A New Year's Serve

[stotty]

Kick back

The Stich serve has three anomalies:

1 no kick back

2 lands on the right foot (as do Becker and Stotty)

3 strange hand/wrist movement around the trophy position

Kick back seems more violent with those who serve and stay back for obvious reasons. Kick back always just seems part of the run to the net with serve volleyers of the past...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFPPz0Iy5A0

...so is the lack of it all that relevant in the case of Stich.

Lew Hoad has no kick back either...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR7kvBGntW8

[bottle]

Very interesting and timely with Wimbledon going on. Has immediate implications also for any server desiring to put less strain on his front leg. That certainly would not be me as a young man with an overdeveloped front leg from rowing and every desire to get maximum power out of it. The counter-argument that everybody on the tour nowadays serves the other way has never seemed sufficiently solid given what we know about authoritarian-susceptible personalities.

[bottle]

Self-Authorized to Self-Feed

I, "the one and only Bottle" in Luke Jensen's words, am self-authorized to think endlessly about tennis technique which you, reader, are not-- not if you want to play well. That is why you should have conversations with me.

Thanks to six gardens being tended to by Hope and Helpless Inc. it seems like a year since I've been to a tennis court when really it's only been a few days. I'm not counting Hope's and my driving over to Rochester Hills where my 10-year-old friend Maxine always wants to go outside and hit academic balls high above the blacktop road.

Maxine-- could be Maximene-- is the greatest Dorothy there ever was in the history of THE WIZARD OF OZ, far better than the menacing Judy Garland. In a 75-person production, the witch's hat fell on the yellow brick road. Maxine-Dorothy: "Don't touch it, Toto!" On opening night they gave her a Kansan bucket with two old-fashioned laundry rollers at the top. That was for the scene where Dorothy throws water on the witch. Well, she suddenly had to figure out how to get rid of the rollers first. Audience tension rose. The water finally got out. Because of the obstacle, both the audience and the witch melted better.

When, near the end of the production, the wizard had trouble opening his bag containing brains, heart, courage, WD-40, etc., Dorothy-Maxine said, "Can I help you?" When the temperature was a hundred degrees and Maxine and I were alternating hits of a soft foam ball against a soft aluminum garage door, she noticed that my knee was clicking a bit too much and I was sweating from the forehead a lot and said, "Are you all right?"

Because of all her theater, now Amaryllis in THE MUSIC MAN, I thought that maybe Maxine was lost to tennis. No, the other day a varsity player from one of the Michigan universities, in five minutes, taught her a two-hander that is simply unbelievable.

So that's about Maxine and Maxine's possible future. Now about my own. When I'm hitting the foam ball to Maxine (she prefers regular balls having played in tournaments from the end of her first week and having won a few times with a forehand only), I can see extraordinarily well the cockeyed spin from my Rosewallian slice along with its precisely variable axis.

Which reminds me how I really like the idea of a double roll on any one-hander. And I think I suggested I prefer to make contact on the second roll rather than during the "cusp" or afterward.

The one-handed drives I see this week on TV Wimbledon seem to roll after contact-- I don't like that. I prefer the "roof" followthrough of a Petr Korda.

If I get to a court today, I'll try everything I don't like and what I do, but we have to drive over to Rochester Hills first to get a dog since Maxine and her entire family are flying to Costa Rica to do some social work.

[bottle]

Re-Thinking Continental Penetration Shot

The upswing will be more controlled, slowing down, if hips are going the other way and forward pressure is building in arm to counter the racket's upward movement.

Ideally the racket will just change direction with no pause.

But if one is building forward pressure in the arm as it is back bowling upward, then forward freedom of arm action is on the way.

This substitutes another racket speed contributor for the "cast arm downward" design I previously expounded.

Hips can continue through the contact. Ground force will fly up the legs and through contact whether knees are bent or not. The proof of this is a reductio ad absurdum: If there's no starch in the legs you fall down on the court.

The stomach muscles continue through contact also. And independent arm travel. And arm roll, which transforms this into a hybrid shot: As Steve Navarro has pointed out, the strings roll up while rolling through.

This is a big learning order, one of the high end items on anyone's menu but worth whatever money, I mean energy, one is willing to expend.

[bottle]

Reducing Scope

Obviously, in one hundred viewings of the same film, one can see something different each time.

What experiments has one oneself been conducting recently? That will make a difference in what one wants to see.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/golden_legends/donbudge/donbudge_sa.html?DBBHRear.mov

How much forward roll is there in this video? Some. Otherwise, J. Donald Budge would have hit a lob here since racket face was quite open to begin the forward swing.

Why doesn't he have to roll more? Because he swings way out from the body (like Ted Williams), i.e., with considerable scope. More scope forms a less compact stroke but helps get the racket tip around in time. And compactness does come immediately afterward in the high followthrough.

Racket rolls to slightly beyond contact, I would argue, and then STOPS ROLLING as it lifts.

One can work out variations on this. In a double roll design, where racket first rolls open and then closed but all within a unified and succinct and inside out forward swing, one can take a shorter path to the ball since more forward roll instead of long scope brings the racket tip around.

[bottle]

Does The Beat Go On?

So, Cher, does the beat go on or not?

Ken Rosewall makes a nice skunk tail pretty high but not too far back.

But skunk tail from farther back with arm not as bent-- with good but not right angle at the elbow-- works best for my eastern backhand drive, allowing more space in which to accomplish a smooth and easy double roll.

So should I change my slice to make it more consistent with my drive, the very slice so recently praised by knowledgeable tennis-mastering Stifel-Steiffels in West Virginia?

Those players at the Stifel-Steiffel Family Reunion were not all Steiffel-Stifels-- some were only Stifels. But a Stifel once married a Steiffel and the result was Hope's mother Louise, whom I interviewed in Middletown, Connecticut before I ever met Hope. Then I went out with Hope. Then I didn't see her for 46 years. Then I received an email from some joker broker who wanted to flirt with my sister but knew where Hope was. What it all comes down to is that if you are German you pronounce Stifel Shteefful. But if you are more American you say Stifel as in the Eiffel Tower. And always pronounce Steiffel like The Steiffel Tower unless you want to say it like the German Stifel, which means boot, which is the inverted shape that your size 44 forehand loop ought to be.

The moral is: "Don't listen to the Stifel-Steiffels even if they think your slice is pretty good."

Go ahead and change your backhand slice elbow setting to be more consistent with your drive and change back later if you must.

[bottle]

Putting an Extra Timing Unit into Continental Penetration Shot

If you (I) plan to get your shoulder muscles going forward even as your racket back-bowls up, I insist that you (I) do so while upper body is rotating/driving forward, not just the hips.

I read a forehand article once in which Tom Okker asserted that most players don't spend enough time actually hitting the ball. At Rock Creek Park, D.C., I watched Arantxa Vicario-Sanchez's coach make sure that she countered that tendency by timing her forehand over and over with a stopwatch.

In the formation of most forehands there is so much to think about, the worst item of which is kinetic chain: Everybody always needs a drink of simplicity.

But when one temporarily foregoes the complexity of one's constantly developing ATP Style Forehand, say, and hits The Stripped Down Penetrating Continental instead, one may be poised to think about kinetic chain without harm.

So, if the hips firing and building tension precedes shoulders firing to do the same thing, arm actually firing and shoulders actually firing are no longer simultaneous.

You will have added microseconds to the duration of the shot.

I will not say you'll add a beat since the overall stroke taken together is still too fast for a rock 'n roll or dixieland groove.

But you can now make contact farther in front, I think.

There is more arm delay. The last instant hybrid roll (both up and through the ball) will permit you to do this even though many teaching pros will expect-- mistakenly-- that you will hit the ball up into the sky.

[bottle]

Topspin Forehand: Free the Elbow!

Design 88:

Initial lifting of the forearm gets the racket out of the way to site the ball with the elbow.

The elbow then starts on its complete journey which can keep you (me) from thinking about anything else although all kinds of other stuff is happening, too.

[bottle]

Quality of Encouragement

Mark Miller, the director of teaching at the Eastside Tennis Facility, Detroit, has the uncanny ability of encouraging a player always at the right time.

Might just be a word connected to something that happened on the court ("good"). Might be perceived danger: One time while doing cardio tennis with Mark, I hit my feet together which caused me to fall and skin a knee.

"Keep your feet farther apart," he warned thereafter, reasonably, and I did so, and the incident didn't repeat itself. Only in the months while various scabs came off and the skinless area grew slowly smaller did I realize that my interaction with a very abrasive surface wasn't due to dangerous technique but rather to tennis shoes with the wrong toe box.

Another time and certainly before Mark knew my name or anything about me, I happened to hit an ace while playing doubles.

From a couple courts over Mark noticed the ace and commented upon it with contagious enthusiasm.

Did he go out of his way to do this?

As I said, he was a couple courts over.

I am not surprised that Mark Miller, tennis teaching pro, connects his brief statements to the exact time when they are needed.

Because everybody hits an ace once in a while. But the player who takes it for granted or ascribes to it too much significance is apt to hit fewer aces in the future than somebody who registers the experience in just the right and grateful way.

Today, while self-feeding, I hit a drive one-hander.

"Classic," Mark suddenly said from off of the court. "I have a friend with one, and he's in the Hall of Fame."

Mark, I once heard from persons other than himself, was in a previous life a coxswain of an international championship crew rowing out of the Detroit Boat Club.

I still am not surprised. No one knows more about encouraging people and getting more out of them than they think they want to give than a champion cox'n in the sport of crew.

Sometimes, the cox will even lie, like Mouse, our cox.

"Twenty strokes to go!" he shouted once near the end of a big race. Then, "Just ten more!" Then, "Gimme ten more!"

[bottle]

For Rotorded Servers Once Again

You are rotorded! What does that mean? You can't get the racket low enough behind your back.

So what should you do? Abandon tennis for another sport? Abandon at least any goal of playing tennis at a high level?

I've brought this topic up a lot in "A New Year's Serve," where no person other than myself has ever weighed in.

(This is simply not true of other topics.)

My ongoing search for best solution, complicated by leg problem, has me turning my initial stance way around (to lengthen runway SOMEHOW, by curving it in this case) with feet a foot apart and combining knee bend and body wind in a seamless, stepless brew.

A Boris Beckerian model might prove useful.

http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/strokearchive/modern_legends/borisbecker/borisbecker_serve/bb_1st_serve/bb_1st_serve.html?BB1stSDeuceFront1.mov

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFPPz0Iy5A0

He however can get racket tip very low.

The more turned around stance is to compensate, somewhat, for that.

So how will this work?

My proposal is a whirl of summing body and compressing arm which then starts to extend before more vertical action takes over.

See post # 5 on the subject of verticality in this link:

http://www.tennisplayer.net/bulletin/showthread.php?t=2385

This total action should apply to flat, slice and kick serves-- all three.

[bottle]

Three-Forehands-in-a-Row Set Piece

A set piece in theater is some small passage in which one can do and say the same things exactly the same way night after night, which can free one up to be more creative and thoughtful and improvisational elsewhere.

Here is a devious plot for when you see a three forehands by you situation coming up anywhere, perhaps in doubles starting off of a forehand service return.

1) ATP Style Forehand

2) Continental Penetrator, Light

3) Continental Penetrator, Heavy

I'm sure I've already described the technique for all three shots.

They are my shots, not yours, reader, anyway.

But I'm willing to discuss any one of them, endlessly, so long as there is no didacticism requirement involved and I will be free to expound in a neutrally self-interested way.

3) is of special interest since its method is just being worked out. The oncoming ball is off to the player's (my) right. Instead of my usual bowling down and up in tandem with unit turn and pointing across, with all of this continually turning the body, I will simply bowl down.

Or maybe drop the racket. Or lower it in a prolonged, hydraulic way as I approach the projected convergence with the ball.

Now the hips reverse. Now the upper body fires. And through both, second part of a bowl or small rise of the racket takes place building pressure in the arm, i.e., loading it.

[bottle]

Cliff Drysdale Repeats His Most Provocative, Implicit Idea Ever

Cliff Drysdale, the South African TV tennis announcer, has discussed his friendship with Jack Nicklaus many times.

And how one day, he, a formerly top-ranked player on Tour, was on court with the great golfer and asked him why he kept changing his strokes.

"I've changed my strokes every day of my life," Nicklaus is reported to have said. Nicklaus has been watching Wimbledon 2013 from the audience.

This time Pam Shriver brought up the subject of re-creation. She obviously was familiar with the recent ESPN Magazine article on why Tiger Woods has overhauled his golf stroke so often and not always for the better.

Drysdale indicated that Nicklaus routinely changes both his grip and his swing.

Golf and tennis are never for him a set piece the way they are for 99 per cent of the people who do them.

[bottle]

Taking a Curve at Salamanski Airport

It is a busy day at Terminal One. The air traffic controllers in the tower are ready to give up.

The line of planes waiting to taxi onto the main runway is backed to some outlying hangars, and from there another three miles to a passenger parking lot.

But all of these planes had better scatter, and the pilots know it, and they separate in surprisingly good order, one to this side, one to the other.

For down the center comes the rotorded server aircraft that everybody has heard so much about.

This guy doesn't taxi onto the runway but rather races there. As he takes his final turn he all but tips over but then goes straight and hits the ball.

[bottle]

Magic?

If advanced players are engineers or magicians, then a top coach, once his charge has surpassed the basics stage, is always a magician.

A big part of the great coaches' magic is that they freely steal from one another without attribution (which takes too long and might be polite but is really not much more than a millstone). And they always have their antennae out.

They listen for anything that anybody has to say about tennis, hoping to find a helpful gem in some offhand utterance which ordinary tennistas would find trivial and unimportant.

The gem might even come from some TV announcer at Wimbledon as when former singles world number five Jo Durie, or was it her broadcasting partner (and does ownership ever matter?) said that when serving, one should send up the tossing arm and then fire the other arm hard up the first arm.

[bottle]

Cue Control

Cue control and analysis are not the same.

That's true of both billiards and tennis, but, if, in tennis, the best cue is a verbal one, as often happens, some subtle progression of thought may have occurred.

On my one hand backhand side, I feel I learned something very specific from all my self-feeding experiments in double roll.

First, The Czech Book idea that a mid-swing change from short arm to long arm will accelerate the racket head is accurate but may more effectively apply to Bottle's serve than to his ground strokes.

The idea of prolonged double roll starting with only mildly bent arm in which neither roll is overly sharp and which includes a collision between ball and strings during the second roll can lead to:

1) an inside out swing

2) a nicely formy edge on follow through (A) or a beveled racket followthrough (B) or both but at different times in the followthrough (C).

3) more control in getting racket around to outer edge of the ball.