A New Year's Serve

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Free and Easy

I'll talk about anybody I please. And certainly have earned a green light to do so from comments you have made. It could be, despite your efforts to intimate otherwise, that I am more of a free and easy guy than you. I detect some brittleness in you, don_budge.

I'm telling you, I didn't mind when you tried to discuss Hope's sexuality, in fact thought it quite funny.

And you cannot say that I ever alluded to your wife's sexuality, although I did link her, since she is a Swede, with the World War II universal Swedish guilt at having the black trains roll through carrying supplies for the decimation of Norway, Denmark and Holland.

But she and her horses and house way out in the woods seem pretty cool and attractive to me.

So I'll now declare that no regular Swede or child or grandchild or great-grandchild of that Swede deserves the World War II blame if one is ready to put it all on the shoulders of the king or prime minister or other high official.

(http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...ok-claims.html)

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Zone-out vs. Burnout

In my case, a zone-out is most apt to occur from making the choice to use only one forehand for the duration of a match.

On a day when this ploy clearly won't work-- most days-- one may as well revel in one's forehand variety. The chance still remains of sudden discovery among the other forehands.

It also is true that a day may come when all of one's strokes work at once.

I just wouldn't count on it.

As for the professional psychologists who supposedly can easily induce the "zone," unless they are professional hypnotists as well, beware! While they are good at identifying characteristics of zoniness, chances are equally good that no one on earth knows less about inspiration. Too much analysis and not enough synthesis at home is my guess.

I recommend reading the poems of Emily Dickinson one by one instead. They are short. One soon will find the poem that works best.

But I have already stated that, with me, choice of forehand has most to do with zoning out. To which I add the experience of zoning out in two different national championship eight-oared regattas, the Henley distance Dad Vail final 1960 and the three-mile IRA the same year on Lake Onondaga, Syracuse. With all 13 crews lined up side by side across those Indian waters. And no wind, which meant that every oar was reflected under the surface. That helped.

But so did our incredible preparation. We went three miles three times on the Potomac against the best of all high school crews. Without ever knowing ahead of time which of the three crews, each covering a mile, was the fast one.

Any time I feel now the way I did in those days, I play tennis well.

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Forehand orchestration as of today:

1) Bottlebam: Turn back to opponents holding racket close, slight separation of elbows then, and forward swing from shoulders then hips.

2) Topspin: Same squeezed backswing but with transitioning arm extension almost straight down followed by scissoring to find ball as hips fire followed by shoulders with arm extension and roll followed by bending of arm again in the follow through.

3) Budgebam: Based on film of the younger Budge in his hayday rather than that in middle-age. Two hands to point-across to take racket back to outside. A brief arm fall abetted by wrist turning downward to compensate for natural weakness of arms being out so far.

4) McEnrueful: Down and up backswing followed by forward hips rotation to lower arm and racket in a core-connected way. Aeronautical banking of shoulders then gives ball a good ride. Composite rather than strong eastern grip is employed.

5) Backspin Sidespin Combination: Backswing and grip are same as for The McEnrueful, but forward rotatiing hips protrude more sideways so that shoulders cantilever as arm straightens to right as well. Aeronautical banking picks up again but in a downward direction. While thus divebombing you pull the arm across.

5) has been revised. Please see the newer post entitled "Pleasing Revision."

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Pleasing Revision

I don't like the forehand form of backspin-sidespin I have proposed, am worried about balance and trying for the silliness of too much speed.

Reader, go to page 107 of RACKET WORK by John M. Barnaby if you can be so lucky as to find a copy.

If using the down and up backswing of a McEnrueful, take racket up to your right side rather than behind you.

Step directly at your target with prop foot and final step both. This will add still more weight to the opening of shoulders and bowing from Barnaby's very little amount of turning back in the first place. It also gets you faster to the net with still another step, the walk through (the ball).

The arm work is a whole different system at right angles to the first. It comes from far to the side in both forehand and backhand slice to cut the ball with a high number of revolutions per second.

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Zone-out vs. Burnout
Topspin: Same squeezed backswing but with transitioning arm extension almost straight down followed by scissoring to find ball as hips fire followed by shoulders with arm extension and roll followed by bending of arm again in the follow through.

This shot was pretty good last night but pretty good is not enough.

The mechanics seem in place but the overall concept needs to be tweaked.

I have always hated big, looping forehands that then seem to stop when racket has come down to the court so that all significant motion has to start up all over again.

A brief pause or slowdown near top of the loop has always made more sense.

But now because my name is John Escher I eschew all that.

No longer enough to parrot all the instructors who cry, "Get the racket back!"

The idea for experimentation today is "Get the racket back and down in one swell foop."

For if there is going to be a pause or "wait" in a forehand as in the trusted formula "hurry-then-wait" for the shot, it can only be in one place no matter where in the tract you personally think, reader, that slowdown ought to be.

So I want to get squeezed racket back superquick primarily with bod but with the superquickness continued into all arm as I assume the Atlanta Falcons logo of one wing out and the other down.

Rhythm then in a three-count forehand is 1) back and down, 2) slow scissor, 3) cream the ball.

Everything described is willpower.

If there is to be magic in the shot, however, I suspect it will come from a weird combination of power and finesse.

The hips fire = power. The arm scissors = finesse. These two actions are simultaneous.

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The Universal Attitude of ALL people in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Black and White, about Self-Feed in Rouge River Park, which I have done now for Six Months

"You will be robbed and murdered."

Philosophically speaking, I'll readily admit, this could happen in my last two weeks of living here.

If one person comes, I'll brain him the way Miss Marple would with a forehand chop as he stabs me.

The chop is a good stroke, all about management of lower edge. Used it to kill a rat in Winston-Salem. The racket was an old one and the rat was a big one. Basement apartment, don't you know.

If it's ten persons I shall whimper and mercifully die while Donald Trump was still the president.

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Report

(Background or weather: too cold for murderers)

Hit nothing but forehands, alternating topspin and flat.

Went for precisely uniform duration of each shot although I didn't bring a teaching assistant along with a Heuer stopwatch.

Uniform duration meant that the breaststroke between backward and forward bod movement in the flat stroke took the exact same amount of time as scissoring of the arm in the topspin version.

The most significant difference between the two strokes then became their respective length of tract.

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Refinement of One's Approach Shot Down the Line

I don't play singles any more but am sure my refined approach shots will come in handy one way or another in doubles.

In the decades when I did play singles I probably thought these approach shots of mine were pretty good.

It could be though that they became too quick with not enough spin.

John M. Barnaby, author of the collector's item RACKET WORK: THE KEY TO TENNIS, seems absolute best on this subject.

His view aligns with Pancho Segura's in his book CHAMPIONSHIP STRATEGY. Both men advocate sidespin for soundness of approach down the line.

Any player who just came in farther than usual should like seeing his heavy ball stay low and deep yet break to the outside = a weighty sidespun-backspun combo.

The books of Barnaby teach straight arm preparation far to the side and not back at all. The farther the racket to the side, he points out, the better to rasp across the ball.

Yet when it comes time for Barnaby to teach closely related forehand chop, he starts with a bit of bend in the arm.

From which I infer that a player who straightens his arm during the forward portion of any backhand needn't necessarily abandon that method. And that if this works on backhands and forehand chop it could work on forehand sidespin as well.

Pulling across from straight arm preparation however = more feel; while pulling across from a chopped beginning = more mechanical. Pulling with arm while pushing in linear fashion while stepping through/around = a new word supplied by John M. Barnaby: you "PLUSH" the ball.

All written tennis instruction is of course obscure. Just as all oral tennis instruction is woefully inadequate.

One can come back to a favored writer like Barnaby once every ten years and still miss something vital.

Not his fault. He makes tennis abundantly clear. The villain is one's own denseness, recalcitrance and feeble power of observation.

In re-reading any great writer on the technique of anything, there always will be a truth right in front of you that you never have been able to grasp.

This time I have decided to call it "banjo shoulders," having just rejected guitar, ukelele and mandolin.

One doesn't turn one's banjo away from the audience but rather lets them see it.

Conversely, one doesn't let an opponent see one's racket if one knows how to turn one's back on him. That would be for a concealed drive.

An approach shot is intrinsically opposite although it contains its own concealed likely surprise of an excellent crosscourt dropshot.

The shoulders are turned back only a little = Banjo Preparation.

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Just because Voltaire took a couple of easy potshots at scientists doesn't mean that the A-bomb didn't explode.

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Pulverizing Every Link in the Dreadful K-Chain

One can see, in carefully studying the photo sequences of Tom Okker in the old book MASTERING YOUR TENNIS STROKES, that when he starts his early shoulders (in his topspin forehand), they pull his hips around just a bit at the same time.

I don't have a scanner, so you will have to take my word for it. The other thing they do is push those hips forward. Which lowers the right shoulder. When you take all this together, you see that Okker's early shoulders rotate in a skewed fashion to take his racket down.

Just as it comes up. Through arm scissoring in the plan I'm now out to institute. Because I want to get something out of all of this for myself.

The emerging image is of two canceling motions creating low, level racket travel.

One thinks of the chair lift analogy of teaching pro Bill Wright in his old book AEROBIC TENNIS.

A skier waits. The chair comes at him level and then takes him up in the air.

I'm not sure I have ever consciously sought out this phenomenon but through various designs the thing keeps happening.

And just as shoulders can pull hips around while pushing them forward, hips can then pull shoulders, i.e., cause the aeronautical banking (Welby Van Horn's term) I'm always writing about. There's not MUCH aeronautical banking; the shoulders just return to level, but the impetus for this can come from lower than the transverse stomach muscles which already fired.

It can come from the hips.

Whether you follow me or not, reader, I'm implementing two forehands of equal duration, flat and topspin. I love to alternate them in self-feed, hitting one then the other over and over again. They both start their forward motion with shoulders rotation that violates the nasty, limiting religion of over-interpreted kinetic chain, something I detest almost as much as Donald Trump.

Kinetic chain exists, sure, but usually after a lot of other things have happened. But overly conceptual persons tend to think the "other things" should follow the kinetic chain scenario as well.

ADDENDUM: Don Budge flat forehand: shoulders then hips. Ellsworth Vines flat forehand: shoulders then hips. Mercer Beasley flat forehand: shoulders then hips. Tom Okker flat and topspin forehands both: shoulders then hips.

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Short to Long

A radial swing from a short lever turning into a longer lever is one of the basic ways of accelerating the racket head according to Dr. Jiri Holm of Czech.

(One of my favorite Czechs, Veronika Larson of San Francisco, refers to her native country as "Czech." She has led me to believe that most Czechs use that same form. What seemingly ought to be a modifier becomes a proper noun and full country. Much snappier than "Czech Republic," it seems to me.)

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Runwayitis

A server with limited rotational possibility from his internal shoulder does everything in his power to lengthen his runway up to the ball.

This becomes a self-defeating proposition in that if he puts all straightness of runway under the ball he will put no straightness of runway-- not even two centimeters-- above the ball.

Even very flexible, wonderful servers have to be careful to place a bit of runway above the ball. This is a mental concept. Some players envision a ghost ball above where the real ball will be, and put their effort into scraping upward on that.

The reason for such gymnastics of the imagination is that the racket changes direction immediately after it contacts the ball.

And any server who jumps the gun and changes direction before or even during the ball spoils the serve.

The phrase "longest possible runway," though very important for purpose of achieving maximum acceleration, could be modified to "longest possible runway with just a bit of that runway extending up from the ball."

The inflexible server-- the "rotorded" server, I like to call him-- is like any server thus apt to hit one of Pam Shriver's "decels," a serve that didn't keep accelerating as it contacted the ball.

The inflexible server, having obsessed too much about a longer runway, thus fails to get full reward out of the limited range that he does have.

Vic Braden: "You use what you got."

John M. Barnaby: "Spin is how you come off of the ball."

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Minimal Separation for a Flat Forehand

I'm talking about the "breaststroke" part of a high, in close backswing.

The shoulders have turned. The hips have turned. The outside foot has turned. Bod will only start turning again after the "breaststroke."

Which can be very small, just a mild separation of the elbows if one wants, more of a "suggestion" of the breaststroke if you please.

Why should long straightening of the opposite arm matter in a double-bend forehand? Better to keep both arms doing a similar thing.

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Shortening the Frame

The grand expression "shortening the frame" can be extremely useful for the development of more consistent topspin in one's ground strokes.

Do you even care, reader, who came up with those words? He doesn't care about attribution, so why should you? He thinks all tennis ideas should live in a special canvas bag for free pulling out by any player at any time. Who cares who said something if that something, coming from anyone or anywhere, will help you teach or play?

A frame is something that goes around a painting. A narrow frame squeezes the contents of the painting. That is exactly what you want if you seek more topspin and can think of yourself as a painting.

The Atlanta Falcons logo we have discussed-- one wing out, one straight down-- shortens rear end of the frame.

The higher follow through that Tom Okker advocates for more topspin than in a flat shot (he teaches both) shortens the front end of the imaginary frame as well.

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A Reward for Indecision

The forehand specialist who never could decide between straight-armed and double-bend shots-- oscillated back and forth between them all through his silly tennis life-- can finally reward himself by orchestrating them together.

Just as a shallow-shouldered crossed approach shot and crosscourt dropshot can be thought of as single concept by a right-handed player in the deuce court, so can straight topspin and straight-arm-turning-into-bent-arm topspin balance one another.

In other words we can take any two shots that naturally complement each other in tennis and call this a devious and well-conceived plot.

Straight-arm for down the line, bent arm for crosscourt.

Try the opposite conformation too: straight arm for crosscourt, straight-to-bent for down the line.

See which works best, is more powerful, fools better.

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De-fanged and Re-fanged Slice for the Rotorded Server

The rotorded server-- he or she with limited rotational possibility in their internal shoulder-- can't hit the kind of kick they desired, which in my case and era would be that of the doubles specialist Jared Palmer.

Bad enough. But the same rotorded server now spoils his potential for powerful slice as well through taking to heart a certain tip he ought to ignore.

Braden and others have advised any player who wants to hit more spin to keep his palm like Palmer parallel to the side of his head as it passes his ear.

A great thought for many but not for that subset of servers struggling just to achieve another inch or two of racket tip lowness.

Do Bill Tilden or Pancho Gonzalez or a dozen early tennis writers-- and who should care which unless doing a tennis history research project-- say anything about keeping Palmer-type palm in mind? I don't think so.

To hit a slice serve, they say, hit your regular flat shot only cant it a bit to the right so it crosses the ball more from left to right.

Or right to left for the lefty. Mario Puzo's literary agent, the lefty Sterling Lord, wrote a fine book called SINISTER TENNIS, all about and for lefties but wasn't so far out of it that he couldn't give good advice for righties too.

For the righty, then, he advised a toss six inches more out front and six inches more to the right.

And Tilden, I'm pretty sure, just said to hit more to the right. (Off of the exact same toss then?) Hit your flrst serve in other words but on a trajectory more to the right.

Pretty simple? And if one can accept that much simplicity, one can still bend the wrist back, not so that it faces one's ear like Jared Palmer, but so that it faces the sky.

This gains another few crucial inches of racket tip lowness.