A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Magnificent Transformations

Next two logical steps might be to push all of my arm roll stuff back into the up of any down and up serve and then to eliminate it altogether.

I'd hate however to eliminate something which is so obviously important-- since it directly pertains to the development of a deeper drop-- so I think I'll let it reappear, magically, at the peak of a golfer's or tennis player's backswing.

In other words, I'll just start from my normal address, the one I've had for years, with the racket on edge at middle height out in front of me.

But wait a minute! I changed my grip from a TennisPlayer 2-2 to a TennisPlayer 2-1 to put more angle in it. Should that change my address, too? How will I get my snail mail?

"What do you think, tennis racket?"

"I'm a thing, John. Tennis rackets and other objects don't think."

"Okay then. What do you think, my right arm?"

"Just leave me alone, you bastard, and let me do what I've always done."

"Okay den. I'm anti-war."

So Bottle decides to point his racket a little to the left of where he most often points it. This means that after the down and up, his racket will be incredibly closed, and what's more, be pointing much more toward the right fence and not back enough at all, with Bottle, John and I in total agreement on this point.

But we decide to go with it.

So now I do windmills and figure eights while dancing around like Marion Bartoli on a good day between points.

"Gender change alert!"

"Shut up, Bottle."

"Relax. You'll be fine."

[bottle]

Actuality

At the court, I found myself NOT KEEPING THE PALM DOWN. Instead, I opened the racket all the way through the loop and only closed it on the way up to the ball for best serves of this particular day.

[bottle]

The Skinny

Something more should be said about this. Here's the skinny, which is slang for "information," i.e., opinion.

Every ready made assertion in life and tennis both should be challenged.

Assertion: Keeping the palm down facilitates a natural loop, particularly when arm is loose and the shoulders in a tennis serve change direction.

Although this assertion is correct, the implication that goes with it is less true, that any right hander who rolls his racket clockwise in the pre-strike stages of his serve is both a NIT and a TWIT.

The first and only place in tennis writing I discovered something to explicitly and knowingly counter this widely believed Bradenian notion was in RACQUET WORK: THE KEY TO TENNIS by John M. Barnaby.

Barnaby, in that good book, suggests that, to simplify cocking motion behind the back, one should open the racket, in a down and up serve, as racket passes by the right knee.

I'm not doing that now, I'm opening through the loop instead. But just the idea in all of this, that opening out the racket can work better than setting palm down, has been much too difficult to come by.

Two points: 1) Grip is essential. Grip, as Kerry Mitchell points out, changes every aspect of any swing. 2) The specific challenge of rotorded serving requires specific response.

[bottle]

For Rotorded Servers Only, Unless Somebody Else Wants to Help

We rotorded servers have a real problem-- not enough spectacular upward spin combined with spectacular pace. (For a definition of "rotorded," see post # 666.)

Each rotorded server, if tackling his central problem on his own, which is most likely, should ask,

1) Which'll it be, animal or plant kingdom? (Explanation of these realms occurs in post # 670.) More poignantly, will hips keep rolling throughout the serve or stop for a while in the middle?

2) What'll I do to lower racket tip farther-- turn arm inward or outward?

3) What grip shall I use? (MOST IMPORTANT.)

4) What's the swing configuration that works best with that particular grip?

With a 2/1 continental, I'm finding that simple down and up works best. This doesn't take racket around the body. How could it?

Take your racket in this grip, reader. Let it fall and then come up. Now look at it. What do you see?

To answer my own question, I see a nice angle between arm and racket. I see strings that are beveled and facing a target.

From there I'm going to wind arm clockwise as I bend it up. (Model: Bea Bielik.) I'm going to continue this wind as the arm folds up. And as drop and downward radial cocking of the wrist occurs. (That would be wrist motion toward the radius bone, to prepare for wrist motion in the opposite direction up toward the ulna bone.)

Although the elbow meanwhile has twisted up, it will keep responding to the core body-- won't rise as sharply but should rise some. It mostly goes forward. (Model: Roger Federer.) My point is that the arm doesn't start extending just as elbow finishes its big upward protrusion. No, the elbow travels a little on core body instead, and then the arm extension starts, with elbow STILL SOLID WITH THE BODY.

(I wondered about this for decades. Why did I have to do that?)

About halfway through arm extension the body and elbow get still (Federer). Well, the body may be pressing but it's sure not rotating much, not compared to just before.

[bottle]

The Whole Deal

My partner has a beautiful 8-year-old grand-daughter who is a grand athlete. Two days ago, while both of her parents were working, we watched her win three blue ribbons in a swim competition-- with 800 people milling about and a new race starting every two, three or four minutes all afternoon and into the night.

The same girl, Maxine, belongs to a high level traveling soccer team. In one game, we saw her score nine goals before the coach benched her out of fear she'd score more. You'd see a group of girls close together. Out of the bunch would come the soccer ball as Maxine passed to herself.

Usual pattern: The ball stops just at the point where the goalie can't come out to get it. Then Maxine outruns the other girls (though her legs don't seem to be moving faster), feints, scores.

The day after the swim meet, Maxine sat next to me watching Wimbledon on TV, then wanted to play tennis. Although both of her parents are competitive players, they don't hit with her very much-- their jobs and sports engagements for their three daughters keep them overly busy.

At the court we played mini-tennis, but Maxine soon wanted to use the whole court, and did. There were many things I could have said but didn't. At the end of the session we both agreed that I had taught her one thing only:

A 2/1 service grip with heel of the hand on top slat of the racket and big knuckle on the slat just to the right of that.

Did I do well? She was nice to me the rest of the day. I thought she was promising enough to teach her proper serving grip so that she wouldn't have to gradually work toward it later as many coaches advise.

I hope this decision was correct. Above all, I didn't want to say too much, not having any wish at all to discourage Maxine from learning the game.

[don_budge]

Maxine...the plant.

Wow...that's real cool. You did good. She see's good old bottle in a different light now...the tennis aficionado, magician, wizard.

You plant the seed and see how it grows. Give it everything it needs along the way. Nurture. (From the Plant Kingdom)

See if you can plant a few other seeds with Maxine...get some of her little buddies in a group. They can grow up together playing tennis and staying out of trouble...the strength of the Wolf is the pack, the strength of the pack is the Wolf. (From the Animal Kingdom)

[bottle]

Are Auto Mechanics Permitted to Play Tennis? How about Carpenters?

Just slightly to re-phrase: Can such careful, thoughtful and precise people play the game well?

The special skills these artisans bring could, conceivably, be worth more than a special drink or some new breathing idea.

In personal experimentation today, I wish to think about mechanics in trying a second version of an 8-board serve.

Why? Because the normal service form seen here at Tennis Player rather than at Tennis One-- where leg drive typically occurs later-- has been going well.

And if something has been going well, it is only natural for the serious student of the game to apply it everywhere.

So, instead of turning hips backward as tossing arm and racket drop down, I shall not turn at all, at least not yet.

Nor will I bend front hip out as part of the toss, although that little maneuver does work if one wants to do it.

No, I want to explore, using Escher's moebius strip with its implication of eternity.

More practically, if we insist on close and literal level relation to the earth where one picture equals a thousand worms, we shall roll hips in three dimensions, down and up as well as backward and forward with all of this continuous motion performed in a smooth blend so cleverly balanced that one would not fall off an 8-board, a surfboard, a skateboard, or even a bongo board.

[bottle]

The Easiest Backhand to Hit (in the World)?

Since people, for unknown reasons, actually listen to me at this website, perhaps I should make a suggestion, in grateful payback-- something that could render life easier for an innocent person.

This backhand, seen here, might be the easiest kind to hit.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/pro_men/stanislas_wawrinka/sw_backhand/sw_bh_wide/sw_bh_wide.html?SWBHWideClosedStanceCourtLevelRear.mov

Now I don't want that assertion to plunge myself into some brutal argument that pits all two-handers against all one-handers, of which this is an example.

My own two-hander only lasted for a year and a half, so I recuse myself from that discussion, don't know enough other than to say that keeping track of one hand on the racket might be easier than of two.

What is simple, and therefore easy to imitate, about Stan Wawrinka's backhand, and is this opinion of mine based on faulty or correct assumption? And would this matter? Why? You can try the shot I propose whether it's authentic Wawrinka or not.

My assumption is that Wawrinka's arm gets completely solid with his body before he starts his forward swing.

So, 1), hips glide forward, which levels the shoulders and lowers the racket, and this action is vigorous and definitely integral to the swing. You can easily keep your left hand on the racket for this.

Then, 2), even more vigorous, you swing your shoulders while keeping them level, and swing your arm independently from the shoulder too-- do both things at once.

Try the full swing easy. Try it hard. What a simple shot!

[bottle]

Animals, Plants and Essays

Although the most severe critics of my method have been laying off for some time, I have to ask myself, isn't there a point where I ought to simply shut up and enjoy my discoveries, implementing them in play but not trying to tell the world about it-- and isn't this what any good player does when he finds something that is new and effective, knowing that the pen is mightier than the sword but that the tennis racket is mightier than the pen?

No, I want things both ways just as I refuse to settle, when it comes to serving, on animal domain or plant domain, I'll keep both, thanks, if that helps me win a match; on another day I'll keep to one or the other. A basketball coach would hate me and cut me from the squad. A guy who overhauls his foul shot mid-season?

I have something to prove, I guess, to myself if not to others, that language per se isn't worth a thousand worms any more than a single picture is. It's just that words, like the single picture, take too long for a majority of jocks. I go with the dance instructor I saw from the New York City Ballet. He simultaneously used words and demonstration, and all of his students, advanced, completely absorbed the lesson in one take. They went away after a single hour with eight new full routines.

If a serve is like a foul shot, you don't want to mess with it, you want to repeat it over and over until one day it becomes very good.

But I am not even playing tennis as the owner of this website once pointed out, and that is certainly true right now this summer.

I am going to play tennis, however, and not the same way.

To combine the realms (and by the way, reader, am I correct or is there a third or fourth service realm I don't know about?), I'll need to concentrate on toss.

Toss is definitely the foul shot I don't want to change, the commonality I can take from the one service motion to the other.

So, in animal kingdom the hips turn early and body can then be still for the toss after which one bends under the ball. Where did the arm point to begin the toss? Use that memorized position as the guide for an even more extreme stance in the plant phylum serves?

This thinking doesn't seem bad although it raises a problem of orchestration.

If I'm going to have two basic motions, I want them to be startlingly different, and a plant should normally extend but not jump up in the air.

This serve could be hard on a reconstructed left leg. One needs to be up on front toes and perfectly unweighted for a ground-connected but well-oiled pivot.

So, be careful. This is a warning to myself and anybody else who tries this.

[bottle]

The Serves were Working. So Did I get Bored? Possibly.

Okay, "phylum" is apt to refer to well known primary divisions within the animal or plant kingdoms, so today, in plant, I'll take the racket back long and low with a creeping motion exceeding the progression of simultaneous hip rotation, which also is backward (in a way of speaking).

Does this windup still employ gravity? Yes, the racket drops down, proceeds a long way, then rises up like a tendril whose growth is surrealistic through being perceptible to the human eye.

My idea is to gradually shift weight forward and perform one's toss during all of this, which may seem a compromise of earlier ideals of keeping front shoulder still or rising at that point.

The way it can work is if the toss starts up while shoulder is still tilting (slow diving) down. Then, in middle section of the toss, the shoulder reverses direction and comes up for support. After release, the shoulder keeps rising as part of the overall motion that is a moebius strip in which, actually, there is no backward or forward or pause, just flow.

This serve more than any I've hypothesized increases the range of overall loop behind one since racket first comes up butt first with strings inverted quite far beneath it.

[bottle]

8-Board Serve

O, twist again
Like you did last summer
O, twist your wrist
Like you did last night
O, twist your hips
Like you’re a chubby
O, twist your bips
Now you’re a teletubby
Now twist your hips up
And you won in Davis Cup
Now twist your hips down
And come up from the ground

Around and round and round
And round you go, don’t you know,
Well what the hell, just serve like this
Yeah you should see my little sis
You should see my little sis
She really knows how to toss
And when she rocks her serve
Is a hoss, my sis is boss
So don’t be cross

My daddy is sleepin’ and mama ain’t around
Yeah daddy is sleepin’ and mama ain’t around
We’re gonna wristy wristy wristy
Till the Davis house come down
Now take me by my little hand and go like this
Eh oh twist baby baby twist
Ooh-yeah just like this
Come on little miss Davis let’s do the twist

[bottle]

In More Detail

If you're going from traditional (turn, bend, thrust and turn) to 8-board (turn constantly), you may decide that you've given away one third of your time.

How are you going to make this lost time up? Well, if backswing never hits a ball, you can either slow it down or speed it up-- shouldn't matter, not technically, at least, but you'll need to revalue the timing for either case.

I tried a unified but quick backswing today and liked it. Hips go back and arm goes back even faster (simultaneous) with racket folding under, i.e., the wrist humps. Is fall of racket gravity-driven? No, it goes down faster than that. It uses gravity but adds to it.

Rather than subtracting from racket head speed, this change increased it.

But how far to shift weight forward (as hips turn back) and when to "reverse" the hips become the variables now, i.e., fun things to fool around with.

I have to put the word "reverse" in quotation marks since a true reverse never happens. The front hip goes down as it turns back. The front hip goes up as it turns forward. The rolling, sinuous nature of this continuous action is sculptural (in three dimensions) rather than flat.

[bottle]

Be an Animal

I finally played. Once again, I have to say, "Simplest is best." That would be a serve in the animal kingdom in which the hips turn gently back as the two arms fall.

From that decision, one concentrates on figure eights over and over again. Because that first turn of the hips now is out of the way, the separate parts of the serve are more clearly delineated. Toss and bend become more pure.

But I am not just a rotorded server-- I am an English teacher. And I fault tennis instructors across the board for insufficiency of articulation of what happens at bottom of the drop. First drop, pro drop, stretch-shorten cycle, windmill exercise-- I'd like to say I hate it all.

Actually, though, I only hate "stretch-shorten cycle," which makes me think, out on the court, "Drip-drip-- I have to run home and turn the dial on the washing machine."

And I hate "pro drop," which is no drop, because, to me, the expression implies extraneous motion somewhere in the arm when body alone should carry elbow forward and slightly more upward at this point of the serve.

It is the body alone that carries the racket tip out to the right and creates a parallelism for a viewer standing directly behind the person who serves.

That parallelism occurs when arm finally starts its triceptic extension. The two ends of the racket seem to rise at the same speed-- to that imaginary or real but impartial viewer behind.

With all of that said, I love the idea of the windmill exercise even though I don't think it applies to me, only to slightly less rotorded servers than me. You wind the arm and racket forward around and around like a windmill and maybe at top of the sixth gyration let your slightly open racket drop naturally down behind your back.

I'm sorry, but for the most extreme forms of rotordation, I have to recommend an infusion of more sideways-ness into the loop.

This happens better with figure eight pattern than with windmill. Which predicts a serve in which near the outset the hitting arm comes up slightly to the right-handed player's right.

I also love the expression "first drop" because that happens no matter who you are. The racket tip can't possibly point all the way down at the court until the body tilt does it.

So how many of the available internal and racket tip lowering arm actions should the player have completed at the bottom of "first drop?"

All of them.

[bottle]

~

Well, if somebody can be confused, he will be confused. When people are talking about a maximum use of gravity while serving, the term "first drop" could refer to the two hands falling and becoming separate.

In fact the "first drop" I mentioned in "Be an Animal" refers to "first drop" BEHIND BACK, possibly a not very low and almost imaginary backscratch somewhere near the spine.

I add this because I think the "Be an Animal" serve is effective and worthy of examination by any server who's rotorded.

For a definition of "rotorded," see Post # 666 .

[bottle]

Hit the Back

In reading "Your Strokes: Arthur Gosnell: Serve," I see a big argument for using John's windmill exercise along with Don's figure eight exercise if you are a rotorded server.

The argument is that, in the racket drop, you may actually hit your back with the racket, and that would be all right-- maybe not in your best serve, but this is an exercise to take you toward your best serve.

To go from that to what I personally want to do right now, I will next do normal figure eights and finally a few abnormal ones, where racket hits the back, then regain smoothness but with racket continuing to pass through the deeper vicinity.

The two exercises are close enough that THEY SHOULD BE DISCUSSED TOGETHER IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion).