A New Year's Serve

[stumphges]

That's an eastern, with heel in middle of panel and big knuckle low on the same panel or maybe even on the point.

You're right about hand tension ("like holding a bird's nest," my Russian student said). Personally, my big knuckle is on the 3.5 ridge.

But Roger's may be up a bit from that ridge.

Will Hamilton (who has a bunch of other Maryland area pros to work with) just did a study on Roger's grip at FYB (Fuzzy Yellow Balls). It's a UTube video for anybody. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXcsblS3Jl4&fmt=22

Maybe you had seen it already. Hamilton and his people studied 3000 instances in which they found both Roger's heel (of hand) and big knuckle on panel 3, which is a conventional eastern grip.

Thanks, yes, I had seen it, but after I'd posted my question for you. So into a left-brain-worded twilight-zone we go (I'm pretty literal, (but liberal), I'm afraid):

Could you do an experimental favor for me bottle?

You know how Roger leaves his thumb straight and relaxed during the backswing, all the way until the right hip snaps, the elbow straightens, and the wrist lays back? Then he blocks the backward snap of the 'top' of the handle with his index knuckle, index finger, and end of thumb (which drops onto bevel 8 at this moment, completing the ring).

Could you try leaving your thumb straight, rather than grabbing onto bevel 8, and see what happens? Can you still do the stroke? I'd be happy for your report.

[bottle]

Editing Excess Looseness out of Service Motion

Sure, John, and I liked the word "please." But I think I made clear my pitch for the necessity of "twilight zone" or a better, less loaded term, "hypnagogy"
or the "hypnagogic" if one doesn't fear success and really wants best possible stroke action for oneself in this lifetime.

Sure, stumphges, I'd be glad to try that thumb straight experiment and report back, and thanks. I'm also on the same page with you about the problems of being overly literal, analytic, pedantic, rigid, legalistic, particular, written word oriented, not funny at all and very mean, i.e., left-brain. The answer is to use both hemispheres together and rely on complete images much more, and sure, laugh like hell when you lose unless you're a competitor.
Then, if you don't taste ashes you weren't trying hard enough.

But about hip snap, elbow straightening, wrist laying back...you may be right but I see this a different way.

I see a very straight line from elbow to racket tip, with Roger's elbow out a bit from his body thus producing a loop far more simple than I ever could have imagined (I had to arrive at it laboriously by trial and by error).

The left hand (always right-brained!) can start the racket head up and out while elbow pivots in one place. The forearm can turn the bottom edge toward rear fence as separated left arm pulls body into a huge turn. The right arm then completes its extension with wrist still straight.

Now you're ready to go, and I compare what happens next to a golfer taking a divot or a hockey player slapping the tip of his stick back. There isn't turf or ice to help you, so you have to kill the racket tip with perfect timing, because
your body now is springing and turning very FAST. What does help is if you gathered your wits and your muscles for the big spring just as your arm got straight. No matter what anyone may tell you, timing is not difficult even against the hardest hit balls if you prepared in this way. Looseness of grip has a lot to do with how the racket tip will go down and back just as you cream the ball. (I'm not permitting myself to think about different parts of the hand at contact just now although there may have been a time for that.)

On service, I asked myself today, "Why take 40 degrees of loose compression of arm from its right angle before you take an additional 40 degrees in which to build resistance?"

Why not, starting with straight arm, take 90 degrees during bend/travel, and 80 degrees during which you gradually build the pressure in your shoulder rotors and in your triceps.

I wrote this out before the gratuitous insult, but wanted to wait till I tried it. Saw no lessening of ball behavior but a modest increase in smooth continuity, which makes me want to go with it.

[bottle]

Thumb-off Experiment

Peter Perret, former director of the Winston-Salem Symphony, is a tremendous educator who again and again has leapfrogged kids' scores in math and reading through the use of music in public and private schools across the country.

He talks and writes about neuronal connections in the brain, about how when there are more of them, well myelinized, old people become less subject to Alzheimers (if one pathway breaks down others take the load-- good then to have many, he suggests).

The health, vigor and longevity of orchestra directors is legend of course.

But who knew that a challenged kid's corpus callosum, the organ that takes information in both directions between right and left brain actually grows from exposure to classical music (the so-called Mozart effect).

A great example in tennis of brain hemispheres working together is John McEnroe's launching of the cups. Meanness (left-brain) combined with spatial awareness (right-brain) so that he launched the full cups and not the table under them. I saw Ivan Lendl do a similar thing at Rock Creek Park to a bee.

Peter Perret reported in the talk I heard that Clarence Big House Gaines used both to read and have others read while bouncing a basketball.

Smart athletes, whether conscious about it or not, figure out ways to combine mind and matter.
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stumphges, I tried taking thumb off the racket while hitting a Federer type forehand exactly as you described. I could hit the shot but lost a bit of accuracy, and didn't like the idea of last instant manipulation (restoring thumb to panel eight) during contact, and I had a match to play. Contact is so fast-- .004 of a second-- and my previously expressed divot/slapshot idea gives one much to do already, i.e., simultaneously lay hand back and twist it down,
so why complicate this?

I love all experiments however, and the wilder the better. Some would call that just part of brainstorming, which I am convinced most players don't do nearly enough of. In my philosophy of tennis a first day kid would not just learn separation but to modify her strokes as part of a routine for the rest of her life.

I looked at the eleven forehands in High Speed Archive in connection with your question. If this link doesn't work, http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...04813-0001.mov ,
just go to High Speed Archive and click on the last of Roger's forehands and decide for yourself what he does.

Not that anyone has to imitate him of course.

[stumphges]

Thanks bottle

Thanks bottle,

Much appreciated. Don't worry, I'm not going to try to drag you into unnecessary grip conversations. It sounds like you've got all you need - just don't let the bird fly out of your hand.

Sorry I didn't tell you the rationale, but I like a controlled experiment. I'm missing half a thumb on my playing hand (not as bad as it sounds actually, only really hampered two or three activities my whole life - remember those old car door handles where you had to push the hard metal button with your thumb? - now obsolete).

However, my grip seems a little unstable, especially on high-swingspeed forehands. So, just wanted to get an outside view. The main thing seems to be that that the thumb, index and third finger form a 'ring' 'round the grip that prevents the handle torquing off the hand when it pivots about the index knuckle. But without a thumb on bevel 8, this ring is incomplete, and on certain shots the handle can break out a little bit and wobble on the pivot. This also leads to excessive hand tension - and thus arm tension, shoulder tension...

No need to reply, of course. Thanks again for your help.

[bottle]

Wow!

is all I can say. Have you read any biography of Bill Tilden?
Some think his shot-making improved after the removal of
some of his digits.

I'm holding a racket right now and looking down. I think most
control from the thumb is in the digit closest to the hand. And
I didn't lose that much control when I took the thumbnail part off
and there was no practice-- it was just an experiment of a couple of
minutes!

Service grip could be really interesting. Mine has moved over the years
down toward web between thumb and forefinger, where I'm stronger, maybe because of a broken wrist when I was 13 or 14.

Yes, controlled experiments are the best except maybe in the case of the next one.

[bottle]

Wild Experiment 999

Service development has been going well. Adding body to toss replaced the Tiantric turn which PRECEDES toss in the John McEnroe serve. Recent experiments have concerned the winding up of the arm in all basic serves.

But I have a different slice available in which the arm bends earlier and only to a right angle-- took this from the Dennis Ralston article about hitting out very wide and very low.

Would I want to make a second bizarre option available to myself in which I steal back from McEnroe his squeezing together of arm before racket tip goes significantly down?

I (you) wouldn't have to turn arm out the way he does since you've already got it turned out at address.

AT THE COURT. This is neither Federer nor McEnroe, and the only question is whether it is me. Squeeze arm completely together about twice as fast as usual during body bend/travel. Since I'd like to preserve the present (and kinetic) "wrist starts bent this way and then as consequence of centrifugality gets naturally bent the opposite way," my elbow had better get far back or I'll hit myself in the head. But my elbow had better get far back any time.

RESULT: Arm coiled this way is very snakelike (and how could that right-brain image ever be bad?). Pre-load of triceps from there will invoke a steel band holding both halves of the arm together as they strive to pull apart. Body-arm conflict, so useful, will now be relegated to shoulder rotors pre-load. And there will be much more rotors play (with which to play).

Rotordedness has been a secret when not so secret subject of all these posted service experiments.

This serve worked quite well. The most economic way to go, in this experiment, seems to be to bend arm completely then let elbow passively rotate upward a bit during the spring and simultaneous pre-load of rotors.

On the other hand, the first time I saw the Bea Bielik serve at Wake Forest University the year she was NCAA champion, I was amazed at the duration of time and distance in which her racket traversed her back.

This was (and remains) one of the smoothest and niftiest motions I will ever see, and admiration should always lead one to experiment. (I'LL be the one to decide if I shouldn't try something at home, thank you.)

I have no idea what Bea was actually doing, and didn't ask her when I met her in Leon's bar, but in my own terms if I start with arm out a bit to my right and then bend it completely but let the travel leftward continue, the elbow will rise-- has to.

But I will have added a new motion or lengthened the old one and do I want to do that?

All depends on racket head speed and direction generated by the different possibilities as always.

[bottle]

Problem-solving with a Smooth Pen

New ideas are permitted, encouraged, as are revision and modification of old ones. None of this panders to the reader as much as commercial prose. It's more like lab report!

On serve: Pulling hand across to bend arm (completely) and then twist the elbow to make it go up and back and farther around doesn't make sense...since you can accomplish all of these goals with one simultaneous motion which is much more economical.

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On forehand (a Federfore): Most people agree that grip should be so light and relaxed that racket almost flies out every time. There might be more disagreement on whether Roger Federer and a lot of other tour players hit the ball in the center of the racket or in the lower half. Anyone with worries about racket twisting in hand at contact should join the latter group and seek out those videos of Roger in his prime where he's hit the ball but his racket is now turned over out of all proportion to where it should be given his known grip.

If the racket is going to slip, in other words, make it slip in the right direction.
Hit all balls in the lower part of the racket or in the middle but never in the upper part (if it were horizontal which it isn't).

Okay, that takes care of horizontal orientation. Vertically speaking,
Harold Brody has shown through "bonking" experiments at Penn that the faster the racket head moves relative to the hand the closer to racket tip the sweet spot is. He has other technical terms for fixed items in racket design.

stumphges, if you are reading this, I don't know about you but in my case I use more forearm muscles on some of these shots than others, and when
I do am confident that I'm swinging the frame more, which makes it "track" more, i.e., makes it less likely to slip in the loose hand.

[bottle]

Add Cobra Coverage (one of the most unpleasant programs in the world)

Am still working on serve number three to go with:

1) Federal Convention
2) Ralston Slice.

First we add cobra to bottom of the racket drop, and do so quite close to the body during the toss. Think Marion Bartoli, Jamie Murray, Jack Kramer for a rough look.

Individual progression, a kind of jazz riff over days and weeks, has us already with hand turned in, but it coils down farther (the "cobra," according to Ochi, one of the characters at this website).

Now, on bend/travel, we draw both hand and elbow away from the body, coiling the elbow completely (some would say "scissoring" it but not I with my Cobra tennis shoes). The combined motion is cobra coverage, only pleasant this time, and more like a copperhead coiling for a low strike along the ground.

Forget all snaky things in what happens next. The squeezed together arm, trying to break its bonds, turns back on shoulder rotors which fight to fire in opposite direction every inch of the way. The body IS FIRING of course.

Does hand centrifugate to outside of arm as rotors and triceps finally release at great speed, or do you keep hand to inside until arm is straight?

You can do either, but if you maintain hand to inside, you can finally fire racket in the continued tomahawk throw way out to right-- with that simple image including your pronation of a certain nature, i.e., pronation that doesn't flatten the angle between arm and racket.

Pronation by itself doesn't add significantly to total energy. Pronation assisted by a tomahawk throw is something else.

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One who writes as often as I, especially with the right hand, i.e., in a mean and temporal, overly analytical, left-brain way, must always ask whether my accusers are correct, "that he is intoxicated with the sound of his scratching pen," as the philosopher Leonard Shlain has said of the 16th century prelate John Calvin.

No, my pen is smooth and silent, and I know for a fact that I am not prolific.

One must always ask, however, "Am I being crazy enough?" then, "Am I being too crazy?"

A slightly open racket at address and slightly bent arms fall in the category of arbitrary decision-making.

Should one try, alternatively, straight arms? I did but returned to what is most comfortable for me.

Should one, again at address, turn hand in more-- couldn't one get extra cobra that way? Yes, but why change the setting you use on other serves?

I tried first forcing tip straight down during the toss; then tried not altering the wrist at all until I was drawing the racket head up and around-- snakiest of the experiments but truly unpredictable.

Then tried mild turning of racket tip in behind body (again during the toss), which led to a spate of consistent serves-- a good start in all matters of eternal flux.

[bottle]

All these Things about one 2nd serve by Justine Henin

1) She tosses as far out front as Dennis Ralston (two feet over the baseline) but when she makes contact her head (left temple) in in line with the ball in backward-forward dimension.

2) So, to do that, she travels like mad (hip out ahead and then she fires it even farther ahead with her back leg before front leg is even straight).

3) The finishing of front leg thrust brings the freed back leg up to it and there is considerable catapult (body rotation in which head moves).

4) Toss is from hands still together-- one goes up, one back.

5) Then, instead of achieving the right-angled arm during full bend/travel common to many servers, she BOTH takes straight arm around (a couple of feet maybe at the hand) and starts bending it then completes this full arm bend as rear leg fires. At this point she is closest to a Leaning Tower of Pisa in side-view. Of course there is leftward lean as well-- another thing. Again, the toss starts early followed by sideways movement of straight arm before it starts to bend.

6) She sticks the landing with BOTH legs flying in opposite direction.

7) Am still not perfectly confident of what she does with wrist; here, she appears to get it straight on the tossing takeback.

8) Something you (I) may never have realized. The bent arm aims first at rear right fence post but extends at ball. Without any kind of body rotation rear fence post is where the edge of the racket would go. With quick body rotation, whatever its nature/combination, the elbow/racket edge now points on a 45-degree angle at the ball. Not flat strings parallel to net or pure edge perpendicular to net but in between equals 45 degrees. Bend-straighten, bend-straighten-- 90 degrees, 90 degrees on the "straighten." This is illustrated in the Chris Lewit articles as well, by the young left-hander using an elastic to build strength in his triceps muscle. The body turns ninety degrees each arm extension.

9) I'm going to pen this before I see it in video to determine if I was right or wrong. Justine pivots on her front heel for a second serve, on the ball of her front foot for a first serve. So when does she pivot on her heel? I say it's during the toss. Right/wrong? RIGHT about when she pivots on heel. But she pivots later when using the ball of her foot. Heel or ball-- you can't generalize about first and second serves as I just did. She uses either method on either a first or second serve.

10) One key to upward, rapid, dreamed of totally consistent silk-tearing spin for me personally is to get little finger permanently off the end of the racket.
The time has come.

[bottle]

Forward Momentum in the J. Henin Second Serve

My loose pinky is back on the racket but not there to stay all the time. If this causes a new strand of myelinized nerve connection, good-- I won't get Alzheimers as soon as a more monotoned person. Hana Mandlikova should have a long and happy life since she has too many tennis strokes.

There has to be simple pleasure in discovering how something clever works.

The Federer serve is famous not only for its effectiveness but for its conventional notion that as straight arm bends to form a right angle the knees bend and travel toward the net.

The Henin serve separates knee bend from knee travel more distinctly. As straight arm winds sideways the knees bend weight onto both feet.

(Or you could keep all of your weight on rear foot if you wanted.)

As straight arm bends to form a right angle the knees travel low and pretty fast toward the net-- a different feel with a certain simplicity.

The legs fire in two different directions and at two different speeds because of their two different loads. The player throws the racket down on the legs drive and up on vigorous-to-the-max body rotation which the left hand quickly brakes to snap arm forward on its hinge into the ball.

Remember this snap on one serve to make another snap coincide with it on the next.

That would be a snap toward right fence, and both now will happen together as a super snap.

There is much hips turn on this serve but not much separate horizontal upper body rotation before contact and a lot of catapulting of head and shoulders though without jackknifing the body very much.

Without being or wanting to be an expert on the following two alternatives, I think to hit a good kick serve one must either block the hips or block the upper body but not both. And blocking the upper body through countering with left arm is an old idea.

The rhythm of this serve is down, toss, wind, bend, THROW-- or onetwothree four-FIVE. "Wind" and "bend" are subtle and slow like the top of a good golfer's backswing. "THROW" is very fast. It has to be. The hand, starting behind neck, has to go all the way down and all the way up and all the way down again and across to your follow-through in a single beat. Hard then to think about anything at that point. Maybe we shouldn't, ever.

As far as small hand movements are concerned, they, too must be anti-intellectualized, i.e., kept right brain; but they start before arm is straight and end with acceleration off of the ball AFTER contact.

My conclusion from reading theoreticians on this snap-combining-wrist straightening-and-forearm-pronation is that there is consensus on where it ends-- slightly after contact-- and disagreement on where it should begin--at start or at end of arm extension? Neither, I say. Start it with arm still partially bent at the point where left arm puts on the brake.

Try half, 3/4, 2/5, 9/10, any fraction of arm extension you can think of until you hear the noise you want.

[bottle]

Learning a Principle of Serving from a One-hand Backhand

For years I didn't swing around properly on my full loop one-hand backhand, couldn't consistently hit the acute angles I wanted. The solution was to get the racket over the left shoulder and keep extending backward and downward with both hands. This created a trigger, i.e., a residue of bend in the right arm with which to separate out of the left arm. Trigger as beginning of forward swing immediately blends into upper body rotation and arm swing sideways which virtually squares strings to the target. It's a fluid action which becomes easy and quick, and it happens before you've even applied the power (which can come from a blend of clenching shoulder-blades together with arm twisting of frame straight up).

What I want to take from this is the idea of a minimal trigger. Having pursued the Justine Henin serve pretty far, I want to go a single step more, i.e., don't operate with the feel that racket tip is coming up like a skunk tail behind me as part of my hurtling toward the ball. This is certainly workable, but I would prefer to emphasize sideways rather than forward racket work at this point.

Sideways does make sense in a Henin-type motion. During the toss you feel as if you're smoothing the racket a short distance straight back. But then it starts to cross (all the same motion if you really think about it). Now the arm begins to bend, and yes, it will do so to a right angle, but why shouldn't you take it beyond the upright (skunk-tail) position? If you've been straightening wrist why not keep going with it until it's cocked, i.e., laid open as happens in a forehand? At the same time you may key with the upper arm, i.e., while maintaining good separation, you can use shoulder rotors and wrist to draw the longest line possible sideways behind your head with your racket tip.

What I'm saving here for racket drop is not much: a clenching together of the two halves of the arm combined with a slight rise of the elbow.

[bottle]

Turning Forearm Out

One of the many challenges with using words to describe anything in tennis is that you always leave something out; nevertheless, I think that people should try-- in fact I find such attempts indispensable-- especially if the listener/reader is someone other than oneself and is a knowledgeable tennis player.

The basic concept of Post # 86 is simplification of the racket drop because of one's desire for subsequent quick extension of arm from the triceps muscle. Luckily, the early cocking of the shoulder rotors does not seem to impair their function for a fast slice serve hit well out in front. One can have the best of both worlds then.

Omitted: Turning out of the forearm. This can happen simultaneous with wrist cocking open and arm bending to a right angle that leans toward left fence. It puts racket tip to outside of right arm through most of fast arm extension as in a Federer serve. It lengthens the already long imaginary line parallel to the net but behind you which you can draw with your racket tip.

[bottle]

Bielik-inspired Slice

We've never fully understood what happened to the pro career of Bea Bielik after she won the NCAA singles championship and advanced to the third round of the U.S. Open, where she lost to Justine Henin after almost taking the first set 5-7 . We did read a pre-U.S. Open newspaper interview in which Bea wanted to become the number one player in the world. She became the manager of a large tennis club out on Long Island and Monica Seles's doubles partner in team tennis where both represented New York city while drawing upon their displaced Hungarian heritages. (At some point in world history more Hungarians lived outside of Hungary than in it-- in Yugoslavia, in the U.S. and everywhere).

It is the sideways element in the Henin/Bielik service motions which now fascinates me. And, although it was a while ago that I observed Bea serving in the Wake Forest University Indoor Tennis Facility and my photographic recall could be weak, I'm not making things up when I say that Bea's preparation is slow, roundhouse and unbelievably long.

"You describe player characteristics," the basics urging Nico Mol of Holland has pointed out, as if my anti-Spartan and anti-training camp mentality is somehow wrong. Do I sound defensive then if I say that despite advancing age my kick and pace are improved and so it's time, without Bea's direct help which might be expensive, to adapt Ralstonian slice to huge roundhousedness? This particular challenge does not seem difficult.

Modern toss uses straightening and turning back of upper body to assist in lifting the ball up-- so there you are, upright like Dennis Ralston (See TennisPlayer article "Perfecting your Slice"). Why spoil this? Don't!

In bend and travel stage just stay upright and sink very slowly down on A. both feet or B. rear foot. Neither twist your head nor move it backward or forward. Twist the upper body horizontally toward Ralston's palm tree beneath a still gaze. Load shoulder rotors through keeping right angle in right arm. Fire both rotors and triceps though you may be starting from what for you is the normal halfway point in arm extension. So although we are straightening the arm very fast we can still use left arm to stop the upper body rotation before the arm gets completely straight. I prefer the extreme version of this left arm stoppage taught by Charlie Pasarel in the old tennis book "Mastering your Tennis Strokes" in which the two arms form an X in front of your chest-- you can balance your landing just as well as somebody retrieving their left arm and sticking it out again, the added complication of which may exist for suspect reasons of fashion only. The sudden stoppage flings the arm on arm hinge at the shoulder toward the net. Fire remainder of the triceps and hand muscles toward palm tree as you send your head forward, finally, allowing it finally to twist, as well (which usually means that the hips are powering through).

Similar tossing two feet into the court can now see your head follow the ball in one type of serve and stay back to let the hand follow the ball in the other.

You need good thrust in either case to avoid injury by freeing up the feet.

[bottle]

Refining the Motion

The bigger news is always when you can eliminate something, thus adding to your brio.

Wrist straight at address, racket neither open nor closed, upper body counter-wound, arms bent, body leaned over.

Slowly and smoothly whirl body down while also whirling hands from shoulders and elbows to the outside. (Count one.)

Toss, continuing to whirl upper body but straightening it. Racket arm adds to whirling body's momentum, i.e., slowly slides ahead of it as far around as you want (count two).

Arm now bends and keys over still elbow as forearm winds racket out and hand hinges it down. (The hand motions are simultaneous and identical to Mondo on forehand.) The arm gets poised, right-angled but keeled over for two different kinds of throw. The total image of arm and whole body in fact is that of a coiling, aiming snake whose head is in the left of racket's sweet spot fairly near racket tip (counts three and four).

[bottle]

Bend the Stick the Other Way

Reader, use ctrl+UNDO for counter-wind in upper body. It led to premature separation of hands and mediocre serves in my case, and you probably didn't try it since reading is primarily an abstracted left brain activity-- unless while reading you know how to cross the corpus callosum, over to where the good stuff is if you will only mediate it a bit.

Returning to address at post # 86, try turning the hand severely in (which earlier than ever before, perhaps, will wind the forearm out-- the inversion about to happen may make this confusing but stay with the subject). Winding forearm out is now finished for the whole serve. Then lower hands, rocking back.

Next, leaving the arm where it is so that it will be simply moved by whatever the right shoulder does, slowly turn the elbow and humped wrist down which opens palm to the sky. You will have to decide how much. Reader, by doing this you will never in your life take a more anti-Braden stance. But don't be angry with Vic Braden. Be grateful to him for giving you something solid to rebel against. Everything in this paragraph, including straightening of the upper body while turning it back, occurs during the toss.

Then, while slowly bending back the wrist, smooth the straight arm away from your body. The wrist, I believe, should start and complete its work during this section of straight arm movement only, i.e., go from humped one way to cocked the other all while racket is rising on a single slant. You're bending your knees and probably forming a bow in your body at the same time. Just when you really start to rock toward the net, bend your arm to a skewed right angle (rather last-minute)-- there isn't much more to do from there than hit a serve loaded with pop.

Except maybe contemplate these quotes from great Hungarians, first Katie Lomb, who mastered 16 languages and authored POLYGLOT: HOW I LEARN LANGUAGES, new edition 2008: "The knowledge you obtain at the expense of some brainwork will be more yours than what you receive ready-made."
And Dezso Kosztolanyi, writer and poet of the early 20th century: "It is boring to know. The only thing of interest is learning."

I have now finished THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN WORD AND IMAGE, by Leonard Shlain, a dense (in the best sense) book which took me a full six months to read.

I now understand why written tennis talk and analysis brings out extreme meanness, i.e., the hunter-warrior in everyone. Such activity is thoroughly left brain, but here, too, is the opportunity to cross through the corpus callosum and into the ancient human storehouse of complete images.