A New Year's Serve

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Roll out the Barrel. We'll have a Barrel of Fun.

You've heard of the Gordian Knot? How about Gordon's barrel?

Since I am playing around with my fast action serve along with my slow action serve right now, I think I'll get to a netless court without taking a string before the football starts this afternoon.

I like the idea of working on both types of serve at the same time. Keeps one from getting too wrapped up in either.

Brian Gordon's barrel, in one of his articles, starts off rotating slowly and horizontally.

Before one's bod has stopped its significant rotation it is whirling quickly and vertically.

Needed: Extreme stance, way turned around. And so much winding back with the bod that the front heel comes up.

Forward rotation then can be perfectly horizontal until the heel has come down. One can toss during this easy forward move.

Enough sprezzatura (https://www.google.com/search?q=spre...hrome&ie=UTF-8) may dictate a palm down Jack Kramerish rather than ice cream cone toss.

Just for the record: Brian Gordon colored his barrel brown. Later he changed the color to orange.

The way to get the most out of my fast action interpretation of this design, it seems to me (for I haven't tried it yet) is to move hips and shoulders perfectly together so that you resemble an orange or brown cylinder.

Now the foot is flat. Now with more sprezzatura, you fire rear leg in tandem with front shoulder straight up.

Front leg helps drive the front shoulder up.

There is conflict between rear leg and front shoulder.

That is the only way I can see of making the in-process-of-leftward-leaning shoulders whirl properly, namely with front shoulder holding steady and rear shoulder spinning over it.

Thinking too much will do you ill since sprezzatura is the main thing.

Reflect however that the front leg drives straight up while the rear leg screws up (take it as you will).

An attacking giraffe, whirling its lethal horns on its long neck, doesn't worry about keeping its eyes still and neither should you.

If you want to do that, reader, you should go with higher toss and slow, rhythmic action instead.

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Hoop Shape with Elbows Far Apart Can Apply to both Slow Action and Fast Action Serves

Think I held all night. But I had good partners. The serves weren't as fast as at other times but were high and loopy and effective.

The rule of constancy, I'm sure, precludes using fast and slow motions in the same match.

But that's where I was in my experiments. Toggling back and forth threw the opponents off.

In fast action serves, one can even use a bent arm toss if hand is an ice cream cone. That way one half of the hoop has been pre-formed.

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Don't Think that Down Together Up Together Means a Single Speed

In down together the toss hand and the racket tip can, if you choose, indeed fall at the same approximate speed.

But in up together, to keep nice balance, the hitting arm must go faster to go farther in the same rhythm.

Those are cues for the possible attainment of a better serve.

To be perfectly honest, however, the two hands can not go down at the same speed. Not if the "down" is to begin at the same time and end at the same time.

The racket tip, not the hitting hand, is what matches the fall of the toss hand.

So already the racket is going farther and faster than the toss hand and will continue to do so.

Of course one could assign the acceleration of either thing to gravity (32 seconds per second).

If you assign gravity to the toss hand, you'll have to speed up the hit hand.

So assign gravity to the racket tip instead.

Then you'll have to slow the toss hand going down.

Which will resemble the slowness of the initial backswing in golf and seem smart.

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Elbow over Elbow Must Go Deliberately Slow

Sort of like, in grammar, possessive its never splits.

Talking oneself into a good serve is anathema but is it an enema?

We bet today on a big hoop with elbows far apart but up higher the hands somewhat close together.

What almost completes the hoop is the direction of the racket itself.

Such a big hoop is formy and balletic and may seem precious, but who cares, if it works.

High enough toss and slowness are the essentials that will permit the rear elbow to rise over the front elbow without the front elbow going down.

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Wretchedly Rendered Wrenched Forehand

Eye on the prize and nowhere else. Balance the new shot with beautiful forehands and name it after either of Cinderella's stepsisters if you must.

It builds on present progression.

Early shoulders move the hips slowly and passively out of the way.

But then they fire, wrench, snap, crackle, pop.

Any one of those verbs will complete weight transfer better than all of them employed together.

What snapped? One's mind? No, one's hips.

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Form a Hoop but Form it Late

A hoop snake doesn't retain its hoop shape all the time, after all. It sleeps, it goes to the bathroom, it pulls its trousers on like all the rest of us.

Oh well.

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Jacques Pepin Cooking School

If you've tossed too low all your life but just came to realize it, exaggerate. Throw the ball a mile high.

If you've tossed too high your whole life, turn the heat low and simmer down.

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Longer Gesture

A teaching pro here recently stated to me that she sees reminding people of what they already know as a big part of her job.

She combined that with advising a higher toss.

Well, high toss can create more time for accomplishment of all the things one wants to do.

So, if I have the new sprezzatura of latching my toss arm to a high wooden shelf, I may as well be bending the hit arm at the same time.

This idea is both aesthetic (will look good especially if toss hand and racket tip approach one another) and physiological (will synthesize two motions into a single brain impulse).

While assuming that one has kept both arms straight through the up of down-and-up.

And that both arms will bend together with hitting arm perhaps farther back than it was before.

Which creates more space for compressed intricacy near high contact.

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Consecutive Legs in an Old Fashioned Serve. It's platform stance though pinpoint is possible, too.

As rear leg fires it arches the back, which action includes scapular retraction. Deliberately, one accompanies it with bending of the toss arm to latch elbow to an imaginary high shelf.

As front leg fires, if arching has concluded, upper body cartwheels and "husks," which is another term for scapular adduction. Both cartwheeling and husking happen in an upward direction from the firm shelf.

Toss can tilt the body. The hitting arm therefore does not have to rise far to align with the two shoulder balls.

Front shoulder tilts up. Rear shoulder tilts down. But this move shall not reverse itself.

Since latching of the elbow is to occur simultaneous with rear leg drive the knees should have already bent in the down of down-and-up.

Gladys Heldman philosophy of the toss: One should bend one's knees before or afterward. In this experiment one bends one's knees before the toss.

The general sequence of this should be kept general. One will find one's way as to when final bending concludes and all final unbending begins.

Extended sequence: Rear leg, front leg, back.

On paper this seems all right. But when one goes to pantomime the rear leg wants to continue the bend that already was started. Latch elbow then coincident with this further bend.

If one does that, the upward sequence of the two legs will be a close buh-boom.

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Mine Post Serves

New York city's decision to divest itself of fossil fuels combined with the world's sudden though belated realization that Donald Trump is a shithole relegates abandoned coal mines to a purpose better than they have had for a long time.

That would be as model for an old-fashioned tennis serve that does not cave in.

One can start this quest by watching the 1951 Billy Wilder film starring Kirk Douglas and Jan Sterling called ACE IN THE HOLE.

Next one can imagine oneself as an old-fashioned mine owner contemplating whether to use oak or locust posts to support the roof of his catacomb but settling on willow and cottonwood.

A possibly useful or pernicious way of starting one's serve as one's toss starts coming down is to lower or change the lead arm-- the toss arm-- in some weird way.

If one lowers the elbow while bending it, the tunnel caves in.

What though if one just bends it? Could not the elbow then stay aligned with both shoulder balls?

And with that as habit, could not the still aligned elbow become the serve's fulcrum not only for cartwheel but for scapular slingshot fired all the way from one elbow to the other?

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Fighting the Over-Engineering of Kinetic Chain

It's all where you are, I guess, in your forehand progression if progression there be.

Me, I have at least for the time being but hopefully forever accepted the Ivan Lendl-- Eugene Scott forehand pattern as outlined in their joint book IVAN LENDL'S POWER TENNIS.

The hips don't precede the shoulders but rather seem to follow them.

Kinetic chain may still happen. (The book doesn't say this but I do.) If it happens it happens within the above prescription.

This view could amount to significant re-conceptualization for many of us. Combining it with early facing of strings at side fence, one can better attune one's arm movements to beginning of rotation of the shoulders so that there will be a portion of tract where elbow and the two shoulder balls are all on the same line.

This same alignment in a serve empowers both horizontal and more vertical rotation up to the ball.

In a forehand it empowers both horizontal and more vertical rotation down to the ball or to below it.

That's where I would like to stop all thought, at least for today, since I play tonight.

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Taut Left Side

Keeping left side firm is one of the oldest service tips, saws, aphorisms, witticisms, basics, foundations, nuggets, male sexual allusions, tinker toys, aluminum girders, building stanchions, oaken posts to prevent a mine from caving in.

Put another way, if energy isn't building up from the ground to stabilize the front shoulder at just the right time, the rear shoulder, which is the hitting shoulder, won't fly up with sufficient vigor to prove to an uncertain world that you are a REAL MAN.

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Off of the Side Track, Back on the Main Track

But "main track" does not imply a consensus forehand beyond certain broad parameters. but rather a personal main track emerging from one's own experiments and thus a clean idea of what one would now like to try.

I watch the videos and read the discussions. Always, it seems to me, something gets left out.

Today we all love Fognini's forehand. But without pointing out that he turns first then does a breaststroke.

Okay, it's a great shot but one could, if one wanted, still be turning the bod as the arms go out.

That compresses the moment in just about all forehands where one's bod isn't doing anything and the hitting arm is doing everything.

The new "everything" is a simple drop or plunge of the racket.

You see it in other batting/hitting sports. You see it in the old instruction of Vic Braden.

So it's up and face strings at side fence straight off today for me. Both hands are on the racket which is out in the slot. The arms are bent. Ernest Gulbis can do something else, poor rich guy. And he can get to a real court, not a virtual one, because he didn't spend the day sub teaching at Voyageur Prep charter school in Detroit, Michigan with subject how to read the way a writer reads.

Further orientation of the racket can be worked out later if at all. Might be better to let all those different dimension tilts take care of themselves. Did you hit a good shot? If so you must have done something right and therefore shouldn't look too hard.

In the new plan, one's (my, your) arms are to separate from that moment when strings face side fence as bod continues to turn. With wrist cocked up from having just faced strings at fence.

Hey, one in a thousand might call this a half-mondo the way I do. And one in a hundred might call it a half-flip.

I reject that term on the grounds that it puts me on a diving platform a mile above a very deep swimming pool.

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Top of the Serve to You

Consider a single melded last-instant move in which wrist goes from depressed to straight to depressed again.

William Inge: "Madge is the pretty one."

Stephen King: "They're all going to laugh at you."

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Rowing, Baseball and Tennis

Feathering at the catch is more like throwing a curve ball.

Feathering at the release is more like throwing a screw ball.

You do both on every stroke you ever take.

Well, should you do both on all of your serves?

Go from depressed to straight wrist to throw the curve ball.

Go from straight to depressed to throw the screw ball.

Do both in a single melded sequence to serve in tennis?