A New Year's Serve

[stotty]

I commented to JY a while back (in response to his post on Tomic's backhand) that Rosewall's sliced backhand was better than any of the sliced backhands around today. He agreed, but stated that the hitting style of today's sliced backhands have undergone a "forced" to change due to the increased spin and pace of today's game. This is something I hadn't considered since I've never played tour level tennis, and my crude Rosewall backhand works just fine. When instructing upcoming players, therefore, you have to consider whether to teach the Rosewall style or Fed's style. Can you teach the Rosewall style and hope the "forced change" will happen on it's own to an extent? Or should the Fed stlye be taught from the outset?

For me it's only at tour level where these things become paramount, so at club level or even regional level, players are better of with Rosewall style backhands, right?

This is another good example of how most coaches find it difficult to coach above their own personal level of play. Most coaches have no idea what it's like to have tour level shots coming at them. Some coaches with an excellent understanding of the game and an ability to convince others can suceed teaching players above their level, but most look like a fish out of water trying to do it. It happens a lot here in the UK as many coaches try to retain strong juniors beyond the point where they should.

Curious also is that most players don't take the time to learn better sliced backhands. It's such an easy shot to learn. It's been an absent in the game for some time now, going back 30 years even. Borg had an almost pathetic sliced backhand (though won 11 slams without much fuss). Nadal's sliced backhand is only slightly better in my view. I can understand players managing without the shot but cannot understand why they choose to do so - it's such a handy little weapon to have up your sleeve.

[bottle]

~

Thanks for this, Stotty. I think it's so easy to be satisfied with one's workable backhand slice; but, as Sergio Cruz says, "The rolling hit takes perfect timing but when timed well, pays interesting dividends."

Unlike you, Stotty, I'm not teaching a bunch of students right now, but I have, at many periods in the past, and I know the terrible responsibility. When you're working with yourself only, you're in perfect position to fool around and experiment and maybe even be far out.

One of my favorite tennis writers, John M. Barnaby, never taught hit-through slice at least in his books (he was the varsity coach at Harvard University for fifty years). Everything was crossing the ball or chopping down its back. Body was what went through the ball and always to varying degree.

I'm just running a little clinic with myself right now on Rosewellian backhands and am having a ball doing it. What am I trying to accomplish? To go farther than I have in my similar periodic experiments with Rosewellian slice in the past.

Should one get arm straight early or straighten a bit as one goes along, like Trey Waltke? Steve, I mean don_budge, says this doesn't matter overly much, but I'd like to be clear about it in my mind. Of course if you study ALL AVAILABLE sequences of Rosewall in photo and film, you see that he's straightening sometime right up to where his strings face the sky.

That's pretty late in the cycle, so maybe some of the difference is imagined. Maybe I'm exaggerating. Maybe the difference between Rosewall and Waltke, though real, isn't exact.

I guess if I didn't hit the dilemma-causing sizzler I want once in a while, I wouldn't seek to make every backhand slice perfect.

To be practical, I think one should play a singles match where one hits ALL slice backhands even though that's not and will never be one's normal way.

I did so yesterday and had great fun; but, there was a big wind, which helped a lot.

One idea I had last night was just to take racket back to where the strings face the sky. Then to take it back to the phase just before the strings face the sky. And then to take it all the way back and around in a full loop. Do this as a learning exercise. Then drop and hit balls from the three preparations. Form conclusions. Time for dinner.

[bottle]

On Ken Rosewall's Painterly Slice

Sam Green, "the Wyeth of the watercolors," may or may not have played tennis. We never got that far in our informal talks, and I wasn't playing much tennis in those days, just was being a reporter and shooting pool.

Sam's son, Sammy, who decided that the social aspect of painting interested him more than actual pieces, ended up arranging parties for John and Yoko in Manhattan, becoming Greta Garbo's closest friend, and forging all of Andy Warhol's signatures on Warhol's work which Sammy and others mostly did. If Sammy didn't do the forgery, he once explained on film to a hostile interviewer from Great Britain, it isn't an original Warhol work.

The best painting in Hope's living room (she would say it's my living room, too) is of the house where she grew up, and is by Sam Green. The reason I think the painting is great is not the geometric quality of the Victorian house, though that is represented well, but the flowing tree branches reflected in every window.

The thin, bi, tri and quadrifurcated lines are utterly loose, reflecting Sam's free temperament.

When I was on the varsity crew at Brown, I would sometimes visit Sammy's apartment at the Rhode Island School of Design just as respite from my athletic friends. There I met the painter Gretchen Dow, who as Gretchen Dow Simpson later did thirty or fifty covers for the New Yorker magazine.

Sammy took me to a life drawing class. That's where I learned about flow. You could see the flow in the hand of each of the fifteen painters except for myself. The instructor smiled knowingly every time he passed me by along with the jagged teeth I'd drawn in a lady's face.

My hand squiggled. And the nude model's body must have made me nervous. For my easel suddenly crashed.

Eventually, I married a RISD graduate, herself an accomplished painter with flowing lines. When she took to tennis, her opponents mostly didn't know what hit them. For the amount of time she put into tennis, she reaped a bigger return than anybody I've ever known.

This is how I feel about Ken Rosewall's slice. You can study all available films and photos. You can discuss it with knowledgeable people. You can even be successful in figuring it out. But unless you allow yourself total confidence in producing a painterly line, the shot will be a disaster.

But u-i persists. A low, perfect ball skids deep in a corner. You will, in a second, be so tantalized that you will never for the rest of your life stop wishing to master this shot.

[bottle]

Ahoy There, Little You-I!

Hello, how's it goin, little you-I? Yesterday we did painting in tennis, right? So would little you-I like to combine poetry and tennis today? Probably not. But the poem I have in mind is where the expression so essential to tennis instruction "little you-I" comes from. The poem may be coming from where we are coming from, so we wouldn't want to miss out, no?

On the other hand the poet, E.E. Cummings, said in the introduction to his COLLECTED POEMS: "-- it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than the squarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs."

Here's the poem:

o by the by
has anybody seen
little you-I
who stood on a green
hill and threw
his wish at blue
with a swoop and a dart
out flew his wish
(it dived like a fish
but it climbed like a dream)
throbbing like a heart
singing like a flame
blue took it my
far beyond far
and high beyond high
bluer took it your
but bluest took it our
away beyond where
what a wonderful thing
is the end of a string
(murmurs little you-I
as the hill becomes nil)
and will somebody tell
me why people let go

If I were to say this has always been a favorite poem, I wouldn't be saying much. It's a favorite poem of many other people, too. And I like kites, also, but so what? However, if you take me up on yesterday's suggestion about hitting Rosewellian slice from the phase just before the strings face the sky, I think that you, or little you-I, should relax both your shoulder and your forearm. Because if you keep them solid, as if you are sculpture, the simultaneous combination of straightening your arm a little and revolving it backward could, conceivably, shatter your elbow or other body part or ego.

Can we come up with a cue for this specific exercise? How about, "Roll your palm out toward the side fence." Would that be too much? Remember, observational research has disclosed that the human mind is only capable of three conscious ideas per year. If you do this, you will have only one conscious idea possibility left for the rest of the year. You will have used two slots on continuing to roll your arm backward and continuing to straighten it (though doing both faster than earlier in the cycle).

I suggest that little you-I then use the third slot for incorporating this newly acquired knowledge in an overall looped Rosewellian slice backhand.

[bottle]

Think More Rather Than Less

Re Rosewellian Slice:

Both rolls, linked, advance the racket head.

But the first roll levels the racket head with strings open to the sky.

The weight is where the racket is.

So the weight, if a train, moves slowly out of the station before it builds speed.

The ideal swing creates a tray of canapes (pure levelness). This can be adjusted by knee level or height of the arm swing or both.

The rolls are sharp but unhurried. If they are hurried the racket head momentum will get stuck and fail to sum.

Can one finish the rolls quickly and then do something else with the racket? Yes. Can one roll all the way to contact? Yes. Can one roll past contact? Yes.

There are a lot of new combinations that suddenly become available once one has mastered the painterly confidence required for this shot.

[bottle]

Waltke Variation of Rosewall Slice

People often want me to be more simple. Okay, I won't read the text in the following article and another one we've examined before. (By "we" I don't just mean "me" but various people in this forum.) I'll just consider certain videos.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/classiclessons/trey_waltke/the_slice_backhand/the_slice_backhand.html

At top of the article there's A) looped video of Waltke, B) again in middle right, C) again in middle left, D) again at the bottom-- a total of four continuous loops, which is a huge treatment more complete than anything available anywhere of Rosewall himself.

Waltke like Rosewall probably does other things when the camera isn't watching (eat, etc.), but why not go with what's in front of us?

From watching A) and D) together, I surmise that Waltke's backward roll concludes with the racket head lowering behind his back. If this is true, then his racket from that point has nothing to do but roll forward to get to the 45-degree pitch shown at the beginning of B). Furthermore, the racket acts as an old-fashioned scythe from there to the finish.

In video C), where Waltke is hitting on the rise, we see more compressed rhythm in the shot. The racket is slow until it comes in slightly toward his neck. Then, abruptly, it drops to start the quick roll forward, at the end of which the arm is straight and ready to scythe.

This scything, apparent in all four of the video loops, is most accentuated in D), the last. The drop here is slowest, too-- most like top of a very good backswing in golf where gravity does the work.

[bottle]

Narratives of Discovery

That's what I make. For instance, if I have developed a personalized version of a Ferrerfore, I play some matches then ask myself, "Hmmmm. This is a hard, fast shot with enough topspin to keep it in, but how, when I want, can I convert some of these same shots into moonballs?"

From the look of things, Trey Waltke did something similar with the Ken Rosewall backhand. Waltke says with pictures in his article (first item in Classic Lessons) that he imitated three things: The turn, the contact and the finish. That says to me he probably DIDN'T imitate a lot else. And this approach clearly led him to development of his own superbly characteristic shot.

My great-grandfather had 87 patents. I have none. But I've made some discoveries. Right now I'm going to examine Waltke's drop, "the top of his backswing."

Just did it. (But had coffee first.) I wanted to know if the tip of Waltke's racket lowered more than his hand or if both go down together. Answer from studying the four looped videos of himself in his article? (And I might add that it was a surprise!) The hand stays high. The racket tip goes down.

I'll try that when I get to the court today. Of course the racket will already have turned over some during and from the grip change. I think I'll hit some lobs first since any lob from this design is simple and effective. Then I'll add forward roll as the arm extends to produce low-skimming slice.

My personalized version of a Ferrerfore does not take racket immediately back as far as David Ferrer does. My racket in fact ends up pointing somewhere toward the side fence as does my left arm. The shot thus becomes a forehand serve. Forward rotation produces a delayed, power-producing effect as the bent arm goes back and forward and more than catches up. It's gotten fast! I suggested that this produces a flat shot with enough topspin and that's true. (I use a strong eastern with big knuckle near or on 3.5 .) For more topspin and loft to the shot, however, one can simply send the hips toward the net as part of the forward body turn.

[bottle]

~

A day later and it seems, viewing the same films, that Waltke's hand actually is still going up and back as the racket tip twists down (or "drops").

[bottle]

~

The thinking about what happens at top of the backswing is now a light year away from before.

The hand rises gradually up and back until it changes direction without a pause.

The turning over of the racket that occurs at the very top of the gradual hand rise, and is mere continuation of something started earlier, wraps the racket tip farther around the body-- as hand goes up.

[bottle]

Top of the Backswing to You

I've been to the court, where I dropped and hit 200 balls (two baskets).

Today I'm only looking at first looped video in the Waltke article, which is repeating over and over in front of me as I write in longhand.

And I'm only thinking about the backswing.

It's clearly a shallow rise.

The elbow rises altogether just a few inches.

But how does it rise-- by one or two methods?

By two, I submit. 1) it spirals slightly upward around the body. 2) it twists up a bit at the end.

This conclusion explains to myself how the racket head drops lower than Trey's rear shoulder while his twisting hand seems hardly to change level at all.

The same conclusion forces me to doubt if not change my previous opinion that the hand never pauses just changes direction. Could two opposite things be true at once?

In any case, there's a unit of transition at the top worth emulating for anyone who seeks precision every time.

I'm thinking today that twisting hand floats at one level. To make it do that, one may need to raise elbow straight up as the hand twists and the elbow twists, too!

This is subtle stuff to be worked out at the court through fiddling with hand, bent arm, and racket. Words, however, may take one closer to best experiment.

And if I'm getting somewhere in my lucubration, the best final cue may be a teeter-totter, a seesaw with hand as pivot point.

I hate to muddy up such a pure and possibly helpful image, but BIG WRAP of racket head around the body is adding to the power potential of Waltke's shot, so maybe elbow is winding farther around the body while it does the other stuff. Later, one can possibly miniaturize and abbreviate and put the whole stroke out front for the purpose of sticking a backhand volley. You then could have no roll to block this volley and yes roll to stick it. Hand moving less has got to sound good for any volley and maybe even for the other strokes as well.

The basic roll in slice idea seems good in view of the twisting forward combined with arm straightening about to occur. Elbow forcibly dropping as it twists forward creates a powerful mechanism below the relatively level racket head path.

[bottle]

Chunk the Backswing, then Mime the Impossible

Taking guidance from John M. Barnaby stressing the advisability of eliminating needless motion from every tennis stroke, I look at # 850 and see where, speaking of the elbow, I say, "it spirals slightly upward around the body," also "it rises altogether just a few inches."

Fine, there's nothing wrong with that unless it implies three steps: 1)grip change, 2)spiral, 3)moving teeter-totter. Why three steps? Why not two?

Writers call this "editing." Most often it involves paring or removal. After four or five decades of doing it there's no longer an agonizing reappraisal.

Combining grip change and spiral would pare something. All I'd have to do is make a trip to the magical auto parts store and purchase a windshield wiper and not necessarily a new one but rather a used discard from the forehand pile.

Now we're ready to go fast and slow, medium speed and everything in between. Whether there's an Arco blade in our wiper or some other brand doesn't matter. Time to change reference: Think of the old man of the sea, Santos, arm-wrestling. With elbow on the table he pries his forearm mightily.

To say he puts all of himself into it would be understatement. So the elbow comes up a little and follows the motion. This would be little you-I's grip change, but only if the you in little you-I is coming along with me in development of Trey Waltke's variation of Rosewallian slice.

Let's digress. Have faith-- we'll come back. Ken Rosewall didn't write a great article for us on how to hit slice like him, something that's been passed down from decade to decade. No, he spoke with his racket only. Besides, he twists his arm backward real late sometimes and that's hard to do while still maintaining a firm overall stroke. Possible, no doubt. Will try it sometime? Of course.

Simplicity says however to work with Waltke's variation. So we're back with two motions only, 1) a grip change that turns the racket over and lifts the elbow a few inches while carrying it around, 2) the moving hydraulic teeter-totter described in # 850. A key is floating the hand, declaring the hand center or fulcrum of the seesaw, keeping the hand at a single moving height while racket tip (one boy) goes down and the elbow (the other boy) goes up.

Very complicated. So what. Life often is. To make it simple we chunk the whole backswing into a single thought.

That's the process. Develop desired pattern. Meld the parts into one motion. When you've got it, try it fast, slow, medium, at every possible speed. Tennis is the game of emergencies, so prepare thyself for all weathers.

Enough on backswing. Use similar hydraulics under forward racket head path. How much though and where? And what can we mime to make ourselves ready?

Well, don't be an angry mime like a mid-level touring professional who has just muffed an easy shot. Those mimed motions always involve one hand only along with the self-destructive anger. More bad shots are on the way.

One hand only can't be correct here since we don't want to practice wrong movement with either hand ever. And left hand movement is minimal in this stroke. If balance were way off, you might lift both wings like a phoenix bird, but left hand in the ideal just releases racket, falls down to behind rear hip, doesn't counter backward by more than a few inches.

So, from end of backswing with racket head having just dropped beneath rear shoulder, pinch racket on trailing edge to guide it through as much of desired trajectory as you can while keeping body faced toward side fence.

To do this, tell the left hand that he is an actor playing a role that has nothing to do with his real life, so after his brief scene on stage he can just retire to the blue room and go comatose like a sloth.

One knows the desired racket trajectory, doesn't one? It's an almost level swing with the slightest downward grade scything through contact-- can you do that with left hand (on strings) only? Barely.

For scythe's rise to end of followthrough you'll need right hand on handle of a real or imagined racket.

To repeat this motion please remember, reader, you're miming the path of the racket head, not of the left hand unless maybe you're doing a two-hander or two-hander one-hander experiment.

The point is to master one-arm hitting arm hydraulics under the desired racket head path. So as you execute the beginning of a perfect forward racket head trajectory with your left hand, you hold a real racket with proper grip and watch what your relaxed right arm now must do.

Once that's learned, memorize and drill.

Finally, you chunk the whole stroke so it's a single thought.

[bottle]

~

I'm sticking with everything in the previous post at least until I get to the court. And have decided, from the four films, that Trey Waltke's hand is even, while at its highest point, with Waltke's chin.

I'll try, very simple, to let grip change put hand at level of the chin. Teeter-totter then will occur with hand at the same level but proceeding around.

I may keep hand at a pretty high level during the forward swing, as Waltke does.
That means forward roll will be more of a feathering and less of a gravity-assisted downward chop with the elbow. Bend knees more to be able to do this?

Once forward roll along with straightening of the arm is concluded, the L-shaped arm-racket combination does resemble a 19th century New England or Tolstoyan scythe, one of the most subtle instruments ever devised by man.

Such a scythe, with its two handles, works well with a 3/4 golf swing, but wouldn't be adaptable to 2/4 (a purely horizontal baseball swing) or 4/4 (a purely vertical golf cutter (swing) replaced by weed whackers anyway). In the latter two instances the blade tip would be too high and too low, and this information could have relevance.

[bottle]

An Upbeat Report

I thought I had good slice but this is best ever.

It's so easy to say something like that-- too easy. But the present experiment has shown steady progress throughout, and I'd like to think I have the humility and gratefulness to accept that.

If I didn't try to develop this shot for long enough before, it was because I thought the slice I already had was sufficient for my needs-- what a mistake. And how often does EVERYBODY sell themself short through making a mistake like that?

Since this forum is a place where people can share "real experiences" along with instruction and ideas about instruction, my thoughts on slice right now are influenced by two brothers, two black guys in Winston-Salem, one that I hit with and the other that I just watched (when I lived in W-S, NC-- now I'm in Detroit).

The first, Nathan, is a very good teaching pro. After I hit with him a couple of times (always for free-- I never bought a lesson), he advised that I should hit slice on my backhand side all the time. There was nothing conceptual about this. He just could tell from hitting with me that my slice was working and would bother a lot of people.

So what was my slice? Oh, a shot where one sends barrel of the racket smoothly toward the net then changes direction of this slight momentum through suddenly clenching one's shoulderblades together. In my version, the bent arm is allowed to straighten passively propelled only by the clench.

The shot is zippy, low, quick to get off from simple straight back preparation that allows you to imagine you just can see a ring on your middle finger.

It carries a lot of sidespin, too, very good when you want it, maybe not so good when you don't.

The new shot, the one I've discussed here so much, includes a much bigger
backswing and control of everything, but this backswing, I think, after the editing I carried out today, takes hardly any more time than the straight back, abbreviated version I've used for years. Best is the way grip change turning over the racket blends into moving teeter-totter.

Great depth, control, pace, consistency, low bounce, diversity-- what more does anyone want from their backhand slice? And I can chop the ball, also, if I want, with CHOP probably more disrespected (stupidly) in modern tennis even than backhand slice.

Of course if you use the word "chip," then people think it's okay, not understanding that CHIP AND CHOP in tennis are exactly the same, call it CHIP-CHOP?

I don't know the other guy's name. I just know he was one of the oldest tennis players one might ever see in Winston-Salem, and he was playing a tall, strapping, globally ranked senior, very whitebread, who had just returned from international competition in Europe.

It was a juried tournament for seniors; I, for instance, could not have played in it but may catch all of these guys in the eighties depending on what Tuesday's MRI says.

The old black guy sliced every backhand until Mr. Arrogant came in. And then he whipped a topspin passing shot past the punk. What a great way to play, I thought. But Mr. Arrogant didn't share my admiration. I can't remember his hateful language to his cronies during changeovers. I'll only say this. Mr. Arrogant was so arrogant that one couldn't tell whether he was racist or just plain arrogant.

Mr. Arrogant won that day. I don't think he would have on another (or "would of," as don_budge likes to say). But the old black guy, who didn't have an arrogant bone in his body, became a tennis hero of mine.

[don_budge]

Conspiracy?

Mr. Arrogant won that day. I don't think he would have on another (or "would of," as don_budge likes to say). But the old black guy, who didn't have an arrogant bone in his body, became a tennis hero of mine.

Very funny bottle...are you and tennis_chiro conspiring? I dropped out of the only English class I had in college...in fact I didn't even bother to drop, I just stopped going after the first class and got an "F"! Thank God for the EDIT function on this forum!

On the other hand...congratulations on the backspin backhand. That should be a welcome addition to your repertoire.

[bottle]

Probably a good choice. If I were doing it all over I'd do more politics, history and economics in the hope of becoming more "engaged" with the world I live in-- sooner. I don't reject anything concerning English syntax and literature but think these subjects could have been approached from a different direction. They would mean more if the person were more engaged and had significant life experience. This idea isn't mine but rather Gore Vidal's . A gay man, sure, but so was Whitman, Auden, Tennessee Williams, Tilden, probably Melville, etc., etc. A lot of brilliance in that group. The point is, Vidal wrote great historical novels including BURR. He seems to have understood Aaron Burr better than anyone else who ever lived. And wasn't bad on people like Jefferson and Washington, too. But he wrote novel novels and plays and everything. Rejecting its best intellectuals is what America does too often. The New York Times wouldn't mention his name because it thought he was "queer." So he wrote mysteries under the name of Edward Box and The Times, not realizing the new author was he, praised these books to the sky. I remember how my old teacher, William Golding after my encounters with him at Hollins College ("Young man," he said, looking straight up two or three feet at my chin, "you have psychological problems, don't you?" He nicely changed his tune after he read the one big thing I'd written which I cared about) said stuff, extremely laudatory stuff about Gore Vidal in one magazine or journal or another. That was when I started to take Vidal a bit more seriously, and I've never regretted that decision. Anyway, Anne Golding was a perfectly lovely lady, and I certainly don't think William Golding was gay, but here's another point: He wasn't a homophobe either. Being a homophobe or anything phobe is self-destructive behavior. Oh, where was I? English teachers! Had a few good ones. A pox on the rest of them (the majority). Woulda, shoulda, coulda? Would have, should have, could have? Or would of, should of, could of? The latter is more charming, the former more "correct." Take yr. choice.