennis coach of the great Ellsworth Vines, either taught Vines a wee dance move at the end of each closed forehand step-out or learned the same from watching Vines.

Beasley writes in his 1936 book HOW TO PLAY TENNIS, "You turn your hips with the stroke. This is the pivot. It is not the force with which you make the stroke, but the weight of your body coming into the stroke that creates the force..."

"If you are a dancer, you will discover that unconsciously, perhaps, you use the same pivot. Try it for yourself. As the orchestra strikes up you sway to the rhythm of the dance. You do not dance just with your legs. You pivot from the hips, shifting your weight from one foot to the other. The more smoothly and rhythmically you pivot, the better you dance."

[bottle]

Branch Out from Serve to Dance; Apply Dance to Serve

Second side-move in first rumba basic step: Put attention there.

In a quick-quick slow, it's the second quick that needs most discipline.

I'm talking about rotation of the hips formed by simultaneous straightening and bending of legs to consolidate weight and balance on one leg every time.

The second "quick" for a right-hander brings bent leg straight as it sidesteps over to the other which bends at the same time. And this is QUICK! Or did I say that?

But there are no sidesteps in a serve. And in fact, for platform stance, there are no steps at all prior to contact.

There is shift back, shift forward and gathering, and all movement is toward the net except when it goes straight up.

Once your weight starts moving toward the net you never want to retreat which would be temporizing. But you can slow and gather.

I'll stick with my statements about sticking each leg in this experiment. Overall travel toward the net is like an inchworm with a tremendous burst of energy straight upward in between the two inching moves.