A New Year's Serve

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Knees, Shoulders, Slingshot

This progression is taking me ever closer to the down and up swing I've always wanted.

Down and up? Someone questioned me. Just get the racket down. Then swing it up.

Sorry, a golfer doesn't do that neither does Federer.

Most simply, the knees and shoulders sequence, in which hips rotate "marginally ahead of shoulders," to quote the precise words of baseball slugger Ted Williams, will take the racket downward in our Federian tennis stroke, down to the flip.

The implicit Roger Federer forehand philosophy, which I would argue created Nadal, Djokovic and anyone striving to hit "the ATP forehand" nowadays, edits off big circular backswings behind the shoulders line (think Jiggles Goerges), but still contains an inside-out component to be neglected at one's own peril.

Viewed from behind, solid part of swing starts on left side of slot. Flip occurs in middle of slot. Contact (residual shoulders rotation plus slingshot) occurs on right edge of slot.

[stotty]

Most simply, the knees and shoulders sequence, in which hips rotate "marginally ahead of shoulders,"

I never knew this...just tried it in front of the mirror...you're right!

[bottle]

Sometimes I am, e.g., yesterday finally became a distance swimmer (at 72) by hanging all the little movements of good swimming on body twiddle.

By that I mean you transform the whole body into a kyak or single needle and then roll it from side to side with nothing in between.

Got most of this from videos on the internet. Question, Google, something like "efficient swimming technique."

[bottle]

One More Thing to Try on Serve

This will be disruptive.

And probably counter-productive.

As with so many excursions, the question is, Can you come back to where you started?

Michel Berta, writer, painter and French instructor at the North Carolina School for the Arts, would assign one of his students to remember where he started just as he embarked on the excursion.

In the form of invention solitaire I've developed, however, I must remind myself.

And I like my old fashioned rowing shoed double-leg kick combined with linked body rotation and scapular throw.

Can I return to this oasis after my frivolous trip? Only with great concentration, i.e., lay down a snip of colored thread or a good bookmark.

The basis of creating old fashioned rowing shoes in which the soles of the feet (flat here) are fully supported, is clever bending and rolling of rear knee with front foot coming back to flat through retracting heel.

But if one is going to let anything retreat in a hip turn-- which may or may not be temporization-- why not do the experiment big, i.e., start with rear leg straight.

Now, instead of keeping front leg bent for subsequent thrust, screw it straight as rear leg fully bends and rolls the opposite way.

That (Bonnie Raitt, do you play tennis? Are you reading this?) ought to give one's stomach muscles something to think about.

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My Interpretation of the Roscoe Tanner Serve

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLATEORaB_M

Pretty much so:

The head pitches forward, but only AFTER you have hit the ball.

But I'm interested in platform stance-- for me-- no pinpoint. Will this work? Yes.

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Golden Retriever Opts for Quick Start Ball

Daffney, a golden retriever staying at our house tried and failed to pull a Penn 3 tennis ball through the bars of my serve basket.

Quickly, however, though howling all the while, she identified a Quick Start Ball in the mix, and because this brightly marked one was soft, was able to pull it through.

She then dismembered it, ready for Wimbledon.

[bottle]

On-Line Invention

Invention mania is carrying over from my tennis to my swimming, from swimming to parallel parking and how to crack an egg.

"Has anyone ever told you that you're obsessive?" Plenty of times. The person who's told me most however is I myself.

And I wonder if one pursues some subject to its logical ends, as a matter of conscious choice, if that's true obsession, a subject I certainly do know something about in my novel THE PURSE MAKER'S CLASP in the Amazon e-book store. The obsession there: One Hungarian woman and through her by extension all things Hungarian.

My favorite essayist, Michel de Montaigne, believed that the Hungarians he knew pretty well (since the century just before was the time of the Hunyadi Janos--King Matyas father son combo!) were a warlike people, and I would say once and forever.

Montaigne believed in marriage for the purpose of bringing up children but thought romantic love was terrible in that it limited one's freedom.

No, this swimming thing (admittedly Hungarian, too) is different from obsessive love: First off, I just plan to dabble in it, use it for non-impact workouts with no "total immersion" although that does seem a physical impossibility.

My point is that I've noticed that some of the most basic ideas implicit in swimming, just as in tennis, never get expressed.

I've seen a pretty good sampling of the swimming videos on YouTube and wonder about the subject of two-beat kick, about how it is taught.

I understand that you're supposed to kick downward every time your hand and arm reaches full extension-- then and only then-- but to learn the feel of this, one is helped so much by realizing that because of already accomplished body turn the kick is not "down" as advertised but is on a 45-degree angle, first one way and then the other.

In tennis, I'm thinking that today I'd like to try a kick serve with no scapular adduction included until after contact, but rather scapular retraction to reinforce the power of last instant change from knifing frame to glancing strings.

The way I propose to go about this is a big slow helicoptering of the elbow forward to initiate the final throw.

This no doubt will prove an idea even worse than romantic love.

[bottle]

Avoiding Scapular Retraction in a BH One-Hander

In most cases, to achieve an effective, inside out swing (see attached drawings), one needs to place arm fulcrum in shoulder ball rather than middle of one's back.

To better understand this, stand up, don't use a racket, just wave a straight arm. See how arm goes in two different directions according to the two different fulcrums? Scapular retraction takes the right-hander's arm more sharply right.

Implications: Swing easy to put shoulder ball to work? To swing hard from same court position, hold scapula in (consciously at first?) To hit a sharp, powerful backhand from way out wide, do use scapular retraction the way you might on a backhand slam? Use shoulder ball when stepping straight toward net?

The straight lines are toward the target. The X indicates crossing of the ball, which might be good on some slices but not on this driven shot.

[bottle]

Yo, Duckies, Keep Your Duct Tape in Your Pocket

Abduction, seduction, scapular retraction, scapular adduction, scapular reduction, scapulation, revolution-- all these terms belong in the tennis lexicon except for revolution since we all need to belong to the USTA (United States Tennis Association).

Bill Tilden didn't like the USTA but that doesn't mean we can't. And the USTA will be good for getting us tickets to the U.S. Open.

I was in a play at URI (the University of Rhode Island) once-- theater of cruelty called MARAT-SADE, a history play in the time of the nobleman Marat getting murdered in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday in the era of the guillotine.

Just imagine common people coming to take Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand, Rand Paul, Marie Antoinette, all Bushes, Cheneys, Rumsfelds and every other exceptionalist they could rightly or wrongly identify off in tumbrels-- big haywagons, actually-- off to the guillotine.

The common people in this case however were escapees from an insane asylum and I was one of them. "Marat, we're poor," we sang, "and the poor stay poor. Marat, we don't want to be poor any more. We want the world, and we want it now-- we want our revolution now, NOW, NOW! "

Chanting softly, then gradually louder, finally shouting "REVOLUTION, COPULATION, REVOLUTION, COPULATION!" we would plunge into the audience.

I would go for one young lady identified early, somebody I'd been working on by staring into her eyes for the whole play.

When I was one inch from grabbing her, a prison guard who was a real guard from the URI football team would hit me sideways, knocking me down to end the play.

If this is self-serving in the sense of "I been everywhere, man, I done everything, seen the rising sun, man," even been in plays, I apologize.

The sixteenth century classicist Michel de Montaigne, intellectual forebear of Ralph Waldo Emerson and inventor of the essay, unlike what the example of Emerson may suggest, says that it's perfectly okay to write about yourself so long as you don't do it in a superficial way.

So listen, reader, if scapular retraction combined with inside out wrist flip works on a kick serve, then maybe one should save scapular adduction for one's hardest serves and employ scapular reduction on soft slice out wide.

[bottle]

Neggie Experiment

"Hast broke my head acrost and hast given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too."

The previous instruction didn't work, in other words, so abandon the inside out wrist flip-- that's my advice, reader, to you.

[bottle]

Language

Suppose you want to change something? If you're at all like me, you always do.

Then language is the best tool a lot of us have, especially if we're feeling light in the wallet and don't want to schedule a learning appointment with somebody a few of whose opinions we suspect anyway.

I like the expression "ue" (ew, gak, as Bridget Jones might say although those words don't correspond exactly to the letters). "ue" seems more visceral to me than "unforced error." And I like Pam Shriver's "decels." She comes from a time when people spoke more about Billie Jean's ideas, foremost of which is that decelerating as you come off of the ball is a fatal error that tennis servers at any level are apt to make.

Are you hitting decels, i.e., decelerating serves? Are you short-arming them? However you serve, the acceleration must climax as your racket leaves the ball.

Coming up with a better kinesthetic cue could be the best thing a coach ever does (other than applying his eyesight to a specific problem).

[bottle]

Georges and Dogopolov Just for Fun

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6cWqWlj-Jc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8jbOMHZNPE

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Get them together. Why not?

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Dolgopolov

Accent on second syllable-- no? If I'm wrong please correct me, somebody, since I don't want to call my brother-in-law, the professor of Russian and Czech linguistics just now since he is preparing for classes.

But is the accent different for the Ukraine? I don't think so. Listening to the Washington announcers struggle pathetically with Dolgy's name, putting the accent on third syllable ("po") seems very po indeed.

I asked my brother-in-law once about "Sharapova" and he told me in no uncertain terms that her name is ShaRAPova, accent on the second syllable, and her father is ShaRAP, accent on the second syllable.

But I guess the announcers are hoping to create another viral (and stupid)
if softer name like SharaPOVa. If she changed back now I guess she'd lose her sponsors.

But I'm with Kuznetsova (accent on second syllable) on this one. She asked (quite public it was too) why Americans insist on being so stupid about foreign names. It was the best shot she ever made.

Well, because we insist on being stupid about everything. It's why Mitt and Paul or Mutt and Jeff if they run have a good chance of becoming president and vice-president.

Not that we're the only bad-asses. Think what the Brits did to "Don Quixote," changing what sounds like an h to what sounds like an x.

DO YOUR PART FOR WORLD INTELLIGENCE AND PUT THE ACCENT ON THE SECOND SYLLABLE in Russian (and Ukranian names, too, I guess).

But if she's Hungarian, accent on first syllable would be all right, I guess.

Dolgopolov: Fastest action in the West or East or anywhere.

Down then hip out
Then straight up (no forward element yet!)
Then split

Rear heel up all the time.

Hits ball at peak of toss. It doesn't get to drop. (Well, maybe an inch sometimes.)

Front leg rearranges (all of foot) to put weight on rear foot for an instant.

Knees don't bend until racket is almost all the way up.

The front leg rearranged so knees were pointing in the same direction LONG BEFORE THAT.

Anything else I should or shouldn't notice?

[stotty]

Dolgopolov

Interesting serve.

EVERYTHING has to be right when executing a serve like this. There is no allowance (or very little) for micro adjustments to be made as with a serve with a higher ball toss. If the timing is out you're in trouble.

Roscoe Tanner is the ultimate exponent of this type of serve...did it perfectly. He had pinpoint timing...the action so quick there was no allowance for micro adjustments in the lead up to the strike.

It must be hard for the returner to pick where the serve is going when playing a big server with a very low toss...easy to get caught out...when one is used to reading servers with higher ball tosses...the brain gets duped into thinking it has a split second longer than it actually has.