A New Year's Serve

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Use Flying Grip Change to Edit Out Built-in Stupidity in One's Iterative Backhand

An iterative backhand is simply a backhand that is always changing and therefore has a story behind it.

My composite grip McEnrueful forehand is part of optional one-grip system in which the wrist is flat compared to what it used to be. Wrist is flat on fast forehand drive-- a rope-- and is flat on backhand slice.

Well, if wrist is flat for backhand slice, why should it not be flat for one's backhand drive, too?

I made this discovery some time ago, but to implement it used needless sequence in first having depressed wrist and then straightening it as racket descended behind me a small amount. (All my backhands including most backhand volleys are scapular-driven with arm gradually but proactively straightening from the elbow all the way to contact, which formula can on occasion produce inside out swings.)

The idea here is never to make wrist depressed, i.e., concave when viewed from above.

Now thumb tip will still be on a different pointy ridge than for slice but with the same straight wrist.

It could be that really good players don't make as big a distinction as other players do between backhand slice and backhand drive. Read in full the autobiography of J. Donald Budge if you don't believe this.

"Your backhand is really coming along," Ken Hunt said to me at the tennis social on Friday night. In the whole Midwest, Ken is ranked third among players over 80 despite being at the upper end of the 80 to 90 spectrum.

We got to play together for a single set which we won 6-1 . Then we started a second set in which we could do nothing right before Sara Sessions, the activities director for Eastside (indoor) Tennis Facility, Detroit, came out with a new chart for different partners.

The let-down was due to old-age weariness against young opponents but who cares?

"Your backhand is really coming along," Ken had said. He knew the backhand he was discussing was slice backhand but didn't make that distinction.

Have I tried flatter wrist from the outset for drives yet? No. Will this change work? Has to, it seems to me. I'll be very surprised if it doesn't.

(And it does.)

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TSLTTMMABD

"The stupid little thing that might make a big difference."

Note that it's singular. So don't try to pluralize it. If you've got another TSELMABOD, wait to try it until tomorrow or better next week.

Today, let's temporize the racket head at bottom of the gravity drop.

I've been all over the place on this one. Palm down, palm up, palm rolling from down to up or square to up, palm slightly open the whole way, palm down the whole way leading to racket head momentum which can then open the racket face to where you want. Recently I've tried to keep racket square (on edge) at all times, which requires ongoing attention and adjustment.

So screw that.

Since I want maximum gravity assistance in the cause of constancy, I will start with both hands high, maybe even over left shoulder with weight on rear foot.

But here's the tselmabod. The racket face will be slightly open even when it's high.

Seems like all the tour players start with open face nowadays but never tell why.

So I give my own reason: to temporize at the bottom.

Gravity speaks. The two arms can drop as natural as can be. And the straight hitting arm can easily swing up to low web position-- a position where the fleshy web under your shoulder has opened out.

Right then as racket morphs from drop to back and up a bit is the time to temporize to square. Just let the racket head go slower than the hand. Now the strings won't have any momentum in the backward, forward or sideways direction, and this should equate to better balance and a more upward-oriented serve.

This also should put to work the hand, a good thing since a less mechanical and more sensitized hand will control squeeze at elbow and anything else the elbow does from then on.

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Correction, Reality and the Nature of Same

https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...ActionRear.mov

In this second serve ad one can see, if slowly clicking, that the two halves of Sampras' arm do squeeze together.

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More Attack

Lightly throw the elbow instead of lugubriously stretching it upward.

Everything that happens in the lugubrious inversion (the twisting of the elbow upward) must still happen as part of the light throw.

The only difference will be in how you cluster things. If you can't perform the inversion at higher speed with leg and all other help you will have created a clusterfuck.

Practice this more aggressive attack by starting in an open forehand stance, at the baseline (and) from low toss for now fire line drives all the way into the opposite fence.

Remember the mantra "speed, push and crow?" Well, it applies better now.

But once you've mastered the long line drives don't make the mistake of replicating them in your serve. That same energy must go UP.

(If I sound pedantic here, I apologize. Simply put, I am talking to myself.)

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Start Attack from Middle of Body (Groin to Sternum) and Let the Energy Radiate both Up and Down

Well, this is worth a try. A different idea than concentrating on leg or arm drive although the attack being described here is all a single drive no matter how you cut it.

From groin to sternum is a thrust or elongation-- the technique that Alexander the Great so loved to talk about.

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Compact Version

Now with everything else AMAP remaining the same, the two arms only straighten to 90 compared to 180 degrees. Pete Sampras never seemed to straighten his hitting arm early, only on way up to the ball. Whoops, this was a mistake in perception (https://www.tennisplayer.net/members...ActionSide.mov). You can see in the video that Sampras straightens then bends but never then squeezes both halves of the arm together like Ivan Lendl.

Sampras' shoulder is/was uncommonly flexible, so the rules of advisability are very likely different for him.

Still, why accept anybody's insistence that a full service motion better helps legs get racket tip lower than abbreviated motion does?

That may be true or not. All I am saying is one should find out for oneself.

Try archer's bow serving both full and abbreviated version then choose-- why not?

Abbreviated might be good for an aging player. Or perhaps if, like the tin woodman, his rusting joints are getting sticky, the fuller motion will give him more needed smoothness and rhythm and so keep him holding for longer.

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Removal of Backward Hips Rotation: One Less Moving Part

. Return to Brenda Schultz-McCarthy and Mark Papas (http://www.revolutionarytennis.com/fineprint.html) with crossover from other relevant sources

. Immediate implementation of archer's bow on the toss, which will fly one foot higher than before.

. Start with weight on rear foot, arms bent, racket pointed at net post or even more to the side. The body, upper and lower, faces the side rather than target. The feet are roughly parallel, not splayed very much. The arms both get straight at beginning of the down of down-and-up. The tossing arm drops to leg.

. During down and up of the straight arm toss the front hip will actively protrude all the way to the baseline to turn whole body into an archer's bow.

. "Down and up" of the hitting arm really means the arm flows down and back and up to ATA (air the armpit position, which is lower than it might be due to tilt of the shoulders).

. A farther pushing by rear foot of front hip across the baseline by several inches as rear shoulder winds and stretches around the posted toss arm as hit arm bends to some semblance of trophy position. The two hands come toward one another to create form above the head.

. Straightening of leg, bod and arm with emphasis on extension between groin and sternum to create "leapfrog" rather than "cartwheel."

. Teardrop shape lowpoint of racket tip drop.

. There is no ESR or ISR or any other encumbering alphabet soup during all-out psychological and physical and loose but pro-actively fast and throw-like extension of the arm. One keeps racket on edge for as long as possible for aerodynamic reason and others.

. Total attack mode then from racket drop to nuclear wrist, which penultimate and concentrated snap is many things rather than one.

. Opening of shoulders comes only after contact. That's what Brenda said some place else.

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An Explorer Frequently Finds Himself in a Morass

So what does he do about it? All slice serves, followed by less slice on them to make them flatter, followed by flat-and-kick, followed by kick.

Worth a try.

Have to go with what has worked, not with what some other person says is a good idea.

Return to bent arm toss (with hitting arm equivalently bent "to keep form"). It's just as good if not better than straight arm toss so long as both are from the shoulder.

Start pushing elbow of toss arm toward right fence as racket drops.

Raise that elbow more as hips turn back.

Toss as shoulders turn back and knees bend with front hip pressing forward.

Employ kinetic chain as it ought to be employed-- a Muhammad Ali jab rather than a linkage of spinning disks in the red Smithsonian Museum of 19th Century American Technology.

Jab from rear foot to include elbow inversion and adduction and body cartwheel if cartwheel is something in which shoulders go end over end.

The jab, a hell of an attacking whollop, includes complete bending and straightening of the arm but more important plenty of ESR to put strings on outside of ball.

At last instant, with arm straight, one's ISR snaps the racket through a tight arc that mystically speaking hits back of ball and then inside of ball.

With left arm clutching one's chest not to make the shoulders lurch forward but to stop that process already underway and convert it into rotation about the spinal axis as front leg also drives up for the same purpose. Because axis is tilted slightly forward at that point, the final turn of shoulders will add to rise of racket if struck at beginning of this final tract.

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"Don't bend your knees right away," Scott Murphy said.

Can't remember the reason he gave. Something to do with bad earliness. But he is a guy who knows his stuff.

So I stayed tall and did my new twist-the-arm thing while rolling weight on rear foot.

Put toss between that initial hips rotation back and shoulders rotation back, which became part of the post-toss body bend and protruding forward of front hip.

It was Easter, so a black guy walking past said, "That was a good one."

Soon used distance but less splay between the feet.

New Year's day is bullshit. Easter, Passover, whatever the equivalent is in some other world religion is where it's at.

Believe in the rainbow nations. (Song in a new Toronto musical preparing for Broadway.)

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The Tossing Arm Treads Water

But the water rises from underneath.

The expression "treading water" is of curse subjective in that the arm does not have legs.

But the arm swims in place without going anywhere.

The other arm, also straight, seems to wing it far away from the first arm as shoulder tilts down to shoulders bat line.

One ought to experiment with the speed of this down-and-around backswing. Common knowledge is undecided on whether it's better to compress and extend the legs with no pause between these two parts. If pause is the better option the pause is the time to toss, the success of which will depend on speed and rhythm.

Who is to say that a fast or slow action serve is better or worse?

This has been a message from the monoliths on Easter Island.

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Humeral Conflict vs. Long Straight Runway as Explanation of Racket Head Speed in the Serve

Everything is iteration. There is no theory or speculation here, only a question. Can the new roundabout arm swing combined with maximized arm roll (racket face can be closed to more than vertical at or before end of double arm straightening) give the rotorded server more space in which to generate humeral conflict?

That would be conflict in which the humerus was spinning one way while trying to spin the other.

And there is no reason why humerus can't already be spinning backward as arm begins to break at the elbow.

Just a question. Youth wants to know.

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Rolling Arm Backward: the Idea

The idea is to get racket tip way back, not necessarily fast, but with a bit of racket momentum carried along.

In this light I propose that arm roll not start until double arm straightening has concluded but last all the way through hips and shoulders backward sequential rotations.

Edited out is the notion of shoulders rotating backward as part of the toss.

This makes simultaneous straight arm toss and hitting arm bend a pure double action unalloyed by any kind of bod rotation backward or forward, and similarly not messed up by leg compression since that already will have happened.

Still, some linear travel forward can be going on.

Overall serve: backward rotations (including rotation of arm); the toss and beginning of throw; the upward and forward serve itself.

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My Ass in a Morass at the End of Moross Street in Grosse Pointe

As I explained to the mom who watched her 18-year-old son and me get to 5-0 before we started to falter and had to gut-check ourselves, all my writing about tennis strokes has helped each one except for my serve.

"I would have a better serve if I had the one I used to have and didn't study any serving stuff at all."

It helped that I thought her son was a prodigal tennis player. "What an athlete," I said, mentioning in particular a pair of his towering straight up topspin lobs.

A good player herself, she laughed about my serving woes. What else should a person including myself do?

Try down-and-up again, I suppose, in my serving sessions at the end of Moross.

Down however shall be both arms connected by the racket from the elbows to create great straightness out to the side.

Up shall not include toss at all. The toss shall be delayed.

Up will take the racket back in the rolling way I outlined in previous posts. The racket will go level but the shoulder will take it up to bat line. Put another way, happening tilt will bring rear shoulder down to the line where the two shoulders and the arm form a straight line.

Up will also raise base of the tossing arm although that arm shan't toss yet.

Up will also bend the knees to turn the hips then shoulders back and create great tilt.

Toss shall be straight arm from the shoulder with ice cream cone configurated hand helping create desired parabola from right to left.

Toss shall include bending of the right arm to keep this service a single continuous motion.

The legs to drive up as the racket drives down.

Forget anything else.

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Riffing on an Idea is Pure Jazz, and I Love Jazz

The idea is to be a rebel by introducing carved serves into one's repertoire.

"Stop thinking so much about body parts," Martina Navratilova said.

I have, I did, but needed to think about the body parts first, got the backward arm roll just right, abandoned the unnecessarily complex palm down middle frisbee in-and-out that I didn't enjoy for my whole life.

Now I do everything together or will do that when I play social doubles tonight letting the chips and scores fall where they may. The arm will roll, the shoulders will coil, I'll leftward lean, the hips will cock, and it will all happen at once.

The bent-arm ice cream cone toss will occur where it keeps telling me it wants to occur at beginning of the forward traveling triple rotation.

This may no longer be a double helix serve but that might be all right.

I will have earned so much time I'll be able to do what I want, i.e., stop the bod altogether and let the arm go.

Then I'll be ready to try some kick and next flat off of same preparation and toss but with ISR now that I didn't have in the carved version and with more body bend/"husking" upward too.

And with elbow held back not squeezed forward into a preparatory needle as before.

Jazzy riff, that's all this will be.

The carved slice will be all bod then arm.

The kick, the flat and the non-carved slice will be arm first then bod.

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One Abbreviated Serve

Starting with # 3545 I have decided to add leg compression on the backswing and leg extension on the forestroke with serve remaining the same in other respects.

Did I try all this simultaneity? Not yet. But doubles played this morning leads to this decision. See this proposed version as circular more than linear. Think sharper angles from the forehand court should be attainable if one produces topspin slice. The ball can go higher but still come down short almost in the alley.