A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

But, if you're Going to do That, why not This?

Still working with the design where you turn elbow down while tossing, how about a simplification of subsequent take-back to remove all sequence from it? What was the sequence doing there anyway? Could its only purpose be to show that you should have been a lawyer? The important thing is to throw from a position where your elbow is maximum distance away from your body.

New take-back: As body bows and starts forward (or simply goes down straight on the knees in the case of adapted Ralston slice and then starts forward), the turned arm goes back but starts bending to its skewed right angle soon rather than later. Everything is simultaneous and spread out-- the wrist bend from one extreme to the other, the slowly flexing arm, the elbow smoothing back.

In this inside to out move you go directly to throw position. The racket won't come in to same place from a straight arm as before. Which is better? Only one way to find out.

All these speculations open up from revolving the elbow down somewhat during the toss. (Yes, grip will be a determinant of how much.) Arm twist will now be largely out of the way, hopefully making it less of a joker factor.

Another factor, perhaps unforeseen and nautical, is that the choices presented require different lengths of outrigger at a time when balance (or precision of slight imbalance) is crucial. Compare the feel and potential in these two different serves as well as the immediate results?

This comparison, which pits full take-back against abbreviated take-back, must be interesting since A and B put the arm in the exact same place and configuration every time.

The modern discovery of myelinization (the accretion through repetitions of insulating brain goop around a pathway increasing neuronal transfer from 10 feet per second to 100 feet per second) seems a clear argument for specialism and never changing anything if you want to be a good tennis player.

Unless, of course, you value variety for its own sake in your game. At 69, I expect good days and bad days, and in this case am authorizing myself to use either wind-up at any time I damn well please.

[bottle]

Adding Finesse

Katie Lomb makes the distinction between the words "monologue" and "autologue" in her book POLYGLOT: HOW I LEARN LANGUAGES."

An autologue, like a dialogue, can help one get outside of oneself. In fact, it is an imaginary dialogue, an essential tool in acquiring new languages. And the tennis serve, most intricate of athletic motions, certainly does qualify as a complete language whether Katie Lomb refers to it as such or not.

She doesn't, but does refer to a specific move in world class ice skating. For my example here let's take a triple lutz, which if I tried it, I say very obviously, would be a triple klutz. You see someone perform it and think to yourself, "How beautiful, how easy, I can do that." But you can't. The only way you possibly could would be to break it down first into manageable parts. Your decision to do that would initiate an autologue, i.e., a conversation with yourself to help you toward mastery of the new language.

Similarly, I have only known one ACC basketball coach, and he died suddenly two years ago, a relatively very young man. If I had said, "Skip, should one mess with the technique of one's foul shot if it isn't going in?" I have no idea how he would have replied. He might have said, "Let's see it, John. Mime it." He then might have said, "Change it." Or perhaps, "Don't change it. Stay with it. One day it will start going in."

Anybody who has read these posts knows that, left to my own devices I would try one hand, two hands lopsided, and then propelling the basketball with the point of my elbow.

There are some commonalities in the two serves I have most recently described which I perhaps need to stress. First, both start with body bent over, hands fairly high, arms bent, right hand turned in. The hands and racket stay connected for part of their drop but then separate to comfortable positions like two different eggs being laid.

Upper body then straightens while turning back as racket turns out and left arm goes up tossing past the ball. The combination of right shoulder movement (up and in) and twisting arm (out) takes racket head a good ways toward rear fence with no other effort by you. And what is body weight doing? Well, it's not going back. But many players and coaches are passionate in insisting that it be going forward. Not yet, I believe. The weight is pausing, in transition. It is between going backward and going forward.

Finally, although arm compresses to a right angle as one way or the other it goes back, it compresses again as part of the quick actual serve (throw) as legs and body and everything else finally release. It can do this in one of two different ways (again) which will send the racket in basically different directions.

[bottle]

More about Autologues vs. Purchases of Extra Tennis Lessons

This post is dedicated to Roger Federer, who did okay in the Madrid Open. Think carefully, Rog, about this idea everybody is bandying about of your purchasing a top-of-the-line coach. Not only could that be expensive (and your Swiss half must be pretty tight) but you should include yourself in the sweepstakes. Yes, think deeply about purchasing yourself.

The truth is, every tennis player alive must strike best balance between external and internally provided advice. There is danger in either giving away one's identity or in relying too much on one's own breakthroughs and mistakes.

This latter approach works well so long as one KNOWS when one has made a mistake. A mistake uncaught may quickly multiply others.

Katie Lomb warns explicitly about this in POLYGLOT: HOW I LEARN LANGUAGES (she mastered 16 of them)-- the best education book I have ever read-- personal, idiosyncratic and immediately useful. While advocating "autologue," much easier to control than "dialogue," she knows how easily one can get off the track.

[bottle]

Hyper-hope for the Rotorded?

The following discussion should be fun, dear reader, and I hope you have the knowledge/experience and sense of irony you'll need to enjoy it.

(Irony seldom works on the internet. I am aware of this.)

My favorite tennis pro to mock is Jack Groppel. Why? Because whenever an ordinary tennis player speaks of "laying back the wrist," Jack Groppel says the wrist is "hyperextended."

To me "hyperextension" is a medical term for something painful. But, to provide Jack Groppel with the benefit of every doubt (and in fact my ultimate goal here, higher even than to praise him, is to learn from him) we may give the Greek prefix "hyper-" its English meaning of "over." Now the term "hyperextended" can mean the laid back wrist is past extended, i.e., past straight and turned over, i.e., laid back.

By the same logic, if the hand is bent to the extreme the opposite way, is it not still hyperextended, using Groppel's definition? With hand bent either way, the forearm should also get turned out in the "external" direction (yecch yet again) as in a Federer forehand or any good serve. Yes, we're saying this is true for any kind of service wrist layback or service wrist lay-forward.

"You always make things too complicated, Bottle," I can hear my left brain critics say. "No, you oversimplify," I reply in my left brain way, "you're giving me vague street directions, not simple ones."

It's mano a mano, a stand-off and not as interesting as what Jack Groppel himself has to say in TENNIS FOR ADVANCED PLAYERS, page 136 :
"Using three-dimensional cinematography and an electronic device for measuring angular change, it was observed that wrist hyperextension did occur as the forward swing was begun. In addition, the wrist flexed from that hyperextended position through impact. It seems that elbow extension from the backscratch position, forearm pronation, and wrist movement occur at nearly the same time. To determine when each action takes place and how one contributes to the other would be near to impossible."

Since service to me is either an upsidedown roadmap of Budapest, Hungary, or a complete language such as Swahili, Finnish, or Magyarul, you KNOW I am receptive to this statement by Jack Groppel.

But what I personally wonder as a result of my ongoing autologue here at TennisPlayer is whether the part about flexion "though contact," i.e. past contact (and elsewhere in this book section Groppel does make it clear that this indeed is something he means), also applies to "hyperextension" of the wrist the opposite way, as in the serve of Sasha Kulikova on the women's varsity team at Wake Forest.

In other words, would the rotorded player, i.e., anyone less flexible than Pete Sampras, have a perhaps improved chance of generating upward spin if she were to keep hand turned in (just the opposite of if she were about to skip a flat stone on a flat lake) and were still whirling trailing edge as she came off of the ball?

One might develop a new cue: Round nubby wrist bone still extending out to right after contact, and hand whirling partway open in reinforcement of forearm pronation with both happening just as left hand crosses to stop upper body rotation and thus fling arm edge-on directly forward into the ball.

[bottle]

Dial-a-Forehand

99559. This is the telephone number if I want to call Roger's forehand. Nine frames to lift racket while laying back hand to conventional Eastern position.
Nine frames to keep lifting racket (the easiest part of this total 1.2 second cycle-- a good time to take a siesta but also to begin aiming at the ball). Five frames to start hand separation, close the racket head, complete backward upper body rotation by thrusting left hand across. Five frames to start lowering from unturning upper body but then to step on the gas with outside leg and mondo down full from forearm but not yet let the wrist bend backward to the max (this is the most difficult part of the cycle with so much going on including much forward if slightly delayed upper body rotation suddenly retarded by left arm folding in along with aligning of racket butt with ball at great, confident separation producing "feel"-- with all of it happening in only five frames). Nine frames to scrape the ball in one accelerative action at start of which the wrist reflexively bends a little more. The strings will be going forward from the hand at contact, not backwards as in other subsets of fedeforis.

You could say you point at the ball three times-- once with left elbow when both hands are still on racket, once with left hand from closer, and once from racket butt at end of the mondo. Triangulate, like a surveyor! Why not?

Okay, Sir Bottle, if this is such a great telephone number, containing at least three examples of pointing finesse, exactly when does the acceleration start, a question which has puzzled the heads of famous tennis schools? Consider the following videos:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/roger_federer_09/rf_forehand/rf_fh_arm_action/rf_fh_arm_action.html?RFFHInsideOutArmActionRear4.mov

Get to end of mondo. And then click two times more. Look at the racket! It’s warped, isn’t it? The strings appear to have bent forward from the handle because the racket speed is greater than the speed of the film.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/roger_federer_09/rf_forehand/rf_fh_arm_action/rf_fh_arm_action.html?RFFHRunningArmActionRear2.mov

Get to end of mondo. Then click one time more. Look at the racket. Same thing! All this makes me say that finesse ends with the mondo, which is precisely when acceleration, consisting of two seamless parts, non-wiper
and wiper, gets to one racket width below ball and one and two thirds racket width directly above it and finally crosses the body for a poised landing on your left foot.

The perennial question about Roger's forehand, re-phrased here, is what arm action produces the warp speed? Which way is the arm faster-- pushing out or pulling in? And which way is that arm healthier when colliding with a hundred-mile-per-hour ball? And what are some good images to express the pulling in? 1. Hand running along a fence. 2. Hand running along a glass wall. 3. A sliding glass door. To hit inside out you could turn the glass door until it was more perpendicular to right corner of the opposite court. And on a cross-court you might feel that you are pulling in toward yourself. Such ideas-- anathema to so many American teaching pros-- require different amounts of upper body turn by the end of the mondo, yes? You pull with the arm as hard as you can, including a scissoring action from the biceps started before you got to the ball. How can this happen any other way when the shoulder housing is already extended-- at the end of your hugely confident racket separation toward the right fence? There's no where else for the shoulder housing to go except sideways, driven by the muscle on the outside of the top of your upper arm.

The hand of course, stays bent back. As abruptly changing direction hand whips sideways, the strings fling through and up. Your head could do more than remain still as a golfer's staring at the ball. It could actually be moving to the right as hand whips to left. That's a very neat idea I've never been able to arrive at by myself.

[bottle]

More on Video Frames Experiment

What can I say? I'm always in search of some cue that will prove a tried and true way to spark up a given stroke.

The telephone number 99559 was an interesting experience in Fedeforis, but now I want to try 99945, where the third nine combines hand separation, racket closing, arm straightening, leg thrust, hips turn and mondo of forearm.

The 4 now will represent a simultaneous bearlike swipe of right arm and maximum cranking of shoulders from transverse muscles of the gut and passive bending of wrist from conventional Eastern layback to maximum physical layback (possible only with a VERY loose grip).

The 5 will represent a dramatic change of direction, i.e., a roll of racket head from one width below ball to one and two-thirds above it combined with the very beginning of arm scissor. This blended action taken together can prevent the lower edge of the racket from going into retreat during the contact (another kind of stroke). I am allowing an extra frame or two here after all the acceleration for deceleration of racket into the upper left arm.

[bottle]

Fear Not the Deadly Mondo

"Mondo" means "the world," i.e., something that is feared by many people.

But it also means to crank the racket downward from your forearm in the middle of a forehand, and maybe to lay back wrist to the max at the same time.

No one is quite sure about this-- whether these actions should be done SIM or IN SEQ or NOT AT ALL.

Or whether they should be done during contact to turn your racket into a flipper of a pinball machine the better to kind of catch the ball while you fling it with your body.

Or whether you should do it early and get it out of the way like Federer.

Such confusions are partial explanation for why tennis instructors almost never use the term (I've only heard it used by one other tennis instructor, but he assured me that pros on the tour say it all the time).

And why wouldn't they? Do they have time or inclination for elaborate, left brain explanation of things? No, give it a name and be done with it.

Of course, many instructors would prefer that the term not exist in the vocabulary of any student of theirs, period, believing as they do that such
recklessness would ruin both the student's forehand and the student's life.

And the students themselves are apt to be complicit. "I can't do that," one said to me the other day.

"Sure you can," I said.

In any case, naming a fear diminishes it.

The great thing about all the denial is that I seem to be one of the few tennis bloggers anywhere who ever uses the term. I've even got one forehand where the mondo is SIM, another where it's IN SEQ. (A fair question: if IN SEQ, which of the two sequences?)

The authors of tennis technique articles, when they deal with the subject as they inevitably must, invariably use tortured, sequential explanation in accordance with their left brainedness, preferring 34 words to the one word, which would be "mondo."

Since I'm the person who uses this term most, I figure I can make up the rules. Here they are: Can be a noun or verb. Can be capitalized or not. Can be IN SEQ or SIM. Can be tried in different form at different places in the stroke.

[bottle]

Ouch

I dunno. After two days of hitting successively with heavy topspinning high school stars returning to the game, Brian, 48 and Bryant, 32, righty and lefty, I have some pain starting to develop just above the elbow on the inside of the arm, from forehands.

Still like the frames phone number 99945 but am not going to be twisting elbow while bending it during heavy contact in the match today or at any other time. Maybe I can twist elbow during arm and gut acceleration (4), but be done with that by the time I start bending it inches before contact (5). If I need any more closing of the strings embracing contact (which I probably won't since I'm playing somebody who hits flat), I'll provide it from forearm only.

[bottle]

Mondo + One

What physical action produces the warp in Federer's racket? (Here comes another video example: Note how the warp occurs one frame after the mondo-- it is an effect of Federer's racket moving faster than the film, and is perhaps more useful for us to observe than the highest speed series available, at least in this present instance and for this person.)

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/roger_federer_09/rf_forehand/rf_fh_wide/rf_fh_wide.html?RFFHWideOpenStanceCourtLevelRear1.mov

We've already decided not to close the racket from the wrist, so the action in question couldn't be that. And I got hurt when I tried prematurely turning the whole arm too close to contact, so it couldn't be that. And yet the racket butt turns a lot just at this point in the stroke, and this happens repeatedly in other sequences.

Is the blurring acceleration a wiper from the forearm, then? If so Federer is wiping the floor, not a windshield. In fact, there are a number of ways to twist from the forearm-- so that the racket rotates as if on a still axle, or so the racket is driven forward, closing, or so the racket is driven up, sideways, down. Actually, it seems here that this wiper drives up a bit, but only after it has wiped a level floor.

What images might help us to do this? A slap shot from hockey where the ice forces the stick blade backwards before it powers the other way. A frail boy or skinny tomboy who is good at skipping a flat rock across the still surface of a pond.

Why frailness and skinniness? Because one needs cleverness and forearm "knack" here rather than brute strength. If you are a filmmaker-athlete you want a blur but don't want to try too hard. The preference is to produce the blurring speed through biophysics of the smartest variety.

This brings us back to the "mondo" term. The pros using it could mean a full sidearm throw and not just the cocking back/downward of the racket tip for all I know. If not, maybe we should call the forearm twist that wipes the floor "mondo plus one." The point is not terminology but whether the linked backward and forward motion is a psychologically unified desire like an infielder's throw to first base. You lay the wrist back as you twist the forearm down (SIM) but you immediately fire the cocked wrist forward (from your forearm) and now you're ready to swing right to left with arm just beginning to scissor.

Such thinking might lead to a phone number such as 55735, which digits seem useless to the athlete-filmmaker since his body moves differently from the individual frames in film-- until he thinks about RATIO or PROPORTION at which moment he can feel all subtle differences. Consider the 7 in this light-- a bit longer than the lift with wrist laying conventionally back (5) or the continued lift with wrist at conventional Eastern setting (5). It puts slight arm extension downward from a still upper body (two frames) with level arm separation, racket closing and completion of the body turn the five frames previous.

Now the mondo plus one (three frames) starts with thrust of outer leg and the beginning of the long spiraling turn of the upper body all the way to a balanced ending. There is no utility in mentally separating hip turn from shoulders turn as far as I am concerned. The leg thrusts the upper body into a long, balletic jet with every Federfore.

Within that framework, however, there are three key frames where film and athletic movement, despite anything I've suggested, are one to one. You step on the gas, you mondo, you sidearm the racket tip parallel to the court (three frames, linked-- very fast).

We're working toward a stroke of 32 frames total where contact occurs somewhere between the twentieth and twenty-fifth frames: I gave a value of 5 (the last phone digit) to the final acceleration which occurs while actually hitting the ball because I was thinking of two frames more before contact and three frames afterward. I'd prefer not to think about the decelerative frames that come later but bring the total to 32. Every nuance of proportion up to contact and slightly beyond it is, however, well worth one's conscious attention. The goal is big hooking over-spin which you will recognize when you achieve it. Wanted: great spin and pace similar to a well struck drive in golf that makes the ball slightly hook and roll.

Some will have followed my proportions, others not, which is fine so long as they will consider developing their own. To quote the late Hungarian educator Lomb once again: "The knowledge you obtain at the expense of some brainwork will be more yours than what you receive ready-made."

[bottle]

A Pooch Forehand

Maximize the Mondo by keeping the wrist straight through a preparatory loop. Then slightly delay. Then start the graceful spiral (later than in the just described forehand posted moments before this one). The racket is going backward this time. It's going backward and downward as the body springs and torques into the ball.

One very important note on all of this. In any forehand of the species Federforis, the arm mondos well out in the slot. Just check out where the racket head points when Roger's arm is still bent. It's pointing more toward the right fence than at the rear fence. It's pointing pretty much in the direction that Roger's eyes are looking.

Contrast this kind of preparation with a Stan Smith forehand where arm actually is wound round past the shoulders line.

What these two preparations have in common, however, is a huge shoulders turn.

[bottle]

The Longest Backhand Ever?

Don Budge may have had the greatest backhand. That doesn't mean, though, that he or his brother Lloyd or William F. Talbert or Bruce S. Old was necessarily the best person at explaining it.

I simply want to apply the Mondo principle as seen in the pooch version of a Roger Federer genre forehand, post # 100, to a Don Budge backhand.

The idea comes from Talbert and Old, THE GAME OF SINGLES IN TENNIS, page 142: "The shot should be made with a firm grip, the wrist straightening and locking naturally at the time of contact." The beautiful drawings and diagrams of Ed Vebell, Katharine D. Old and Stephen P. Baldwin give no help in understanding this.

For, if the wrist is going to straighten, it must have been bent. And if it was bent, then it was bent in one of two ways, either humped or concave.

If humped, the strings would be closed behind Don Budge's back-- but they are open. Wrist must be moving from concave to straight then during his large forward upper body turn with arm and body a single unit at these fleeting points in the tract.

We're looking for some extra person-generated sponginess in the strings as the racket makes contact. The simple act of straightening the wrist as shoulders swing produces roll in the racket, i.e., the upper edge goes forward while the lower edge goes backward-- so there it is.

Assumption: Contact in lower half of racket. True some times and not others. If you believe that Don Budge hit the ball exactly in the middle of his wooden racket's small sweet spot every time (not hard to believe, I'll readily admit) you win the argument and I am wrong.

Talbert and Old also tell us that the swing is non-accelerative. And we can see from both the drawings in the book and the videos at TennisPlayer that the arm is not rolling in the crucial area, i.e., ripping the strings upward at contact as in a closed string starting Federer backhand so much as hitting through with a long, gradual uppercut.

But Budge got the racket pretty square. And his organic straightening of wrist added to his feel along with all of his power. And the risk of damage to his arm in such a "conk" backhand is diminished in that the total swing is easy, unhurried and perhaps even non-accelerative, as the book's two authors assert.

Note 1: Budge like Federer kept his hand in the slot. This "longest of all backhands," the Budgian phenomenon, is positively short when you consider hand travel alone.

Note 2: The Budge and Federer backhands are hit pretty much with the same grip.

Note 3: A rueful but maybe positive observation about tennis: When your arm gets hurt it becomes a better sensor.

[bottle]

Re-dial 55645 (Hear the Beeps)

In reference to Mondo + One or Post # 99, 55645 is less dramatic but healthier for the arm, giving it an extra frame in which to change direction during the four (4), which breaks down as follows:

First frame: Step on gas and turn shoulders

Second frame: Mondo (SIM)

Third frame: Rest forearm before turning it the opposite way

Fourth frame: Twist racket along runway and take-off.

[bottle]

Continuation and Correction

Donald Budge's topspin backhand is a new/old avenue, with different shops along the sides, one of which is called "Grip" and may sell suitcases.

On his grip, Don says, "I advise turning the hand about a one-eighth turn farther behind the racket than with the forehand-- and remember the forehand is the shake-hands, flat part of the hand upon the flat part of the racket." So I was 3/8ths mistaken when I compared this grip to Roger Federer's.

On other persons' topspin backhands sometime in mid-twentieth century, Don admired Arthur Ashe, Manuel Santana, Don McNeill, Frank Kovacs,
Tony Trabert, and Frank Parker. He thought good but not great the TSBH's of
Rod Laver, Dennis Ralston and Bobby Riggs.

All this is from the backhand section, pages 110-115 of DON BUDGE: A TENNIS MEMOIR. As to where he himself fits in comparisons, he says, "I would settle for none but my own. I state that unequivocally, not because I think mine was necessarily better but because I am sure that it was a more natural shot than anyone else's."

On how difficult his type is to hit, he says, "There is nothing very tricky to this."

On the technical aspects, he says, "I do not want to go into a long involved polemic on exactly how and when to pivot your hips and turn your shoulders and swivel your neck and furrow your brow...If you will hit the easy baseball-style backhand that I do, about all I must tell you is to stand sideways, feet spaced comfortably apart, and then stroke through the ball-- that is, do not flail at it like a .050-hitting pitcher. If you follow my suggestions, the rest of your body, the legs and the shoulders and the arms and the back, will all take care of themselves. You will be surprised how easy it is to hit a really good backhand."

Elsewhere, he compares his BH to Ted Williams' baseball swing (and in fact Don Budge swang lefty in baseball). Maybe he didn't know or care that in describing technique, his own or anybody else's, Ted Williams could fill an oral encyclopedia in less than three minutes.

Don's much older brother Lloyd, he of the great kick serve, is the person who inveigled Don away from baseball, so one assumes Lloyd at least started him on his backhand.

In TENNIS MADE EASY, one of the classic tennis books, the magnetic Lloyd, whose ugliness was so extreme it passed for handsomeness, emphasizes keeping the elbow out.

Don, on the other hand, emphasizes keeping it in, but he's probably talking about ready position.

On height of takeback, Lloyd says, "The higher the elbow, the lower level the racket attains on its course back." And Talbert and Old, in THE GAME OF SINGLES IN TENNIS, picture Don with a high takeback.

In the six video sequences at TennisPlayer, though, takeback is around waist level, and Don seems to be doing just fine.

In his memoir again, he says of his backhand, "When I was good, it was very good; when I was bad, it was still good."

The exception was at one of his Wimbledons, when the stroke suddenly went sour on him. So he wandered to an outlying court, where two veteran women were playing singles, one of whom was dominating. "That old girl," he writes, "moved over and reached out and hit this gorgeous zinging topspin backhand."

At that moment he realized he had been hitting down on the ball rather than up on it. So you see, reader, how he kept even his autologues simple: "Am I hitting slice or am I hitting topspin?" Would that my life-- maybe-- were that simple.

Me, I messed up my elbow in a match with The Partridge last week by ill-advisedly hitting a perfect slap-shot forehand in the opposite direction from which both myself and The Partridge were looking.

The only shots I can hit right now are backhands, so I thought it would be fun to take my high rise basket to the court for a couple of weeks and revisit the
Don Budge backhand-- just to see what new I can learn and if there is anything I want to keep.

But one commonly neglected aspect of this whole discussion, it seems to me, is the excellent backhand of Vic Braden, used by him both to play and to teach.

His model, as he tells us in TENNIS FOR THE FUTURE (a book that deeply affected at least one full tennis generation) was Don Budge as seen through a small hole in a fence.

The part about when and how to move the hips is quite complicated, I've always thought. Just going by the six videos at TennisPlayer, they move differently when one stays on the ground or leaves it: The airborne version is especially interesting for its bouncing recovery-- the hips rotate just before a simultaneous landing on both feet followed by a bound and then a sidestep toward the center.

(BUT "Old men shouldn't jump up in the air!" I can still hear that cry from an adjacent court.)

Vic Braden may have based all the TFTF ground strokes on the Don Budge backhand-- maximum leg extension with minimum hand travel.

Braden's innately and intently gyro cleverness may have adapted it quite a bit, though. First, on backhand side, grip is more around to left. Second, the racket face starts closed, way out left, then loops in for the "sit and hit."

The real fun in hitting this type of shot, however, may be in taking a nice easy cut at the ball before the front leg chimes in and keeping everything going, easy, on the slight gradient upward with internal weight transfer spread all the way to the end.

Caveat: When you see a film of Don Budge's body rising into the air as his left leg moves toward left fence, you know that his weight already had to be on the front foot. The same thing is true in a Federer backhand where, preferring not to go into the air, he moves his left leg toward the right fence as front leg extends.

[bottle]

Federer's vs. Budge's Backhand Grip

Sorry again. There are eight bevels on the racket, so a one eighth turn is one bevel.

Going by big knuckle system alone (not as good as when you assign a second number for heel of hand), Roger Federer comes in at 8, Don Budge at 1, John McEnroe at 1.5 yes for his topspin backhand but for all of his strokes as well according to himself in YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS.

[bottle]

Federfore (more commentary at straight arm/double bend discussion)

FEDERFORE

55463 (and ten frames to finish)

wok wok wuk feeeel SLAaaaaaaaaam

feel slaam

feeeel SLAaaaaaaaaam