A New Year's Serve

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A Painful Lesson Learned

If one is to be a self-feed advocate, an inventor totally unafraid of change, one needs to keep the self-feed going right up to the time one plays, can't take a day off as I did on Thursday.

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Three Options in a Bolo Punch Forehand

If you don't write down your idea when you have it, you'll want to kill yourself later. -- David Lynch

Option 1: Splay hands for a shot down the line.

Option 2: Keep hand on racket for a crosscourt.

Option 3: Nobody but you will ever figure out these first two distinctions expressed here. But suppose someone did. You could mix him up by switching the roles.

The most interesting aspect of this however is that Thing 1 and Thing 2 are both natural to their stated purpose.

And once one commits to supernumerary turn one can shorten initial turn to make the strokes easier.

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Playground Slide Serve

I'm trying to help people visualize it.

One stands with butt protruded at rear fence.

This creates a desire in the racket to go up a ramp (the slide).

The slide is long. One simultaneously creates its length at both ends.

The hit arm goes a short distance up the slide at which time one thrusts out one's upper sternum to pull both shoulders back. At the same time both arms get straight.

The slide has been created. The rhythm of the just completed downward movement of the toss arm simulates the down of a down and up serve.

Toss-and-wind, integrated and simultaneous, is about to occur.

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Forehands

I leave the advocacy of passive loops to those who have them and like them and use them for timing and positioning of their rackets.

Me, I prefer the power loop that the bolo punch forehand enables-- that is the forehand subject I can best explore right now.

The first question to ask is whether immediate segue of backward to forward rotation of the shoulders can accelerate a circular racket loop through up, round, down and forward directions to a whiplike wiper. The answer is yes.

One need only develop a severe cocking of the racket tip downward during the supernumerary shoulders turn one can detect in this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBVgDc8TXnk).

That will next spring the racket head in the opposite direction as forward shoulders rotation takes over to help carry the strings with good velocity to beginning of a windshield whip to replace one's previous windshield wipe.

Everything can lighten up and become less muscular, slow and strained.

That is the goal.

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Kiddie Slide Serve

I think you've really got something if after assembling all the parts you can speed up the total mechanism to allow more time for the ball to come down.

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Not Quite So High

Perhaps one remembers one ace from a time when one didn't get the elbow quite so high.

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When you love someone or even something, you see more.

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Bolo Punch Forehand: Simulate the Shoulders Turn that Players Achieve when they Keep Opposite Hand on the Racket

Spray both hands a bit while letting them stay at level of wait position as a way of doing this.

However much or little you turned your shoulders, the opposite hand is going to point across more and the shoulders are going to turn around more.

This is the supernumerary shoulders turn that one can see so clearly in our model of a bolo punch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBVgDc8TXnk).

As this supernumerary turn happens the arm is still bent but with the racket tip turning under.

https://www.google.com/search?q=supe...hrome&ie=UTF-8

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Am Now Willing to Return to the Conventionality of Straight Arm Toss in the Serve and Laid Back Wrist for a Windshield Wipered Forehand.

It is precisely because I don't know anything that I perform so many experiments.

The difference in the straight arm toss will derive from the forward ramplike shallowness with which it goes down. The toss hand may roll in either or neither direction at the same time.

The difference in the wipered forehand comes at the beginning of its bolo punch. One advantage of taking one's forehand from boxing is that the boxer does not carry a racket. The experimenter therefore must invent his own racket work to go with the boxer's handiwork.

To that end I have returned to an old experiment in which I first send the racket tip down rather than up.

Racket tip goes down in conjunction with the boxer's supernumerary wind back of his shoulders. Hand like his rises one or two inches at the same time.

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Time to Combine Eight Different Instructional Sources on the Subject of Volleys

1) Turn an old racket into a butterfly net. One can either do that or imagine it (cheaper and simpler). Either way you will catch rather than punch balls in your dreams.

2) Simulate catching of balls in the butterfly net by starting each volley with bottom three fingers relaxed. Tighten those fingers while opening the strings to catch the ball. The combined action shortens the volley, applies controlling spin, determines direction of the shot. It is the "kernel" of the shot, the sine qua non (https://www.google.com/search?q=sine...hrome&ie=UTF-8),

3) Take balls a bit more to the side rather than way out front.

4) Use a composite grip like John McEnroe for all volleys. This grip is half way between continental and eastern forehand. Keep wrist straight.

5) Practice one step volleys if you are tall or have long arms.

6) Stop distinguishing between blocked and "sticked" volleys. They all are solid if one blends the mechanics of catching or blocking with that of driving lower edge of opening frame while tightening the bottom three fingers which brings the racket tip slightly around. This is a more specifically focused instruction than the old "You tell the ball what to do. It doesn't tell you what to do."

7) Enjoy the facility that the new "kernel" gives you. You can hit forceless volleys that dribble. You can angle the ball off the court by using speed of the oncoming shot. You can supply your own power through transferring body weight. You can be on front foot and restrain any use of body weight so long as you are as solid as the flying buttress at the bottom of a cathedral.

8) Hit volleys against a bangboard which is how Pancho Segura learned his. How many can you keep going? (None in my case until I recently learned my "kernel" at the age of 78.) Later, like Segura, use the bangboard to force yourself to move and stretch to wide balls yet still keep the rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

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From Low to High or Level to High or Down to Up but in a Completely Different Way?

I am trying to skip one week in the development of this serve.

The "from low to high" version became very comfortable and consistent but didn't always produce serves as crisp as I want.

"Level to high," though a bit less smooth, was promising and enabled me to hold serve for most of a long evening.

But if I were just slightly off-level, i.e., kept butt protruded toward rear fence through the entire pre-toss phase, the earlier separation of the elbows would take toss arm down just a little to create a slightly longer motion up.

Since my toss is ice cream cone from a bent arm, I will be interested in having hand to elbow cover the low end four-inch slightly downward tract like a golf club cutter that doesn't turn just then.

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How Little can one Raise Racket Tip in a Bolo Punch Forehand?

This forehand contains a mondo, but a mondo in an extended sense.

Most mondoes are simple flips in which wrist lays back while forearm turns down.

The mondo is a passive act caused by primary body parts that are stockier than forearm or wrist.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBVgDc8TXnk)

In a bolo punch forehand, entirely based on that guy's sockdolager into his opponent's gut however the mondo is best performed as simultaneous adjunct to the whole arm turning inside out.

One could say this arm transformation is a loop albeit a power loop and not a passive one.

So how low should racket tip be to start its whirl?

Experiment, experiment. And report back.

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Progression

We start today with substitute teaching from which I extrapolate a valuable lesson that applies to the new motion I used to hold serve every time last night except for once at the very end of the two hours when I was bone tired and the just fabricated thing finally began to unravel.

I started serving with both hands held high-- and didn't serve at all during the hour of cardio that preceded the social doubles.

The cardio or warm-up drill included an old Australian friend who volleys like a dream.

"I loved where you were standing," I said afterward. "Farther back than most players. And you were getting a lot of balls."

"I have long arms so I figure why not. It gives me more reaction time. I get ready and pretty much can reach everything with one step."

To make sure I understood he repeated every word of this-- a very good example of effective substitute teaching although the regular teacher did her job well too.

In real substitute teaching the day before, I found myself at a distant Montessori school in west Detroit where the teachers were requiring fourth and fifth graders to memorize poems.

Some of the kids didn't have the family background that would enable them to do this or hadn't been able to do it yet.

The successful ones however were grateful for a fresh audience and recited for me one by one.

Everything in teaching is about encouragement.

Many more people could participate.

And I in turn was encouraged to depart from all the printed sub plans and ask the teacher's aide in the room if it would be all right if I stopped everything and read out loud.

"By all means," she said.

So I read a bunch of poems from the current Caroline Kennedy assembled best seller including "If" by Rudyard Kipling.

In the hallway coming back from recess a teacher whom I obviously didn't know said the kids from my class were all talking about my reading.

So I repeated the same approach after lunch.

The poetry went over again but not as well. The teacher's aide was gone and this was a tougher group.

Still, my aggressive reading established me on a different level of guest teaching for them, and so, later, when they were supposed to be doing their work but weren't, I seized a provided drumstick and beat on the chimes that lay on the regular teacher's desk.

The class became silent.

"Why did I do that?" "Because we were talking?" "Nope." "Because we weren't putting the books back on the shelves?" "Nope." "Because some of us were fixing each other's hair? And some were up out of their seats shadow boxing?" "Nope."

They stared at me.

"Because it's fun!!!"
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The serve in actual competition didn't like the beginning level I chose for it. So I started from a bit lower. And last night received subliminal messaging in my sleep.

"Why do you have to roll your toss arm?" asked the voice of my new serve. "Why don't you just get your hand cone aimed right in wait position? And why do you have to divide the take back into independent arm and upper chest arching of elbows away from one another? Do it all at once!"

The toss elbow will naturally go out a very small but rhythmic amount.

The combined independent arm and upper core involvement will get everything up to shoulder level and way back.

The toss will have more time to arc downward before I scrape it.

But a person needs to say important stuff more than once. An arm going back level and straightening from beneath shoulder gets up to shoulder if one is committed to getting it all the way back.

Also, continue to start the serve with independent arm movement kept deliberate and smooth but very soon let the elbow separation from upper core chime in.

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The Same Murderous Intent that Allows this Body Punch to Work Allows my New Serve to Work.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBVgDc8TXnk)

The boxer wants to put a hurt on the punching bag. So even though his shoulders are in good position, he turns them back a little more while using the force of that to start his bolo.

In the new serve the shoulders are in only fair position for beginning of the toss.

The new serve also employs a last instant supernumerary shoulders turn as part of the force of the toss.

Similarly, shoulders wind back and release with nothing in between.

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Roll Toss Hand a Little as Racket Goes Back

This makes ice cream or Hungarian hot dog less likely to fall out of its cone.

And frees subsequent elbow separation from encumbering adjustment.

And gets hands moving in same direction to start the serve.

Left hand moves a little-- no more than the bit caused by its slight roll.

The closed right hand meanwhile moves quite far quite fast as arm straightens to give level racket trajectory a square shape.

Next comes the slow rhythmic separation caused by upper chest thrusting out.

One can minimize initial arm travel by starting from turned around stance. Racket can start from behind base line.

The independent arm travel will then be roughly matched by the subsequent arm travel caused by the organic feeling elbow separation.

All this happens before the toss, which happens in turn with backward body wind (long "i" as in Long Island).

Note: When miming without racket the rhythm of this serve make sure to preserve the static hand separation that occurs when racket is resting on the ball. This arrangement need not change from past years.