A New Year's Serve

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Film at 2 p.m. Balls too Frozen till then. This is the Script.

Idealism in a Barrel: a Personal Narrative of Body Core

Hands up together (rock forward).
Hands down splitting (rock backward).
Ease forward on the toss, bent paw combing the head
Straight paw coming close behind to lift and pass
Hips and shoulders turn
Backward to raise ta more
And settle weight on
Rear foot, which now
Beams a dream of gleam
Of a colored barrel that topples
And plunges, starting to spin,
Warping to left where it
Spins faster on a line up
From behind one's tilted head.

Did the driving, spinning
Hand, warping to the left
Leave the racket head
Behind, wefting to the right?
It did. But what else did it
Do or try to do?

It tried for ISR-- no dice.
For this barrel has mo
And ment and um
With hand moving hard
To left
Behind the head.
But building quiet force
Until the arm, unconscious
And Unseen, snaps straight
So that ISR, unopposed at last
May release without surcease.

Film notes: The folks at Hudl Technique agree that my phone can never flip me from left-handed to right-handed even though it did flip me to left-handed which no one understands.

If I therefore want to see myself as right-handed, I film again with the Moto android natural video-recording function, then play back both versions with the Hudl left-handers rendered in four different speeds. With the Hudl ability to stop or reverse or proceed with a swipe of one's forefinger.

Writing notes: Although all writing is autobiographical I don't do advertising copy. I do discovery instead.

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Perpetual Change in the Technique of All Sports

Vs. same old, same old foul shot (basketball) a million times. Million dollar per year basketball coaches advocate this, thinking it the best way to win.

The robotic repetition appears to work, mainly because it never gets measured against the opposite philosophy. Not enough players have ever subscribed to the notion of perpetual change for there to be a study.

If some player has perfectionist tendencies and always thinks he can improve his foul shot, he needs to do it in silence and perhaps even in secret on his own.

In professional football, however, we learn that Tom Brady brings in a special coach around this time of year to work on his passing technique.

Tom Brady!? Fiddling with technique?

My contention is that not doing something new all the time-- perhaps a very small difference-- leads to the same result as not wearing something new on Easter.

A bird will poop on your head.

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Emersonian Compensation as in Ralph Waldo

There aren't many compensations for having to immediately lift your elbow way up over the shoulders line.

One however is that a smaller amount of passive ESR will get your elbow and hand beneath it lined up with ball in a high facsimile of pro drop.

To "roll out the barrel" one can utilize before and after freeze points rather than trying to think through a bunch of continuous motion.

First freeze point: low point of racket behind you-- as low as you can comfortably get it.

Second freeze point: The gradually tilting barrel has already arrived at its horizontal position.

Torso twisting around one's still head can then help throw bent elbow straight up.

So, the leftward lean that the spinning barrel animates may be faster than one thought.

One wants one's human head off to the side early enough so that the tail end of one's torso twist can continue the vertical plane originally started by rear foot push.

Your head moves and then it doesn't move.

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Refinement

The arms can be more bent than one has had them. As hands go down the ta can straighten hence separate from ha which holds its bend.

ha now lifts toward right fence and continues on same hook-shot-like pathway up over head, clearing it. To retain this form and yet to achieve a diagonal behind the back, however, one may want to start the hook shot toward the right fence, yes, but also a bit toward the net post.

At moment that feels the best, perhaps as ha's hand clears head or slightly before, one performs one's toss which doesn't just place ball but starts reconfiguration of the bod.

The rear leg first but front leg too are driving by now to start the passiveness of a 20 to 30-degree arm squeeze.

"Squeeze" is not the best term, "closing together of the two halves of the arm" seems better.

This and all movement of arm behind the back is motion-dependent including ESR which is not muscular either. What is muscular is just begun torso twist and abduction/adduction which start together and are pretty long.

Also muscular is ISR which is trying to happen but can't yet because of momentum in the relaxed shoulder.

To snap a wet towel one can't get the weight of it going too fast. The requisite slowness comes from your pre-knowledge of what you will do next; in fact you either have already begun to pull or taken forward arm to an end-stopped position.

Similarly, one's ISR, held back by loose momentum, becomes the central focus over the passive snapping of arm straight which happened just before.

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Fun, Continued

The barrel tilts slightly forward without spinning. It then tilts sideways (and forward) while starting to spin. It then just spins.

This guidance is as good as anyone is apt ever to receive.

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

Be very excited by furniture # 12, the orange-slatted barrel that changes its orientation as it whirls then spins in space.

One's excitement is just as important as one's comprehension of this strange, transmuting object.

The barrel once was brown which I liked since I went to Brown University.

Now it is reddish orange but I don't let that get me down.

A furniture is a visual, a picture, drawing or video in the midst of text.

To get to the slatted barrel, go to "The 3D Serve: Upward Swing Path 1" (https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...ng_part_1.html) and count down through the furnitures until you get to # 12 .

For a rotorded server such as myself, this is the most important animation he will see in his life.

It should be pretty important for a server of any other stripe as well.

If, within the phenomenon known as "leftward lean," the head becomes the axis for torso twist, and the head with bod is tilted to the left, the tt will produce more upwardness of racket travel and naturally increase spin (see Brian Gordon's explanation) of the barrel.

Some players move their head to the left at the last moment to get it out of the way of the shot.

But one doesn't want to be altering the torso twist axis when one is within an arm snap distance below the ball.

The leftward lean should, I speculate, happen before the final torso twist.

How much before?

I don't have the answer, only the question.

If one's front shoulder is closed while one kicks arch into the back, however, I can see how one might honor the words of my late friend Bill Matthias, the former singles champ of Guyana.

"I have concluded, after a lifetime of playing tennis," he said, "that all true power in the serve comes from arching the back."

Chris Lewit has told us that back arch happens at once in two directions, 1) along the spine and 2) across the spine.

Both directions should add to the upwardness of the torso twist.

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Backward Division of Serve: Now Alter the Amount of Forward Travel on the Toss

~

Also, while keeping ha ta sequence on the toss, vary this way:

1) the sequence to be simultaneous with the body turns.

2) rise of ha to start before the body turns, which are simultaneous with rise of ta.

Note: Backward hips turn is the more important of the two body turns. (I didn't get into a tilt and a lot of other stuff here.) The serves I have in mind combine forward travel with bod turning back. The turning back is the reason I refer to them as "backward division" or I guess you could say "backswing."

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Why not combine backward hips turn and backward torso twist, doing both at once, but first adjust stance for best racket path going the other way.

This move is simultaneous with one half forward travel on the toss. I say "one half" hoping to convey the idea of getting to halfway between the legs.

Rear leg can bend an extra amount after that.

One could think of this last move as transition from horizontal to vertical rotation.

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If you Produce Short Runways up to the Ball, Give yourself a Racket Lowering Test

Just strike a pose as if you are sculpture, with your racket as low behind you as you can get it.

For me this happens with hips and shoulders turned back as far as they will go.

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Ice Cream Cones

Ice cream cone toss.

Inverted ice cream cone is form of the serve.

The inverted cone is wide at the base. (Rock all the way forward with hands conjoined and raised. Rock all the way backward with hands conjoined and lowered.)

Start gently forward for midway toss (halfway between the legs) as hips coil backward.

The toss for a short upward runway syndrome server can start with bent right arm (abbreviated) to get shoulder housing opened early.

The body now segments further. The ingredients for this are hips bulging farther toward net and backward torso twist as shoulders divide from the hips toward the rear fence. All of this involves further bending of rear leg.

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Went Early. The Wind still was Blowing. Didn't Film.

What emerged: Don't over-conceive. The upward motion of ha that starts the serve doesn't have to be reversed. And ta can straighten on the fly horizontally-- enough of a ta backswing or downswing or whatever you want to call it and up she goes. I've been here before, just forgot. This is what I did the day when my serve was letting me and my partner down and then I got on top of it. ha starts and ta chimes in. Very direct. And very high trajectory serves.

I simply didn't value that earlier experience enough to learn from it. Why were the serves better? Because the shoulder housing was up there. No need therefore to have tried to correct a hundred other details.

The word "toss" implies relaxation. If toss is relaxed enough it can be in one motion rather than two as for everybody else. The toss does need to be vigorous as well.

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Another Way of Getting the Elbow up High Early without Having to Re-invent the Whole Serve

The new tripod blew over, but no damage was done except to my ego. More important, I now want to return to down together up together form. The difference from the past shall be that I start with ha and ta stacked instead of conjoined. The elbow of ha shall start quite high in other words, which ought to solve a lot of problems.

I see this as related to somebody starting his serve with his racket on his shoulder but probably better. One can copy everything one does when both hands are connected through the racket, from a rhythmic viewpoint. Maybe up together, down together and up together. And if losing control of this, put both hands back on the racket for a serve or two which in my case wasn't THAT bad of a serve.

This experiment is for a good purpose-- to get elbow high early. The idea, as explained to me by teaching pro Sebastien Foka here in Detroit eight years ago, is that if you don't get it up early you won't get it up at all.

That's probably true of a cross-section of tennis players (a large cross-section?). Unfortunately, I'm in that group.

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A Baseball Windup after All?

The wildest thing about this serve will be its use of backward torso twist to reinforce the toss.

No the wildest thing about this serve will be elbow at address-- so high that one can glom into the universe-wide phenomenon called gravity.

G will cause one arm to straighten, the other to bend, with both things to happen at the same time. Think about that! Wild. But, bend a lot or a little?

Tried a few of these serves so bizarre for me at the outset this morning. All of which were severely beat up on. Fortunately, I had an alternative I had actually practiced. I think I need to believe in my newest of all new serves if it is to become good, i.e., get to the court with my new tripod and filming capacity and work on the motion until it refuses to fight back.

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The Maiden Voyage of this New Serve should be Quite Spectacular

There Bottle will be with his hands way over his head, swaying back and forth while imagining that he is squishing grapes.

The guys will either stare or not notice any difference from other days. I will not be surprised by their comments.

The higher the hands the farther the bod will cause them to sway.

But the ha may not bend much until the legs fired. (It started with bend in it after all.) I have always wondered whether squeezing of the arm together figures as racket lowers to counter the legs drive or does ESR only count. How about a hybrid? Valuable or worthless?

Verbal description of a serve tends to be slower than real time. The serve will likely have to be more compact than conceived. The sway will flow directly into the toss. The legs will fire to cause all the rest.

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A Baseball Windup after All?

The trick shoulder I was born with dictates that, for effective serving, I need to get the elbow up early.

I've tried countless ways of doing this but why not just do it with both hands way high and joined like a big league pitcher?

Now passive ha travel can go level instead of ascending while forearm falls bent.

And while passive ta falls straight.

Next, toss starts from higher up than normal, in no way a bad thing as Pancho Gonzalez noted long ago although he himself didn't make that radical change.

After the passive stuff is finished some active stuff, simultaneous, takes over. That would be the toss and the backward slanted torso twist as closing halves of the arm now clench in a muscular way and rear leg bends.

The wildest thing about this serve will be its use of backward torso twist to reinforce the toss.

One description of this serve, incomplete of course: sway and torso twist backward, sway and torso twist forward.

The last time I tried such a baseball-looking configuration in actual play, I quit it after the first attempted serve. And I have four scheduled matches in the next four days. Wouldn't it be fine if the new serve worked from first point and just continued to work?

Additionally, my new tripod arrived early but I can't see using it until the weekend.

As I read this over, the most questionable thing in my mind is whether downward travel of the racket will match upward drive from the legs. That seems universal to all serves-- I almost surely will need to fiddle more with arm function behind the back to achieve the wanted coordination.