A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Bizarre Weight Shifts Seemingly Impossible Because So Numerous

Re rumba serve: Hip turns are determined by simultaneous straightening and bending of the two legs.

Yes, one leg bends, the other straightens as hands go down and weight shifts to rear foot. Hips turn back but shoulders don't-- use Latin dance model.

As weight shifts to front foot (essential ingredient of toss), rumba up on straight leg but keep shoulders in place. Some hackers complain that they don't get toss high enough in a third set. With this instruction, they can screw some leg into the toss all of the time.

Turn weight (clockwise for a right-handed player) back on rear foot but let shoulders go with the hips this time.

Press middle of archer's bow forward. This loads front foot again.

Serve.

To summarize: Weight shift forward, weight shift backward, weight shift forward, weight shift backward, weight shift forward-- a total of five weight shifts before the serve. What abbreviates all but the last is keeping your head over your feet.

Think you (I) will be doing this? Not the point, which is exploration. Have got to try it.

The serve itself may add a sixth rumba step depending on whether you can bend rear leg one more time before it too extends.

[bottle]

Service Reiteration

If you didn’t notice (or perhaps don’t care—I won’t blame you since maybe you are impatient to play tennis), I like to try different things. The elements are frequently the same as in previous posts but in altered arrangement.

Racket can fall down and up to a mirror image of itself including original bend in the arm at address. How can racket most easily do this? Through combination with an extremely slow turn of the knees all through the drop-and-lift or with delayed turn of the knees that only occurs after the toss?

And if that second idea is the best way to go, can’t we put into effect another delay, of body bend? And then a third delay, of scapular retraction which we’ll have occur only as part of the body spiral upward? Such elaborateness of sequence which we’d be wise to shun in other tennis strokes can occur with impunity during the service set-piece each of us has maybe through tossing higher?

One of the good exercises we tried combined a catching of the toss with slow attainment of right angle in the arm. But we’re actually serving now. Everything will be a bit different. Still, we use this exercise idea as an organization tool. If we know approximately where we’re going, we can better figure out what should happen first.

Down together up together then (with knees bending naturally in tandem with the racket falling down). But how far back (i.e., around) does racket get at top of this motion if we're truly resolved to stay minimalist and relaxed? Is arm and racket anywhere near replicating the starting position? Hardly. What HAS OCCURRED is that weight shifted from front foot to rear foot to both feet all as part of the toss.

Now the knees can turn slightly backward then stop turning and the whole body form a bow. That’s two distinct actions held together by slow bending of the arm that embraces them.

How high should the elbow be at this point? At the height that will—after body “turns inside out”— A) place elbow slightly BELOW line of the two shoulders and B) feel comfortable in producing this solid-with-maximum-leverage biomechanical scheme.

Anyone of a mind to doubt or challenge these ideas should see the following article provided in this forum by Doug Eng, http://www.chrisoleary.com/projects/...Mechanics.html , and perhaps any of my own posts where I discuss getting spine of scapula lined up with clavicle (and with both forming a yoke that comes together to lead into and line up with upper arm).

Finally, I can’t help playing with the Latin dance idea that has me swinging my hips all over the house. One leg straightens as the other bends. Do that for easy turn of the hips in either direction.

[bottle]

Turning the Corner Abruptly while STILL Swinging Inside Out

Re one hand backhand: The title here pretty much says what I wish to accomplish today.

[bottle]

"Summing"-- an Interesting Verb in Tennis

Rather than name the tennis personages who have spoken of "getting the slack out of" one hand backhands, I simply invoke the idea and then suggest that there must be alternate ways of doing this other than moving the upper body away from still racket until one feels a tug in the shoulder.

Such a tug could come from backward moving momentum in the racket, too, no? And arm could be either bent or straight and still be taut.

In my previous experiments with "fanned" topspin backhands (not the hardest hit balls possible), my efforts to use angular momentum primarily from the hips to straighten the arm passively did not work quite right until I added a bit of forward elbow travel to the equation.

I "summed" a couple of forces in other words until I got more tension to work with in transition to roll of the straightened arm.

So why not-- for a flatter shot-- do some "summing" in the opposite direction as well? Since the backhand progression I've been exploring contains a moment where rear shoulder goes up why not ship arm backward a bit at the same time?

If body then starts forward while racket is still gliding backward, one may achieve the objective of removing slack, no?

But will this method work and be controllable? Absolutely, at least until the idea proceeds from theory to practice. In theory, everything could be too perfect, always. But maybe reality is not so different from theory in this particular case-- experiments are on the way.

Send arm and body forces summing in one direction and then summing in the opposite direction to see what happens.

[bottle]

Go Get the Ball!

Vic Seixas, the last Wimbledon singles champion to have serious issues with his backhand, preached in his autohagiography that you (a tennis player) should bring the racket tip around to the ball a little at a time.

I in these posts recently started to make the same mistake again until Stotty in Great Britain went out of his country to correct me.

So, following the instruction of post # 976 for “hit-through-more” backhands, bring racket open to ball—just to where at the last instant you will roll the strings square.

But you have to learn some drill before you can master this shot, especially if you ever have had an impure thought. And you need to get your juices flowing, especially the goopy one called myelin, a fatty, grey-white substance manufactured in two contrasting bailiwicks in the human body—one in your central nervous system (CNS) which is your brain and spine, the other in your peripheral nervous system (PNS) which is your arms and legs.

Nobody other than a nerve doctor must absolutely know all of that, but the subject will be a lot of fun if you get to look through an electron microscope and see in the PNS one little volcano per sausage link spouting on the side as in the painting of an asteroid in LE PETIT PRINCE par Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

Life is short, so you want to induce this fresh supply of oligodendrocyte produced myelin in CNS and lava-like myelin in PNS to coat your neuronal pathways very soon. You want every nerve impulse to rattle down its long track up to a hundred times faster than before.

You wouldn’t want to go to all that trouble to insulate an incorrect move.

So don’t roll at first. Simply hit the ball over the opposite fence and tell your golden retriever please to live up to his name.

[bottle]

Getting Ready to Rumba

We learned the basic rumba step, but I don't care about that.

To do Latin dances, go forward:
left right
left right
left right
left right.

Translate those eight commands to
forehand backhand
forehand backhand
forehand backhand
forehand backhand.

Now do the same thing backward, starting with the right foot.
right left
right left
right left
right left.

Translate those eight words to
backhand forehand
backhand forehand
backhand forehand
backhand forehand.

Now go sideways (quick-quick) twice as fast:
right left
right left
right left
right left

BH FH
BH FH
BH FH
BH FH

Do this all over the house, reversing direction of course.

Are we going to play tennis this way? No need to be in a stupido hurry. Me, I'm just trying to dance properly. After I've mastered a bit of this stuff through the use of tennis, I'll turn around and apply what I've learned back to tennis somehow.

Each of these steps (every single one!) is a particular kind of hips turn. The leg that's moving straightens. The leg that stays put bends.

[bottle]

Re: Flattened One Hander Off of Korda Like Preparation

I'm thinking, with 1-8 grip, the racket tip is quite far around-- more around than up. And the racket at that point-- when rear shoulder has just risen-- is therefore parallel to court and inviting a long, pure, horizontal bonk from the butt rim.

The best cue then may be to pull hard but not jerk on that rim with whatever the muscles that react to the command.

Arm will be straight for last instant roll.

No farther roll after contact.

Triceps definitely will be part of what straightens arm. But centrifugation of passive arm definitely works better for the alternate "fanned" shot, which produces light but effective topspin, very good, say, to lift the ball high and then to bounce it high.

[bottle]

Serve to Try

Down together up together.

Body turn backward has concluded by the time that the free-falling racket is in transition to coming up.

Now there's toss and lift.

With arm bent at 85 degrees, you'd think you're ready for the forward action but you're not. There's one more thing to do. And that is scapular retraction in two related directions: 1) around and 2) down.

Are you gouging backward with your elbow to do this? Yes. Are you starting to clench the two halves of the arm together so as to start a throw? Yes.

Is LATENESS of "arching of the back" advisable? Yes, according to Chris Lewit in his TENNIS TECHNIQUE BIBLE: VOLUME ONE. Will there be any pause between scapular retraction and scapular adduction?

Don't think so.

Will scapular adduction form the low loop behind the back that everyone should want, i.e., help push the racket out to the hitting side?

Yes.

[bottle]

I've loved this Tennis Player clip for a long time and think there's more of a free will or intentional base to a shot like this than is generally recognized.

By that I mean that coming to the ball closed like Federer or Ivan Lendl is not inherently better or even easier than coming to it open like Gene Mayer or what we see here.

That idea isn't mine but Ivan Lendl's in the book that he collaborated on with Gene Scott. (Lendl only made two books at the peak of his career, and it wasn't HITTING HOT so it's the other one.)

I subscribe to your idea that Don Budge closes the racket face late and then brushes up.

If you stop the video immediately after contact, Don Budge doesn't seem to be continuing the roll. The roll happened before or at the ball or both.

[stotty]

Re 971: One can hit this flatter shot softer and closer to the body if one rolls more. The extreme would be a bowling motion of the arm with complete dependency on roll to bring the racket around to outer edge of the ball.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DBBHFront3.mov

The opposite extreme, much more powerful, strikes the ball at hearty separation out to side as in more typical Don Budge backhands.

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

Within this range, always roll from the elbow, not from the hand, to take the racket head even with the ball or lower.

A more technical explanation would say you're rolling from the shoulder and you'd better not forget it. Forget it. Go with the more kinesthetic not to mention copacetic, verbal choice.

Note: I include these clips because I think they illustrate generally, not specifically, what I'm getting at. In the soft backhand, Don Budge does not roll to end of the followthrough as I'm preaching. I'm well aware of that. And his grip is different, his thumb partially up the back, etc. And his racket is heavier. And he's Don Budge. And I'm not.

Really lovely that second clip of Don Budge's backhand. His racket face looks to be laying open right up until contact with the ball, yet he manages to hit over it to produce what looks like a slight roll of topspin. So the racket face is open but he still manages to brush up? What's going on there? I guess the racket face must just manage to get on edge a fraction of a second before contacting the ball? Wonderful clip...it really is.

[bottle]

Re 971: One can hit this flatter shot softer and closer to the body if one rolls more. The extreme would be a bowling motion of the arm with complete dependency on roll to bring the racket around to outer edge of the ball.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DBBHFront3.mov

The opposite extreme, much more powerful, strikes the ball at hearty separation out to side as in more typical Don Budge backhands.

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

Within this range, always roll from the elbow, not from the hand, to take the racket head even with the ball or lower.

A more technical explanation would say you're rolling from the shoulder and you'd better not forget it. Forget it. Go with the more kinesthetic not to mention copacetic, verbal choice.

Note: I include these clips because I think they illustrate generally, not specifically, what I'm getting at. In the soft backhand, Don Budge does not roll to end of the followthrough as I'm preaching. I'm well aware of that. And his grip is different, his thumb partially up the back, etc. And his racket is heavier. And he's Don Budge. And I'm not.

[bottle]

Ratatouille Forever!

I'll save the ratatouille name for my newest hit-through backhand, which is complicated enough to qualify either as ratatouille dish or ratty shot.

Whatever one calls it, it's a good shot for a tall person, whose arm, left undisturbed, maybe doesn't get around as succinctly as that of a midget.

You add a bit of constant roll to overall swing of your arm. In so doing you edit the shot down to bring it under control.

A slow roll is more like continual adjustment of pitch than part of a separate
effect producing lift as in the fanned version.

[bottle]

A Little Alteration for a Cold Morning

The ratatouille backhand, post # 968, was too complicated. But a one-way roll which spreads that roll out to the max remains a solid shot (and therefore good contrast to the airier fanned topspin described earlier).

In this newest conception, both shots-- topspin with hit-through component and flat with top-spin component-- can start with sensuous connection of forearm to court (see the earlier explanation that alludes to the pole, ski and electrified roof of a bumper car).

In either shot rear shoulder goes up to conclude the backswing, and since these are two-part not three-part swings, in the flatter version the forward roll can start coincident with the various body rolls (about three of them) and not conclude till end of the followthrough.

This version wouldn't work if arm couldn't straighten while it rolls, and continue to roll after it's straightened, but it can.

[bottle]

A NEW YEAR'S SERVE Goes Viral on Public Access

I'm no longer a virgin. I've been on television. I took A NEW YEAR'S SERVE as a third of the "Sport, Fiction and Insane War Trilogy" down to the huge Grosse Pointe War Memorial on the banks of Lake St. Clair here in southeastern Michigan.

John Prost, the amazingly professional host of The John Prost Show, didn't want to talk about the time Katharine Hepburn and I beat her brother and my brother in tennis. Nor did he want to hear my carefully prepared discussion of the novel MURDER IN GROSSE POINTE by the anonymous author Andrew Hartwood. (Andy could be anyone. John Prost? John Escher?) In fact, I'd say John Prost was more interested in insane war than tennis or fiction, but all three topics received their informal discussion due.

"So, of the 27 jobs you've had," the host asked, "which did you like most?"

"Crew coach," I said, explaining that when you teach English and you permit yourself excitement about a book, your students say to themselves, "Oh, Mr. Escher is enthusiastic about that book," but this isn't enough, you want the students themselves to get interested, but when you teach tennis or rowing, thoughts translate immediately to legs, back, arms and hands, which suggests to me a deeper level of effective instruction.

Oh well, I forgot to recite the titles of my three books. But the cute operator of the three television cameras is going to flash the url of my website up on the screen. I know I know, this url is too long for anyone to copy down, but Google spat back all of my earlier suggestions:

http://bottle-booksandstuffbyjohnescher.blogspot.com/

[bottle]

The Julia Childs Ratatouille Drive Backhand

Ingredients:

. Steffi-slice tilt of shoulders
. Steffi-slice double roll of arm during forward part of stroke (sometimes used by Ken in Ken-slice as well)
. 1,8 grip
. Muscular straightening of arm during second half of the double-roll
. Early departure of elbow from Petr Korda railroad station (slow elbow leaves simultaneous with backward roll)
. This backward roll can be continuation or perhaps just reinforcement of spillover energy from flying grip change applying slight pressure downward from palm.

Instruction:

Roll arm backward from bent elbow rather than from hand. Once arm is straight, roll racket at moderate speed to end of followthrough.

I haven't tried this shot yet. Bon appétit !