A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Waterfall Variation, Chipped Return of Kick Serve

Dispense with loop. Dispense with rabbit punch and passive elbow. Take racket straight up in front of you very high. The strings will look as if they are about to hit the ball very deep to the opponent's backhand corner.

Use gravity but assist it in five muscular ways: 1) Slightly compress knees, 2) Gently extend arm from the elbow, 3) Gently extend wrist, 4) Slightly jack-knife
from hips to add a little forward weight, 5) Pivot hips so left foot (on dead leg) slides forward and racket changes direction producing the short angle cross-court you want.

Note: A chip is a chop-- there's no difference. This post is response to, admiration of, and hope for perfect emulation of John M. Barnaby's instructions and the two line illustrations by George Janes at page 82 of GROUND STROKES IN MATCH PLAY, USTA Instructional Series, Doubleday, 1978.

[bottle]

New Backhand and Service Variations

Most persons thinking about tennis technique are either too detailed or not detailed enough. By crossing both lines all the time, I'm ever hopeful of finding the most productive balance between the two, which will happen, occasionally, through persistence (which can happen all the time) and inspiration (which can't happen all the time, but you can up the frequency by staying relaxed and open to anything).

Short One Hand Backhand

Straightening the arm early and to the side and then rolling wrist straight as upper body gets taller opens a new variation. This back-swing has been so short-- almost non-existent-- that one can hit the shot from start to finish with rabbit punch only.

If one takes the straight arm back just a bit farther-- though to the side and therefore still very short-- one can determine to hit the ball at the cusp between end of rabbit punch and beginning of an arm rip sideways. The rabbit punch now becomes very good at putting racket on outside of the ball. There are big differences among hitting ball at beginning, middle, or end of the rabbit punch.

Chopping a Kick Serve

Pancho Gonzalez is said to have done this: i.e., he'd wait for the ball to bounce high on purpose, then serve it back cross-court on an incredible short angle just over the net. Was this really a serve as I just suggested or a chop or a drop-shot? All three: a chop-drop.

I've only pulled this off three or four times in my life and all in one tournament match, which I lost in a tie-break at the end of the third set because I couldn't master this essential shot (one could call it a "chip"), and with two certified teaching professionals watching and continuously yelling to my opponent: "The kick, Dad. Don't use anything else!"

The best explanation I can find, both of essential technique and intrinsic difficulty, is "high backhand" on page 113 of the collector's book RACKET WORK: THE KEY TO TENNIS by John M. Barnaby or on page 73 of ADVANTAGE TENNIS or on page 82 of GROUND STROKES IN MATCH PLAY by the same author. Barnaby's explanations are elaborate, beautiful, complex, intriguing and tantalizing, just like this special shot. A version in which I use rabbit punch to straighten passive arm is belatedly beginning to work, although I haven't seen a good kick serve yet so can't know for sure.

This shot, I would have to say, has taken the longest time of them all to mature: about 30 years. Maybe somebody can now take it from me in five minutes.

So what's the deal? Well, from normal slice preparation with bent arm send barrel butt up to the outside a little and forward but loop it back right and down so it-- the barrel butt-- points down now. Time to review. All of the preceding must be done in slow but rhythmic fashion. And it's all an arm rainbow with elbow bent throughout. Add this: Keep your head (i.e., the human head) perfectly still as racket butt goes up comfortably higher than where the ball will be. But lean backward to add a smidgen of body heft to the downward travel. And just as strings reach the ball clench your shoulder-blades together (ze rabbit punch). After that, good luck.

Barnaby's version-- the one I can't do-- employs longitudinal rather than lateral body muscles. He bows deeply from the hips, which then slides his
left leg forward toward the net as natural consequence.

Perfect downward chop is what you see from back of ball (l) . But this is what the same shot would look like from the left side if you could stand in two places at once (\) . You can't, so you have to visualize, and with the condition that the bottom of the slanting line is farther toward the net than the top.

Slice Serves Out Wide in Deuce Court

Alternative one goal: sidespin, spiralspin and topspin. Ball image:
(\) ( ) . Re-draw slant in space to right so top of line ends at TDC (top dead center). Beginning of slant is more than halfway up the right parenthesis. The rise is less than in the ball to the left. You take a shallow rising piece of upper right quadrant in other words. And toss toward net post. And extend arm with triceps along baseline and crack wrist straight in same direction then twist elbow and forearm both to create the racket path you illustrated in space to right. By the time you've done this the strings are even with net post, which is still way back! FYI, I am 6' 4" tall.

Alternative two goal: sidespin, spiralspin and topspin. Ball image:
(l) ( ) . The illustration on the left is just to get you going. Re-draw the vertical line closer to the right parenthesis. This is what you can see. But imagine same shot as seen from right side. Ought to look like this (/). In other aspects this shot is same as the first. But this time you twist elbow and forearm as you extend from elbow, using triceps muscle again. The wrist is now free for a full swipe.

Note: Even when you fail to achieve one of the three spins, these hard serves can be very good. Use the alternative that will win the point.

[rosheem]

Once you've succeeded in pretty fully saying something, however, you may be ready to move in a new direction. If so, don't be shocked if the new idea obliterates everything you thought you knew. A capacity and tolerance and even taste for uncertainty requires Richard P. Feynman type guts.

I know exactly what you mean. When I look back at some of the old messages I've written to myself, I have to laugh. Some have subjects like, "I'VE DISCOVERED THE KEYS TO THE TENNIS UNIVERSE."

New ideas are always obliterating everything I thought I knew.

[bottle]

Rosheem-- Sounds like you're playing at a pretty high level for someone who hasn't been at the game for long. That's ENTIRELY if rarely possible. I saw it before and grabbed the guy as my doubles partner before anyone else realized how good he was.

And I've long been interested in volleyball serve compared to tennis serve. My ex played volleyball on an undefeated joint Brown-Rhode Island School of Design mixed gender team that competed against other colleges and universities. Though not particularly big, she was known for her awesome, idiosyncratic, no brain serve (quite a trick when you consider that she had a LOT of brains).

When she turned to tennis, she just hit first serves. For that reason the area pros rated her at 3.0 . After she tore up the northwestern Virginia leagues, however, the ladies of Middleburg (the snobby horse and tennis place) formally complained and she was re-rated at 4.5 .

She was much too busy with her painting and natural science illustration ever to work on her tennis other than an occasional hit with me. "Bot is beating his wife," Jim Kacian, the club pro, used to say. Mostly, he was right. But she saw the court like a canvas-- you could ask the college varsity player she defeated in one of her open championships in two different towns-- for which she won a free head heavy white Prince racket she didn't like.

She would laugh at your super articulations just as she laughed at mine. When I made some great discovery she would say, "Oh yeah, I think that's what I've been doing all along."

That said, I do believe in the power of tennis articulation, e.g., your attempts to communicate "feel" or your great description of a first serve. And to answer your specific question, one who plays enough has probably felt everything. It's doubtful, though, that any two players systematize exactly the same service patterns. Once you've succeeded in pretty fully saying something, however, you may be ready to move in a new direction. If so, don't be shocked if the new idea obliterates everything you thought you knew. A capacity and tolerance and even taste for uncertainty requires Richard P. Feynman type guts.

Sure I feel my racket twisting out on a good slice serve wide. But on the "everything ought to be challenged" theory, I just found, I believe, a perfectly good alternative with its own potential for developing or re-capturing ancient "feel." Contrary to popular belief, the notion of "carve" on a slice serve is not discredited. The trick is to do it with wrist snap (or maybe wrist "bend"). The world contains a lot of mysteries.

As for pointing the bent elbow toward the ball for a good first serve, well, I was doing that until a 5.5 player saw me hitting against a wall and asked me for a match. The match wasn't much. The guy was an ox. He wasn't Nadal but he was a Nadal. He hit more topspin than anyone I've ever encountered including USPTA and USPTR teaching pros and a number one college varsity player and Tony Pearman, third-ranked senior in Great Britain.

When it was over, he praised some volleys and overheads, but said he couldn't stand my serve, and since for some reason I was receptive, he pulled my elbow way back and pantomimed me hitting the upper right corner of the ball.

If any of this interests you-- or maybe you SHOULD be perfectly content with your present flat serve-- you could study Brian Gordon's articles in this website-- particularly the part with the animated barrel where he analyzes pre-load of upper arm twist along with another fantastic animation for that. Elbow has to stay back a certain interval then, I think. But all of this is and should be up to you and no one else.

And who would I be to tell you much if one of your sentences has application in the future. That would be, "The hand can rotate more slowly than the entire arm, which enables prolonged contact and delayed acceleration." That's a new idea. I've always been at full throttle and never considered anything else and am excited about trying this.

Thanks.

[rosheem]

O

Smoothly twist elbow and forearm counter-clockwise to the outside as you use your triceps muscle to straighten the arm. (But don't let this triceptic extension habit infect your best other serves.) Keep wrist cocked until the last instant same as in golf and other ball striking sports.

Bottle, do you feel the racquet face twisting through contact on every serve?

For me, it feels like cradling a ball in the stick pocket in lacrosse.

The strings make contact at an angle. Then, there is hand and forearm rotation which helps to rotate the face angle while the ball is on the strings. Selective acceleration and pushing in specific directions and on specific parts of the ball is what creates the spins. The hand can rotate more slowly than the entire arm, which enables prolonged contact and delayed acceleration. As the ball exits, the face angle is being twisted away from it.

Curious to know if you've felt it this way before.

I was a volleyball player. The way I get the body involved is pretty natural, but this racquet action took me about a year and a half to figure out. Now I can hit the twist serve short and wide to the deuce court, or slice it and run it off the deuce court, or kick it wide to the ad court.

However, the most fun serve is the one without kick to either side. On this one, I aim to slice the ball in half vertically, leading with the elbow and with the butt of the knife like knife thrower. Stay on edge until the last possible moment and then open the stringbed to accept the ball while turning and pushing straight throught the original line so that at racquet halfway, the strings are perpendicular to the target and the intent of the entire swing is all going straight through to the target. End up feeling like flinging the ball off the thumb edge of the racquet face.

The key is that while the racquet rotates through contact, the momentum of the sweet spot never diverts from a line going straight through the ball to the target. The reason it's fun is because this is the serve I can land on a dime...exactly where I intend to, consistently. It has spin and thus energy and some good bounce, but no significant sideways motion.

Just wondering if you've tried this or know the feel I am talking about.

[bottle]

Inverting Normal Sequence

O

The O above is either the moon or a tennis ball.

A question for which I didn't receive an answer fast enough, not even from Google: Is pronation or a pronated arm the safety device everyone talks about? If the latter, then one can pronate first and snap wrist second in a sliced serve out wide from the deuce court.

As I ran the experiment, I found that these serves didn't injure my already sensitized arm. In fact, they felt just as good as anything else. And combining sidespin, spiralspin, and poptop became easier, I think. The new serve worked not better but as well as the old. When in one day you come up with something new that works just as well as what you've done your entire life, shouldn't you give the new method a pretty good shake before you abandon it? Eventually, you may even keep it.

O

Take your pencil and draw arrows around the O indicating that some spiralspin toward the left fence will occur.

I was going to recommend that one point one's bent elbow in various directions until one finds the setting that makes the ball A) go in the service box and B), strike the target. However, in my case that was the previous elbow setting, quite far back. Smoothly twist elbow and forearm counter-clockwise to the outside as you use your triceps muscle to straighten the arm. (But don't let this triceptic extension habit infect your best other serves.) Keep wrist cocked until the last instant same as in golf and other ball striking sports.

Question: Gooseneck finish as before? Sure. One of the reasons wrist commentators give for pronation in the first place is that it lengthens and liberates overall hand motion. Well, this is true regardless of sequence. Because of pronation, racket butt doesn't run into the arm but slides past to the right.

[bottle]

Cool.

[ochi]

You didn't have to go to Borders, but to Tennis.com. The old World Tennis is out there now, too.

[bottle]

The beer afterward tastes especially good. I've certainly never solved those returns. But don't see them enough to give myself a chance. On the other hand a closed men's tournament of 24 topflight doubles players recently came to Winston-Salem, and every one of them had the kick serve you describe, the best of which was almost like Jared Palmer whom I saw up close on an outlying court in D.C. at Rock Creek Park one time.

I do think that TECHNICAL TENNIS gives plenty of great clues-- maybe the best ever?-- for solving this Rubik's Cube. First if you go the pop-top route and become confident enough with it you'll keep the ball down since you put a lid on it. This would be lot easier with a two-handed return, but may be possible with a one hander, too. If you go the slice route way of putting some lid on the ball as I'm planning to try tomorrow against Johnny Johnston, your timing will need to be spot on. Backhand slice happens to be my best shot in tennis but didn't work frequently enough last Friday against Johnny's added topspin. From the simplest and shortest of backswings I try to get the barrel going straight toward the net and then rip sideways by clenching my shoulder-blades together. Oscar says you can be turning your elbow down a little while you rip, with contact in top half of the strings. Turning elbow down has got to thrust top of the strings forward. Don't know whether Oscar ever bought into my passively straightening elbow or not, much less whether I can make everything work altogether, but I'll try.

As for delivering such a serve myself, I've tried much too much in my lifetime, but now TECHNICAL TENNIS is saying I needn't, that again I can put a lid on the ball-- since I'm tall-- and topspin is the same topspin no matter where administered. (From studying principles of literary criticism I know I don't have to say exactly what's in a book, can report instead on my reaction to the book if that's what I want, or do both, working the two things together--maybe best of all.)

In homage to Bill Tilden I don't belong to the USTA, which means I no longer get Tennis Magazine, but just drove down to Borders to read Paula Schweb's article on wide service and from there to the court to try her reduced stance idea, i.e, in deuce court draw up right foot to point left hip at target at the start. It worked somewhat but I went back to my more turned around stance same for all of my serves. The hard slice with a bit of spiralspin is just too interesting right now not to go with.

Spiralspin?! What's that? I've read most of tennis literature but never heard of spiralspin until last week.

Well, it's real and hugely important. (I'm thinking right now of the reviewer on the web who said that TECHNICAL TENNIS, the book, will never help anyone.
Boy am I glad I didn't listen.)

I've never thrown or punted a football particularly well but talked yesterday to a knowledgeable sports person. He agreed that the forward pass and the beautifully kicked punt rotate the same way, i.e., to the right for a right-hander. The difference is that the right fingers put the work on the right side of the ball, and the right instep puts the work on the left side of the ball.

Well, if a punter can do it, a right-handed tennis player can do it. He can put leftward spiralspin on a slice serve. Sidespin will swerve the ball through the air. Spiralspin will swerve the ball after the bounce. And if I had to choose
(I probably don't), I'm clear in my mind. Swerve out of the court after the bounce, please.

[ochi]

Bottle, I played with and against our guy with the wicked serve last night, and asked him about it afterward while we drank beer. He's about 50, and doesn't get to play much because of traveling a lot. Doesn't get to practice at all. He said that when he was a young immigrant in Vancouver, he would hit serves in a huge gym, over and over and over, figuring it out. On his own, he developed his severe topspin with slight slice for the ad side, and severe slice with a lot of top for the deuce side.

He demonstrated. Up close, I could see how much he bent back for the topspin... a bit more than I thought. Very violent, fast upswing, of course.

By moving in maybe four feet, I was able to nail some of his serves from the ad side, before they exploded. The trouble was, I could never go inside out, only straight ahead, and once down the alley. Therefore, the net man was usually able to nail them right back. Still it felt good, really good, just to be able to return them at all.

I am never going to work on those serves. Bad for the lower back, I'm sure, and probably hell on one's shoulder. I am way too old to mess with them.

[bottle]

Orchestration: Short One Handers and Two Kinds of Federfore

Option one: Extend arm to side. Roll wrist straight as hips go out to raise shoulders slightly backward. Rabbit punch. Counts: Three.

Option two: Extend bent arm to side. Roll wrist straight as hips go out to raise shoulders slightly backward. Rabbit punch with passively straightening arm. Counts: Three.

Longer backhands: Get arm parallel to sideline. Ease racket forward in some combination of lower and upper arm slow movement, i.e., sequence 1, sequence 2 or simultaneous. Counts: Five.

Closer to body Federfore: Mondo wrist back to absorb 200 pounds pressure at contact as if catching a baseball.

Farther from body Federfore: Mondo shortly before contact. Anti-mondo (straighten wrist) before contact also to hit ball WAY OUT to side, which indirection absorbs energy a different way while giving you Archimedes' lever, which means it's long enough, well fast enough in this case, for you to move the world.

[bottle]

Excellent. I love hearing this informative first-hand testimony so different from the usual synthesis of all the observed experience of five hundred different tennis students. The generality the instructor comes up with, even when sharply perceptive and very good, has all too often-- alas!-- a certain canned-sounding quality, or as a black friend of mine said while we were sitting in Borders book store, Winston-Salem, "This place is missing something."

As for my own serves, I had a very good early morning. I was experimenting per our discussion and so lost serve twice-- my first two service games of the second set. Final score, 6-0, 6-2 . (Yes, from rowing at Brown I am an early morning athlete.) Mostly, I was serving to my opponent's backhand, not using the two slices which had to be totally unpracticed or still in developmental stage.

A great thing about being ahead in some informal match is that you can feel free to experiment, and should! So I tried the Trabert slice unrehearsed (no tilt and no flex) and hit something soft out wide. My opponent got to it but I won the point. On match point, however, I remembered Stan Smith's perfect advice: "The shot you practiced is the shot you play with." That would be hard slice using my normal body motion. My opponent, in deuce court again, barely touched the ball with the end of his frame.

"You're amazing!" he said.

I'm not, but that final serve did carry a bit of spiralspin.

[ochi]

Bottle, unless I overlooked it, Trabert did not write about slice stance. Rather, he displayed it in sequential photos. He used the good old line-up-your-front-and-rear-toes-with-the-intended-target Pancho Gonzalez method on the deuce side, but didn't show the ad side. That is what I've been doing, but with my front foot parallel with the baseline. Serving to the ad side, I point my front foot back several degrees from the baseline; rear foot, too. This is deliberately exaggerated and experimental. I now must modify to get pace with a high degree of sidespin. I've gotta believe that it will work before long. Will let you know.

BTW, I used this ad side stance for flat serves on Sunday, and hit the outside line, or just inside it, many times. If the receiver read it, it didn't matter; the ball either did not come back, or was picked off by my partner, even though the guy has a good two-hand backhand. I don't care if the experts would disapprove; it worked for me. I did this last winter in a match with some early bird players. The opponent on the ad side had a terrific forehand and a reliable backhand, but he foolishly kept protecting his backhand by standing behind the outside corner. By turning my feet to the farther to the right, I could consistently serve to the corner and he would, in effect, jam himself every time.

As USPTA Master Pro Paula Scheb said in her "How to Hit A Wide Serve" tip in the latest Tennis magazine: "Don't worry if you telegraph your intentions. If you can consistently swing your opponents wide, you'll have the upper hand even if they notice your new stance." And you don't even need a lot pace. Sometimes lack of pace works better. It's certainly better for consistency, and for making the ball land closer to the net.

The drawing with Scheb's tip shows the old Trabert stance on the deuce side; it does not show how to change it for the ad side.

[bottle]

For Ochi: Slice Serves and Others

No, I don't have Tony Trabert's book (yet) so am glad you described its slice section so well. Thanks again by the way for putting me on to TECHNICAL TENNIS-- what an edition to any library. For slice I used to rely on SINISTER TENNIS, a thin, white book by Sterling Lord, left-handed literary agent for Mario Puzo and THE GODFATHER, who said if you're a righty you should toss six inches farther toward the net and six inches farther to the right. Then somebody in a magazine article urged both toss and swing toward right net post. Watching the Dennis Ralston film strips in this website got me swinging to where projection of singles sideline intersects with rear fence. But I go around and around on all of this stuff and my slice gets better then worse then better again (if I'm lucky). I'm tired of luck, though, want skill.

"Natural ability counts a lot," my golfer-dentist said. "I try not to think about that," I said through my just cleaned teeth undergoing inspection.

Right now I'm extending arm, triceptically on this one serve only, straight along baseline, then snapping wrist sidearm and rolling forearm and some elbow too so racket goose-necks in toward the net post. The strings rise and veer left at same time. Ball rotation is at least a little on its spiral axis. It grieves me terribly that from the deuce court I have ever hit serves out wide that then kicked the wrong way back into the court.

What Trabert says about straight spine seems great. And now I'll try no flex in legs for first time in a long time. But what are you doing, ochi, with your feet? Not moving them? Pivoting on left toes? Crossing with right foot? If I were still to flex and straighten on these attempts, it would be only enough to release the left foot for pivot in the air since I'm eager to protect my left knee. I'll experiment for alternatives since I want to hear the rasp and add soft slice to present hard. Also, I'll try some of Brian Gordon's upper arm twist to centrifugate loose arm most of the way straight before adding any triceps. Because, although the Ashe-like extension of open racket face followed by sidearm scaling of wrist and sharp roll the other way is producing fast, interesting results-- two balls which settling among the other balls sizzled and jumped over a small fence to the left in delayed fashion-- it's also hurting my already sensitized arm.

On other serves, I love the Cross and Lindsey demonstration of ruler rotating a coin on a table at different angles. "Pop-top" is not some separate natural phenomenon, it would appear, but topspin is topspin no matter where one administers it on the ball. A tall player is in perfect position, by birth, to egg the ball with a closed racket face in the horizontal direction no matter how tight his rotors are in the back fence direction. And tossing farther in front makes a longer path for acceleration, thus undoing or partially undoing the physical handicap. And I just beat my regular partner The Partridge 6-0, 6-0 once again (never used to happen). Don't worry though. An all round solid and very fast William and Mary graduate named Johnny Johnston cleaned my clock 6-3, 6-0 last Friday. I get another shot at him this Friday.

[ochi]

Bottle, you have Tony Trabert's "The Serve." Check out page 82, on the slice, in which he compares it to a hook in golf and a pitcher's outcurve. In part, he said: "This is accomplished by (1) contacting the ball with a fully extended racket arm and racket stretching in a fairly straight line into the court at impact, the racket's striking service toward the ball-arm side of the receiver's court; and (2) letting the swing actions immediately surrounding the actual strike (a) originate from a posture that sees no arch of the spine or flex in the knees and (b) end up with the body facing the net.

He also said -- and this reminder has helped me a lot to impart spin: "Accelerate the racket well beyond ball contact." I was hatcheting the ball. By accelerating way out and turning my feet to the right, as he said, I'm now imparting too much spin and not nearly enough pace. It sounds as if the strings are rasping the cover off the back of the ball. So I'm working on getting it just right, something I used to know how to do, but lost the knack.

How can one dispute what Trabert said about not arching the back or flexing the knees? He was a great player and student of the game. But a friend in my Wednesday night contract group has a vicious kicking topspin slice and does both to a clearly noticeable degree, just a few degrees each. It comes in fast, swerving, bounces short in the box, and then leaps high and to the right. I've only ever met two other guys who could do this. I have to move way in and hit or block it early to have any chance of making the return.

What do you think?