A New Year's Serve

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Back to JM Model

Put late convex curve in wrist at end of bowl...then flip the racket with wrist straightening somewhat like dealing a card. Obviously the mixture of roll, wrist straightening and power of propelled arm will determine success of the shot.

The ball will not rise to the sun despite any shop teacher's claim.

Pace will come from A) weight going through ball and B) length of arm lever (is fulcrum at shoulder or in center of the back?).

Grip is slight for this shot (continental). Any absorbency beyond string job is provided by controlled looseness of the fingers.

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More Never, Use and Always in JM type BH

Never alter elbow level, at least not until you've hit the ball.

Use the racket tip as a separate, sensate system from the body system but make them work in sync.

Get back turned toward opponent.

Let legs extension and arm rotations provide the topspin; the elbow swing around the body (in both directions) is horizontal but with a longer lever
going forward.

So, this sounds like the circular swing that Vic Seixas recommended in which arm and racket tip move as a single unit, right? Of course Seixas was
known by meanie wags as the last person without a good backhand to win the final at Wimbledon.

No, there's still some "flashlight" in this stroke (Bolletieri's term). But it's caused by a little wrist curl in first half of the forward swing. The racket tip is allowed to fall in behind the hand for a short stretch. The flashlight doesn't come from vertical arm swing or bowl as in totally different genres of backhand.

The essentially horizontal swing here allows good connection with large back muscles and enables a second extension of the lever. First lever: bent arm. Second lever: straight arm from hand to shoulder. Third lever: hand to center of back.

Absorb impact through looseness of fingers and wrist. They are loose but tightening as they hit the ball.

This backhand has just gotten a whole lot shorter.
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TRYING THIS. There is great simplicity in swinging the elbow at a single level about the body, and the balls were well hit. The lowering of racket tip behind you doesn't alter the basic structure of this to and fro. But how does lowering happen then? Through slight tilting of upper body backward (A), straightening of arm (B), pronating of arm (C), straightening wrist if it wasn't already (D).

Good feel came from extending wrist straight (A,B,C&D are simultaneous).

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Braden and McEnroe Backhands-- Similar?

Attempts to swing arm about the body may go down the wrong road. I say this in view of Vic Braden's old story about the leather worker in South America who fabricated a holster for him. Braden was then able to hit backhands from the hips with no arm movement at all.

So, a new idea: Instead of bowling arm down and up (see video of Coach Kyril in post # 358) or even using an antique horizontal rotating clock pendulum (one interpretation of post # 362), keep arm fixed with wriggling body almost to contact.

Only then give the arm its freedom just as shoulder-blade clench occurs, so that one feels, as Oscar Wegner's St. Louis representative John Carpenter has asserted, that he is "developing one set of muscles on top of another."

How could this work? Well, it might be different from anything Braden, Kyril, Wegner, Carpenter or John McEnroe himself has ever done yet draw upon them all.

It certainly draws from John M. Barnaby's contention that one hander wannabes are always taking arm back too far, that even if they point the arm perpendicular at rear fence, by the time they step across they're way more turned around than that with little prospect for a clean hit.

So, change grip and slowly turn shoulders as you run toward the ball. Keep shoulders and arm fixed together until front shoulder is aimed at the ball bounce on your side of the net. Where's arm? Pointed at the LEFT fence.

Now you step across. The movement cocks the shoulders to hit the ball. Obviously the fixed arm goes back some more.

Now your front foot has landed. If hitting DTL simply press front hip toward the target. Upper body slides the opposite way. Fixed arm straightens, forearm pronates, wrist first straightens then curls (if you are using continental grip).

If hitting CC, press front hip toward the target, which means you'll rotate your hips at the same time you press them out. The arm becomes once again roughly perpendicular to the left fence but with wrist curled.

The power train in both variations goes from front hip movement to clench of the shoulder-blades. At time of clench arm extends freely out toward the net but to right of where the strings will fly. Is there roll from the shoulder and forearm also?

Not as much as in some other backhands.

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Tuning a Serve

Using the idea of hitting serves downward either to bounce them as high as possible or to cross the net, try to A) cut the ball in half with the frame and B) scrape the ball on the right half.

A range of opinion is available on just when one ought to begin one's pronation, but rather than figure that out, why not simply tune the whole shebang like a violin string?

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Once Again, Why Hit with JM type BH?

You get to use your wrist for:

A) more racket head speed
B) more (late) racket tip lowness
C) more racket head variety
D) more simple logic in linking forearm roll, i.e., pronation as arm extends backward, with wrist then curling racket tip even farther down almost like lowering a centerboard in a small boat at beginning of body-driven arm travel forward
E) shots in general that employ more large body propulsion than many conventional eastern backhands of dubious design
F) a stroke with the sensuous and versatile continental grip, following Martina Navratilova's enlightening instruction during her excellent televised commentary on the French Open: "You can hit a backhand with any grip you want," she said at a time when she was receiving chemotherapy, a good reason to listen to her if you needed a new one to go with the others.

An argument against this continental grip plan, I suppose, is that less meat settles itself behind the handle.

This is true. That you will regularly hit the ball into the sky or strain your wrist may, however, be myth. That you may compensate for any perceived weakness of construction with impeccable timing also could be true. And maybe you SHOULD hold yourself to a higher standard.

In experimenting with this stroke I've been left to my own devices since very few tennis players wish to discuss it or much less model it. And I'm thinking at the moment that one should keep knee over foot while extending front leg, i.e., cut back on forward hip rotation in favor of more pure leg drive combined with rotation(s) from the gut.

This simultaneity (leg plus gut in one or more directions plus straightening of the wrist just before contact) creates more sling in arm when you finally let it go.

Also, I've spoken a lot about "clench" of the shoulder-blades. I still see that occurring sometimes but after contact in the JM videos. The exception is high backhands hit well to the side, with added power from clench then occurring right at contact.

In most of these backhands, it seems to me, non-hitting hand is used suddenly to brake shoulders and thereby accelerate the arm passively from the shoulder-- a maneuver that must be kept exceptionally small and simple to work.

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1 2 prop 4 5

where "prop" includes balancing on back foot, bringing front foot close to back foot while turning shoulders last possible bit and step-out-- with all of these elements accomplished through quickness, confidence and even mastery.

Note: Completion of exaggerated shoulders turn before step-out is a good because stabilizing thing.

It uncomplicates (simplifies) the step-out and therefore can add to its lateness.

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1 2 prop step 5

The hand is in the slot even with maximum back swing. JM could see it through an easy turn of his head if he wished. Racket tip is cocked higher and farther around than hand.

The racket tip goes down with terrific speed to start the forward, upward drive. I refuse to consider this an easy drop. It may be gravity-assisted but it's closer to that point in a good golf swing where the power suddenly turns on.

So a number of elements, as previously discussed, are taking the racket tip down but faster than imagined before.

If dropping slow one could imagine a feeling of going backward. When the swing is really fast, however, you feel as if everything is going forward and are perhaps more aware of the hips which in fact are doing just that.

Viewed this way, the backward sliding shoulders are just part of the loop, broadening and literally giving it body (and going backward enough to provide some control in the crucial, pre-contact phase of the stroke).

Figuring out exactly where in this loop-to-contact-tract forearm and wrist do what may now become hopelessly left-brained.

You know exactly what you want the forearm to do-- twist one way and then the other. You know exactly what you want the wrist to do-- hump one way and then straighten the other. You know exactly when you want these four things to occur-- between beginning of drop and contact. Isn't that enough for you (or me) in the detail department?

After contact is completed, the arm can bend to relax one's entire body.
John McEnroe did it, Donald Budge did it, and anyone can do it where it feels most comfortable, i.e., preserves the most balance.

The ball is gone. So why not do something really easy and nice for yourself?

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Iterative Rather than Linear Learning

The word "iterative" means almost the same thing as "reiterative," i.e., characterized by repetition. You go round and around, making the same discoveries you made before but with a slight difference.

My next determination after all of the foregoing material on JM type backhands was whether the shoulders, having slid backward to fatten the drop, should slide immediately forward again to fatten the lift.

The answer was no, at least when taking JM as the model. The shoulders do stop going backward long before the hit so that all weight can go through the ball.

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Snap. I Want it. Don't you?

Push up with front leg while racket still is flying down.

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An Unagonized Reappraisal

Go with what hitting backhands with my partner (Hope) is teaching me (you).

But I go with what John McEnroe said about keeping the elbow in as well.

And with the idea of trying to be as smooth as Arthur Ashe was with his easy topspin backhand hit on a sharp angle.

And with Allen Fox's idea, expressed for the forehand, that good shots can combine wrist and gross body actions while minimizing the arm.

Well, the wrist is supposed to be much weaker on the backhand side. But I'm not sure that's true if one sets up this action the way McEnroe does as evidenced in the Tennis Player videos. The tennis world didn't always have the benefit of stop-frame videos, easily available, and perhaps will catch up some day.

The whole stroke if one keeps the aforementioned elements in mind becomes an easy circular thing with even the bending arm at its conclusion seeming to perpetuate racket edge movement begun earlier.

No longer do I want to hold bent arm still during step-out but rather to keep it creamily active all the time. If this is a departure from McEnroe, so be it.

Also, I want to preserve the easy hitting footwork I've developed over decades. Bad habit perhaps but easy. I don't usually draw outside foot up to the other and plant toes before stepping out but I might be sliding foot to a similar point instead.

"Sling the racket at the ball," Arthur Ashe said, but I'd like to modify that to "Sling the racket tip at the ball."

In other words I want to envision myself using a slow internal swing in both directions with racket tip moving slightly faster and then much faster in the contact area.

Follow-through as key now becomes more apparent if not as much as Ashe's when hitting short angles in the old VHS "Tennis Our Way."

If the entire stroke in design terms becomes about moving racket tip smoothly and constantly throughout except for one brief burst of acceleration (the sling through uncomplicated and extremely fast wrist straightening), one may want to think about what comes immediately afterward.

The arm should remain straight before it bends.

To return to the crucial subject of wrist power and possible strain, yes, the wrist is weak, but in a well-designed golf swing or tennis serve becomes the powerful transmitter of stored energy.

Some people can hit a backhand the same way.

No one can do it if they don't try.

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Re Post # 369:

That works for some shots. For others better to let swing pull the legs up. Staying low longer is probably best for tall players 95 per cent of the time.

Next question: Does JM, who isn't very tall, start shoulders rotating while he is still low most or all of the time? Answer from a single round of watching the first six TP JM BH videos with just this question in mind: Yes in five of the six. The lowering of back shoulder blends into upper body rotation while he is still low and leg drive then blends into that.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/johnmcenroe/mac_backhand/mac_backhand.html?MacBHCenterCourtLevelRear.mov

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So Sudden

Two hands back, then slightly open the racket head, body-body arm.

That's one backhand. Let's try another.

Two hands back, then slightly open the racket head, body-body arm.

The first part is slow, the "body-body arm" very fast.

First "body" = lower the racket by drawing the human head back, i.e., by vertical rotation of the upper body in a backward direction.

Second "body" = whirl the shoulders from the gut. That means there's firmness in the crouched lower body. The second "body" draws Zen-like power and speed from the first. The two actions are a speed link between vertical UBR (backward) and horizontal UBR (forward).

"arm" = both ends of the racket proceeding at roughly the same speed. I am not even sure that the strings are accelerating through the ball any more. Well, they're going faster than they were at the beginning of the stroke but slower than during the speed link a micro-second before.

The ball probably doesn't know or care. Its only knowledge is that it has been struck clean and fast and with power.

Power? Where from? Extending legs and from everything that whirled the racket tip on to the ball and from beginning of the clench of the shoulder-blades from end of contact through end of follow-through.

Speed? Where from? The two rotations of the shoulders-- vertically backward then horizontally forward during which the wrist both humps and straightens into the ball. I am also using an old tennis idea that the arm should straighten all the way to contact but never in any one place very much.

This is a system in which lower edge of the racket hits the ball because of the two ends of the racket finally bowling at roughly the same speed, which takes elbow away from body at last.

Sometimes the racket head rolls over the ball for a sharper angle-- call this a different basic stroke altogether.

The expression "body-body arm" comes from cat language, i.e., from what a human being might say to a naughty cat: "baddy baddy baddy baddy."

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Neither Braden nor McEnroe, with Similarity to Both

Vic Braden taught the "sit 'n hit" drill, in which the student makes a three-point landing-- front foot on court, fanny on chair, and non-dominant fingers against thigh just above the knee.

John McEnroe does nothing of the sort. A golfer keeps front arm straight; by most definitions McEnroe's arm gets straight and points toward fence early.
One could call his arm "relaxedly straight" and it gets that way BEFORE he steps out. (Of course the right-handed Braden experimented with similar construction, arm pointed at left fence before it curled down to left knee.)

Some players get racket to its lowest point early as in sit 'n hit; some keep arm bent and only straighten it after foot has come down; John McEnroe gets arm straight and low even before step-out (compare to the higher take-back of Federer, Henin or Lendl) and then does the "body-body hit" described in post # 372.

With so little free motion of the arm to interfere, and that restricted to the very end of the forward stroke, McEnroe is no doubt better able to make all his small adjustment steps (count them!):

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/johnmcenroe/mac_backhand/mac_backhand.html?MacBHShortRear.mov

Solidity of arm and body is the virtue of both the Braden and McEnroe backhands. The first however powers more from hips rotation, the second more shoulders rotation on a non-yielding lower foundation.

What you yourself come up with, if trying to learn an extremely economical one-hand backhand from all this, will no doubt be conditioned by your grip, your physique and your ideas should you have any.

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Two Serves: The Cylinder and The Bow

Eastern backhand grip for both and looser than anyone can imagine.

Decide with me that "the kinetic chain" is a crock and always has been, that tennis is too fast for elaborate left-brain sequenced scenarios, that K.C. might have some theoretical basis but no practical usefulness for anyone ever.

So, to take cylinder first, understand that the idea comes from golf, specifically the instruction of the Scotch teaching pro Percy Boomer, who was subsequently ripped off by American teaching pro David Ledbetter. But don't blame Ledbetter too much. A good idea is a good idea and anyone can have it.

Stand up then with knees slightly bent like a point guard in basketball. Imagine your whole body is enveloped by a zinc cylinder. Now you wouldn't want to hit the zinc with any part of your body, would you, dear reader? So don't bend your knees too much, just enough to stay loose. And don't cartwheel since that would move your head. Don't move head in any direction. Stay clear of the zinc! And rotate your shoulders backward against a little countering pressure from the front knee. Now rotate shoulders forward against a little countering pressure from the front knee. The two pressures will work opposite to one another. You'll get good power from your transverse gut muscles, reader. Congratulations. Throw your loose floppy wrist to right of the ball with strings to open just a little from the shoulder. This opening twist from the shoulder isn't a main propulsion package, it's just a subsidiary
of triceptic or hammering thrust. Bounce balls across the net. You'll get the idea that way. No release from forearm or wrist muscles until after the hit.
Throw racket head at net post.

Now for The Bow. Start sinking from the knees as racket goes down and keep on sinkin and hold the arm up high after the toss since that will help develop the desired body bow like John Isner. Get the hip way out there. And use
no HUBR (Horizontal Upper Body Rotation) until contact is over. Snap body straight from the bow so that left foot and racket tip and ball suddenly line up at contact in the most delightfully old-fashioned way. Again, delay any use of forearm or wrist muscles until after contact. The three delays are key ingredients in the recipe. Toss has to be in perfect spot, further left, but the
loose, floppy racket work is much the same as in The Cylinder.

The increase in grip, if you were only using a continental before, makes it easy to keep palm down. And with palm down this much I believe it's better
never to make a consciously muscular right angle in the hitting arm, just to
do the old Braden thing of letting upper body rotation reversal be the sole agent to bend the spaghetti arm and send it through its tricks.

Horizontal upper body rotation, vertical upper body rotation with immediate firmed up left side-- what's the difference as far as arm action is concerned. Don't screw up toss with step and pointpoint is my advice but you're going to do what you wanna anyway. The palm down will allow a natural loop in either The Cylinder or The Bow.

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Well,

second thoughts about upper body rotation in a first serve hit with a "bow."
Isner appears to use both lower and upper body rotation simultaneous with
straightening of his bow, i.e., release of his inverted C position.

The idea of withholding upper body rotation until contact comes from Brenda Schultz McCarthy, and relates to her description and films of her second serve kick. She uses pinpoint stance. Does that change everything? Maybe, maybe not.

What has really interested me for a long time about anybody's good serve (and no one appears to want to talk with me about this) is how the racket aways gets so smoothly out to the right.

One of the variables affecting this is loading twist into the upper arm. That
always happens but when is best? One could do it down by the back foot or
even when the racket was quite high, technically speaking. The speed with
which Isner's racket crosses his back in the videos, contrasted with the slowness with which it prepares in the opposite direction, makes me think that he is applying three rotations simultaneously: 1) upper body from gut; 2) lower body from the way he leaves the ground; 3) UAR or upper arm rotation
in a backward direction.