A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Progression

In a quest for satisfaction if not perfection, one might explore every possible avenue, having taught oneself a fair approximation of what satisfaction feels like.

A coach in a certain professional position said that one must have the grace and humility to recognize actual breakthrough in technique when it occurs.

Ironically, he fooled himself into thinking he had achieved it when he hadn't, and both the coach who preceded him and all the coaches who held his position afterward taught their people technique more effective than his.

The quest goes on in all sports where people are benign enough to know that, in true science, there will always be something new under the sun.

A radical way to use high-speed video is to count clicks:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/high_speed_archive/pro_men/rafael_nadal/rafeal_nadal_high_speed.html?FHCenterFront-0515808-0001.mov

Thus, Nadal takes 55 clicks to get second head above his head, 15 to lower elbow with outside knee still bent, 7 to straighten arm, 7 to body-whirl straight arm, and 6 to get off ball, during which time leg is almost straight . Finally, he takes 25 clicks to finish around opposite shoulder during which time leg becomes completely straight.

Does not such analysis, for the open-minded observer, at least give up the rough proportion of a single stroke in time?

Additionally, the microscoping attention of such counting can help one make oblique discovery or ask some new question.

Is the way Nadal's racket turns over at contact, i.e., the way it closes, the result of a hit on the lower half of the strings or rather deliberate delicacy as in a drop-shot where the player tries to hit two sides of the ball?

[bottle]

One Spanish Forehand

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/david_ferrer/df_forehand/df_fh_center/df_fh_center.html?DFFHCenterOpenStanceCourtLevelFront.mov

David Ferrer's forehand is big whirl but simpler than Federer's or Nadal's. Like them, he leaves the ground. Like them, he mondoes, but his loop is low and elliptical, with racket never rising above his head during the takeback. Although his arm structure is double-bend all the way, his big whirl gets the hitting shoulder racing around earlier and farther than in a classical forehand and contact is with upper body facing the net same way that Federer and Nadal do.

If this shot were a Ziegenfuss, loop to the ball could be slow and all arm before the delayed body would finally spring. I tried this the other night, in doubles, but with last minute slow straightening of the arm, so that my alert opponent, playing net, immediately read this cue and poached.

It only happened once but I'll never hit that exact same shot again. Instead, I'll keep my Ziegenfusses double-bend just as I'll keep any attempt to hit like David Ferrer also double-bend.

Just what does it mean to hit with double-bend structure anyway? It means enhanced ability to make last minute adjustment to hit the ball clean. It means less leverage in the stroke but good control like choking up on a bat in baseball.

One very nice feature of David Ferrer's game is that his forehand and two-hand backhands are close to being mirror images. The only significant difference is that on forehand, racket (not racket arm) arcs up and then settles around opposite shoulder. On backhand, by contrast, racket arcs up above opposite shoulder often to no more than vertical position.

[bottle]

Teaching Question

In last post, # 602, I saw racket but not racket arm curling around David Ferrer's left shoulder.

How could that be? Well, David Ferrer's body whirl is so extreme that right shoulder keeps going toward the net both while he is hitting the ball and afterward.

Whatever else happens, his right shoulder pushes some serious weight onto the ball.

After contact, that shoulder is so far toward the net that bent arm spinning back can only get the racket, not the racket arm itself, to his left shoulder.

Elbow, which you have kept purposefully back and tucked in, flies straight forward and up combined with precise amount of arm twist you require for the contact.

After racket flies up-- on right side of the body-- it comes down and around the left.

Body whirl is very complete. Racket whirl however is out and up into space and then down around front part of the body at left shoulder level.

[bottle]

The Romulus and Remus Serve

Once upon a time there was a rotorded server who felt very lonely until he realized that most other servers in the world were rotorded, too.

"If they can deal with their rotordedness, so can I," he said, reflecting that his recent experiments in elbow waving had not been entirely successful.

A brief respite from tennis was what his doctor ordered, and so he gave himself up entirely to his late father's business, which was injection-molded dashboards in the Detroit auto industry.

"The new cars, whether photo-voltaic or hydrogen powered," he declared, "will still need dashboards, so there's no reason to feel glum, none at all, and I think I'll attend that conference in The Netherlands that everybody has been talking about."

Arriving in Amsterdam, he unpacked his laptop and proceeded to the convention hall, where David Bowie from Great Britain was sharing how his song about Major Tom, lost in outer space, could be taken to apply to many top business executives in modern times.

John Cleese of Great Britain then stood up, towering above the crowd, and projected onto a pale screen a large sow lying on her side.

"Yes, this slide is an outtake from our Monty Python films," he said, "but should that matter? If something is funny, does that mean it doesn't apply to business models? I think not. You see all those piglets suckling on their mom? Well, Romulus and Remus are not among them because they are suckling on a wolf. And this knowledge has great application not only to ancient Rome but to every business person alive."

Geoffrey Williams of the United States then stood up to speak about timing in business, comedy and tennis. "Delay drop until after leg drive," he said.

With a loud smack, the rotorded server clapped his forehead and rushed from the conference. On his plane, mid-Atlantic, he thought, "Hands up together but with hitting elbow exaggeratedly high. Elbow then independently descends a bit as body assumes its archer's bow but can start slow bending then, too. And elbow can then wave up again on leg drive as it completes its bend to right angle preparatory to racket drop."

[bottle]

Waw Backhand

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/stanislas_wawrinka/sw_backhand/sw_bh_armaction/sw_bh_armaction.html?SWBHCenterArmActionSide2.mov

How many inches is hand behind body when it reaches the point where it's closest to the rear fence?

One can take out slack from one's arm through movement at both ends of that arm at the same time. If one does this with both hands, one can even build tension within the racket length itself.

Additionally, one can swing very level for a waist high ball before racket starts upward at a 30 degree angle before contact.

The decision toward including levelness of swing is significant since one could instead bowl down and then up. Ironically, the level swing doesn't get the racket as low but keeps it low for longer.

The provocative nature of this stroke is that it doesn't shift main fulcrum from body center to front shoulder. It's all easy swing as Donald Budge recommended.

But, what's the best distance for hand to reside from body just as arm has completed its final straighten. What is the permissible range? A difference of only a few inches completely alters the shape of the overall swing.

My instruction to "swing parallel to rear fence" now becomes "swing as if to sweep the court."

So, as my friend told the waitress: "Men also can change their mind."

I tend to think that if they don't, their tennis is stunted and they're living a lie.

[bottle]

Progression: Take Mr. Williams' Advice but Don't be Enslaved by it

Williams said, at a business conference in The Netherlands (# 604), "Delay drop until after leg drive."

Mr. Foka said, in a tennis lesson at Eastside Tennis Facility, Detroit, "Get your elbow up high. Get it up there soon."

Mr. Brosseau, skyped at Griffith Park in Los Angeles, said, "Build your serve with a maximum amount of gravity in it."

Rick Macci, on Tennis Channel, said, "This is the tennis instruction of the future" and showed a girl so covered in electrodes that she looked like Saint Sebastian bristling with spears.

J.M. Peredo, in a letter at Tennis Player, said, "The weight of the racquet acts as an anchor forcing the arm to externally rotate."

To combine all this advice, I decided to be enslaved by none of it except for Mr. Peredo's.

First, unlike the girl in Macci's film, I would never permit myself to feel like a robot, not ever in my whole life.

And as for the Williams advice, I would say to myself, "You've tried this and it was pretty good, but now draw it down a bit. You don't have to abandon everything you've ever learned. Just modify slightly toward more delay of the drop. Play with the delay. Delay a little? Delay a lot? Make the delay as dramatic as possible?"

This lead to a renewed serve in which gravity taking the elbow down and up turned into a slow, muscular continuation of upness combined with slow bending of the arm to a right angle but with everything rising, which made me feel as organic as a big leaguer winding up to pitch.

[don_budge]

Excuse me...

Hello there Mr. Bottle...I just clicked on to have the honor to be the 20,000th viewer on you thread. I am just curious. When does the book come out? Or is this the sequel to something. Amazing!

[bottle]

Mr. don_budge,

Thanks so much. A book is in process. But, aside from that, I'm very curious to learn something about your backhand. Robert Frost thought that names have compelling, almost mystical power (in a poem about a girl named April, he traced how her name affected her entire life). So, if you name yourself don_budge, you might eventually end up with a backhand like Donald Budge-- no?

[bottle]

Dullard Tennis: Hit the Same Old Shot

Reader, don't give in to this. Such a player may beat you once in a while but you can beat him too through superior invention. If hitting a David Ferrer type forehand, make the take-off real early, having already pointed across with opposite hand at the right fence like Roger Federer.

Reader, you understand by now, don't you, that I'm not writing about Ferrer or Federer-- they're just cash cows-- but about myself and what new wrinkle I plan to try today.

Also, dear reader, if I may ask a favor, do you think you could refrain from being a play reviewer for one minute? Being a drama critic is tremendous fun, one of the most self-indulgent activities available on earth, especially when you include what your girlfriend said in your final printed review.

But everybody's a play reviewer now, especially people who don't like theater and never attend a play. They review politics, NFL "franchise" behavior, whether Osama Bin Laden was polite enough while the Navy Seals killed him.

Here, one meister of this tennis forum has opined that anyone who discusses innovation is a quack since everything in tennis has been done a million times before. Okay-- quack-quack! But he's wrong. There is an infinity of possible arcs that one can describe through the air with the tip of one's racket, which keeps things honest.

So, let's say that David Ferrer's backward loop looks like the shell of a short turtle. At top, acme, or high point of the shell, let's perform our take-off, a big thrust with outside leg to start the giant whirl which has become a staple of modern tennis.

The earliness of this pro-active take-off will counter the arm, which passively then will fold itself into your body and mondo your wrist after which the body just keeps going!

[gzhpcu]

Mr. don_budge,

...... So, if you name yourself don_budge, you might eventually end up with a backhand like Donald Budge-- no?

Darn, I should have chosen to name myself Pancho_ Gonzales....

[don_budge]

My Backhand and my username...ahem

The Road Not Taken-Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And it has made all the difference.

[don_budge]

April?

bottle...what is the name of that poem? So that I might better understand your question.

[bottle]

I forget. It's not as good a poem as the one you presented, but it's pretty good. And there are others that are better than either.

[don_budge]

Ok...

Alright...it doesn't matter. You are right. I have his eleven books in my collection. I admit that I have not read it but I began yesterday. It's never too late! I will find it. It is better this way. Thank you and please accept my humble apologies for interrupting your rain of thought.

April...come she will
When streams are ripe
And swelled with rain

[bottle]

David Ferrer: Highly Evolved, Minimalist Ground Strokes?

Cool. About the subject of deleterious backward emphasis forehand now, I'd like to examine it as pure idea.

As early as the old VHS "Masters of the Game," I can remember Tony Roche advocating for smaller loops. Whatever keeps the racket back too long cannot be good.

And yet, if the racket counters back in response to the shoulders whirling forward, the tip is going to whip this way then that as in a good throw or serve, and anybody can make contact way out front or anywhere they please.

Federer, Nadal, Ferrer and other top players, I'm sure, figured this out long ago. Me, I'm just figuring it out for my own strokes right now, but I've always been a late bloomer in everything.

Federer and Nadal do this thing differently. Federer closes his racket as he points across with his left hand. Then he gets his arm straight. Then he starts his big whirl forward. His wrist mondoes in response to the big whirl-- yes the racket tip whips back then forward, but he straightened his arm first.

And that took time.

Nadal, he keeps his relaxed arm bent, takes it back a shorter distance, then uses his body to whirl it straight. Goodness gracious, I haven't even tried this-- great balls of fire! I've tried to figure out why Nadal's elbow goes down before it straightens, but haven't let big whirl drive all the little actions. Could it be that vertical vector, the outside leg thrust that initiates every big whirl is more directly related to racket head speed and direction which is up and to the side?

Ferrer, he may not be the greatest player but might be the most appropriate model for me, given my Ziegenfuss.

Regardless, one can start hitting a whole lot harder if one absorbs with perfect understanding his basic hitting mechanism, and I don't care, reader, how athletically gifted you are or not.

My opinion may be worthless supposing I'm a crazy proselytizer, but it's not, in this case, crazy for me.

For a Ziegenfuss, I get shoulders around, but not particularly far, and stop them and loop slowly and armily right up to the ball, which then is hit with the spring don't swing system. My shoulders will not go beyond parallel to the net and I'll catch the racket slightly to my left. This is a very careful and therefore effective shot.

For the new Ferrer-inspired shot, which looks much the same at its beginning, I get shoulders way around-- just as far as for a Federfore, and, similarly, in two separate installments.

The first is pivot out right but forward toward the ball. The second is pointing across with left hand, at conclusion of which your body is fully loaded.

But what is your bent (and relaxed) right arm doing? Almost nothing! It's just hanging near where ball will be, which is good for hand-to-eye coordination.

Now you whirl. I counted clicks in the Tennis Player conventional archive. From load to contact Ferrer's big whirl is two or three clicks-- very fast. And the big whirl continues past contact, putting weight on the ball.

Arm work consists primarily of elbow taking a free ride on the body if you don't think about racket having just arm-and-wrist-mondoed back, or about the way elbow lifts as you start your wiper for contact on your right side.