A New Year's Serve

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Korda and Plagenhoef Backhands in a Single View

The Korda extends arm from elbow during forward part of the swing. Once one understands that, one should be ready to move on to the more complicated subject of how this extension interacts with forward arm roll, forward arm swing, forward arm lift and forward body transfer.

Or, if one is young and unbelievably athletic without the potential of ever experiencing sun damage, one can simply watch this video of Petr Korda hitting with his son (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqpARpkF8WA) and immediately be able to hit every backhand precisely as well as Petr himself.

Petr unlikely but you never know.

The Stanley Plagenhoef backhand, conversely, extends arm as part of backswing not foreswing. Or as part of a transition. We no longer like transitions though—they take too long. Better to say that all of our tennis strokes use 1-2 rhythm. And that arm extension from the elbow goes backward and down.

This is the way most one-handers hit a tennis ball. Plagenhoef’s version however may be lower, shorter and smaller—“easier” to condense things to a single word.

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Report

The simple backhand depicted in the previous post is a small and effective rapier when used as a passing shot. The delay as arm straightens helps.

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Reflection

This seems like such a "fundamental" shot that I must regret that I have come to it so very late. Once the arm is straight the slightly upward but basically level arm work (the body work is another subject) consists of A) twist of the whole arm and B) movement of the whole arm from within the shoulder house.

There no longer is arm straightening during or near contact, if we are believers in personal stroke evolution. Similarly, there is no scapular retraction (clenching of shoulderblades together) until one starts the elegant recovery, and even there the SR is optional.

Perhaps the best way to understand this shot is to contrast it with the famous backhand of Don Budge. That one is all natural rotation. The racket head orbit therefore is wide.

The reduced scope of the Plagenhoef comes from designating arm roll in a nifty way. The simultaneous roll and swing is restricted to the hitting area but happens on both sides of the contact (behind it and in front of it).

The teaching pro Vince Eldridge, another tennis author and with a preface by George Plimpton taught backhand the same way.

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A New Forehand, Never Tried

Anything is a new forehand if you just change one detail or more of it.

I don't want to "key" any longer, just want to fire the elbow from an already keyed position, and a tennis social is coming up tonight.

One starts from racket cheated over to the backhand side.

Elbow leads the backward body turn by a fraction of a second.

Keeping opposite hand on racket as a healthy concept is long gone. Put that lesser hand to work straight away, say I, and shoot it vigorously at the side fence to help achieve big body turn.

The elbow going back is in a twist. It twists to take the racket head down. You want hand and racket to stay in the slot, but racket tip is pointing where? A bit forward? Certainly nowhere near at the back fence.

I'm doing what I say right now with non-hitting side of the strings getting level enough to balance a tray of canapes.

Let's freeze that position and examine it more.

The body is well turned. The two bent arms mirror each other. They and the body form three sides of a horizontal hoop.

One fires the elbow straight ahead. The stroke should feel like a big haymaker rather than a swing. Back of hand will follow through against opposite ear.

I'm trying this again. If backward setting of the elbow and backward turn of the body conclude at the exact same time, the stroke will be too stark.

So I want just a smidge of residual backward body turn once elbow is set to restore good feel.

Mondo of course-- the one loop in this shot-- is going to occur just past start of the elbow throw. Next, a small bit of arm twist will keep the strings from opening up too much in the part of the tract where they hit the ball.

I take the results seriously at these tennis socials. Yet here is a new stroke I haven't tried even in self-feed. If it doesn't work on first try in the first warmup I'm likely to resort to a more familiar something else.

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Report

The stroke did work from first try and the evening's results were fun and fine. Also received separate compliments, one from a stranger, on the smoothness of my backhand. After playing with it for only two days? I was amazed. People should try new stuff all the time. Somebody might find something significant.

In the post just before this one I opined: "Anything is a new forehand if you change one detail or more of it." Maybe I shouldn't quote myself, but evolution, sometimes painful, is what I am about.

If it is true that nothing is a tweak and everything is an overhaul, I'm wondering now whether keeping some stroke intact but merely changing some cue that helps one to hit it qualifies as overhaul.

Yes, I think so. Cues, no matter what else you think about them, are the real dynamite. Now I want to cue the last bit of body turn I mentioned for the new forehand with palm of hand rather than elbow. I want to feel the body turn and palm movement as one after they haven't been as one at all. And face it, hand and body are about to separate again then come together again then separate again.

I'm hoping for a sensation of gathering and consolidating energy, of racket floating when it is back, weightless-- that couldn't be bad.

But when this stroke breaks down-- if it does break down-- the reason will be the familiar expression "lead elbow." Because a light elbow throw is more essential to mechanics here than in the other forehands I have ever tried.

Note, a question: "How much arm roll should there be in this evolving stroke and when should it happen?" It should only happen as the elbow flies forward away from the body. And there should only be enough to keep the strings slightly beveled at a constant angle. Put roll where roll matters, in other words. Similarly, don't throw the elbow beyond where it is doing something. Simply let the arm scissor your knuckles to opposite ear.

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Two-Step Boop-Boopety-Doo

John Higginson, famous seniors oarsman and descendant of Emily Dickinson's boyfriend of the same last name, once fired me as his tennis coach for trying to teach him some Doris Hart footwork. Later at a garden tennis social around and on a beautiful but artificial grass court in northwestern Virginia, he and his partner defeated me and mine in mixed doubles. My wife with a partner other than myself fared better. Even worse, neither John nor I secured the open position of freshman crew coach at Brown. The man who rejected the both of us, Steve Gladstone, has won numerous national championships in heavyweight rowing both at Cal Berkeley and Brown and now may do the same for Yale. The University of Washington crew, currently the national champions and made popular by the David Relin Brown book THE BOYS IN THE BOAT had better watch out this year. Worse, the man who owned the private tennis court became the lawyer who represented my wife. Still worse, Harvard with John Higginson at six narrowly defeated Brown with me at four in the first eight-oared race between these two colleges. Still worse, Tom Bolles, the crew coach who teaches Joe Rantz how to row in THE BOYS IN THE BOAT came up to us on the bank of the Charles River and said, "You guys would have won that race if you weren't so long at the catch that you were pressing the gunwales of your boat together."

You will remember, reader-- won't you?-- Quentin Compson watching the wink of an oar out on the Charles to symbolize eternity just before he kills himself-- in THE SOUND AND THE FURY by William Faulkner.

The time has come for me to take revenge on John Higginson for all of these indignities. I shall do so by using the two-step step-out here at the Tennis Player website, adapting this footwork seen every month in repeating video each time Cageman hits a one hander to the recently discovered by me basic Stanley Plagenhoef backhand in my Post # 3031 attachment.

Bill Tilden, of course, was working on two-step when he expired if you carefully read the Frank Deford biography of him. Or should we say he "perished" as the psychologically challenged Sea World would. It's all tangled together with his buggery of small boys for which he receives less forgiveness than Jerry Sandusky or any Catholic priest since he was the world's number one tennis player.

First step like Cageman's shall bring right foot near to or in front of left foot. The body can still be turning back.

The hips can then start turning forward even before one's second step which can be small.

And there we have it, the secret of the two-step whether pertaining to Doris Hart or not.

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Might Make a Difference

I always was accused by the first teaching pro who really helped me of accepting some idea but then embroidering or pushing it too far. True but in order to search out, in 102-year-old Aunt Frieda's words, "some stupid little thing that might make a big difference," I need to explore in all directions.

The basic good idea here, coming from Dennis Ralston, is to start backswing with the hand. How much or little I don't recall Ralston saying in the book I read. Now I'm thinking I'll turn body as hand goes after bent elbow no more than it naturally wants to go and I won't be in such a hurry to point across with my other hand either.

No, the elbow will simply twist into position with wrist straight and strings forming a platform.

Then body turn will take the opposite hand across. Then a small step to achieve semi-open stance will open the shoulders a bit more as stepping foot lands on its toes. As elbow throws forward level before rising up the foot will get flat. The whole motion should be quite deceptive. We'll see.

If most forehands turn body then do something elaborate with the hitting hand, doing something simple with the hitting hand first followed by turning of the bod should certainly not take any more time.

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handbodhandbod

That is the choral cue with which I explore my new forehand. If I try to explain this at a party, people are apt to think I am out of my gourd. To them a forehand is a forehand, a backhand a backhand. If racket comes through one inch farther from the body or one inch closer to it the forehand is a completely different stroke. Does my audience get it? Probably not.

And non tennis players certainly can't grasp stuff like "keying" or "not keying." Some experienced players can't either.

A tennis player should view subtle arcs through the air as a very full subject of infinite possibility just the way a sculptor does.

A likely trap in this thinking about design is too much either/or. I may choose throwing elbow into a shot over keeping it stable as a pivot point but might key for one inch first to establish new direction for the shot I am about to hit.

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A likely trap in this thinking about design is too much either/or. I may choose throwing elbow into a shot over keeping it stable as a pivot point but might key for one inch first to establish new direction for the shot I am about to hit.

One tries stuff. One decides one likes one thing but not another. After self-feed I reject the idea of keying for one inch before pushing the elbow. To change direction like that I now prefer to slide elbow level before pushing it up. In fact, I might do that on all of these shots. The trouble with pushing elbow from a rearward position is that elbow will go down from wherever you set it. You'll get a down and up in your elbow throw-- not as powerful as elbow level first then elbow push up with a small amount of arm roll to keep strings at constant angle as they fly. But moving elbow on a level plane should most likely be called a short swing rather than a push. Cue next becomes "swing then push."

Next Day Observation: When do our thoughts about arm roll have more to do with racket position then with the administration of force? One could get the roll out of the way during the level slide forward of the elbow, thus making oneself more uninhibited for the elbow THROW. Hmmm. Wouldn't one rather be rolling forearm the opposite way just then as part of one's mondo? To pursue this line of thought then just use a stronger grip so you can roll in the direction you want to roll. But I'm going to have a straight arm variation of this shot available as well with a lot of wipe in it right on the ball and call it my evolved Federfore.

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Serve: Grip Loose or Firmed up at Contact?

Everybody seems to advocate the looser choice. But Stanley Plagenhoef back in 1970 (FUNDAMENTALS OF TENNIS, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey) went just the opposite way. He cites statistics where great servers achieved faster speeds with slower swings this way-- ball speeds that exceeded those achieved with faster swings.

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Rhythm

Yes, very exciting. Try this with two humped camel rock since you can do anything you want before you start your actual serve.

On first rise of the hands breathe in. As weight shifts back let a bit of air out. As hands rise again on rear foot breathe in.

Then slowly exhale during the whole serve through an ovaled mouth.

Do this without a racket while watching yourself in a long mirror before going to the court. You can vary the hand risings, making one bigger than the other. You can make both small, both big. You can turn the racket in a little, turn it out, do neither-- nothing disrupts the rhythm if you are determined and musical enough to keep it constant.

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Is Turning Hips into Front Foot a Bad Idea?

In a forehand or serve of the grounded variety. If it's a bad idea, then why does Welby Van Horn teach it?

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Juicing Up an Ordinary Backhand

You may recall, reader, that I was at a tennis social where complete strangers suddenly began to praise the smoothness of my new backhand.

I had hit it for only two days. The shot is explained in the attachment section of post # 3031 . Six people have clicked on that attachment.

Stanley Plagenhoef, author of the backhand, writes, "Control of the follow-through insures a longer flat area around the contact point, making errors less likely to occur if the timing is off slightly...Even though a roll of the racket is evident during the entire swing, the racket should not roll through the impact area."

We now ingest the pill that Stephen Hawking has been talking about, the one that doubles one's IQ. The strangers who noticed new smoothness did so because I was trying to hit with the natural swing of Don Budge only abbreviated to a scope I could handle-- right?

The abbreviation came from a blending of straight arm roll and arm swing. The main source of these two events is located in the shoulder house-- right?

But Plagenhoef says "Even though a roll of the racket is evident during the entire swing, the racket should not roll through the impact area."

The pill wasn't strong enough. I take another. Now my IQ is four times higher than normal. I look at the illustrations in Post # 3031 once again. The ink and pen figure points at ball with racket butt. He points at net with racket tip. In between he hits the ball. This is how I achieved the smoothness. So I talk to myself.

"Do you want to abandon all progress by rolling first, stopping the roll during contact, resuming the roll afterward until racket points at net?"

I try this in self-feed. Much to my surprise, the shots are more solid, but just a bit.

The falling snow and rain mix stops. The clouds part. The Voice of Knowledge speaks.

"You can juice up your brain, Escher, but that won't juice up your arm. Try rolling all the way through. Then once in a while, Escher, but only when if ever the score is 40 love, try roll, stop, roll-- before the lifted follow-through with weight returning to the back foot.

"If that works, fine, continue with it. If it doesn't, be happy with the simplicity of your newfound smoothness."

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To Adapt a Rocking Motion to a Donald Budge Type Serve

It could be so simple. Get racket up. Hold everything still while you rock back. Then start the motion just as Don Budge does here (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...DB1stSRear.mov).

But I want to talk about breathing and make that talk a good idea. (Such talk frequently isn't when somebody including myself discusses a serve.) Draw breath slowly in through nose and mouth both as racket rises and weight draws back. Then exhale slowly through an ovaled mouth for the duration of the serve.

Or, breathe in through mouth and nose as you lift racket up, a motion that simulates a wag in golf. Hold breath then as you rock back. You're not doing enough to screw the rock up by holding your breath!

Ha-ha. See how fast a tennis conversation becomes complex the moment you give yourself a second choice.

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Second Choice is Better

So practice this new serve's unique breathing in waggles to start. Mouth and nose intake to raise the racket. Exhale through ovaled mouth in unison with each racket fall.

Do this cycle two times. On the third try launch into serve as described above.

The reason I got this most recent idea is that I took a shower after playing tennis-- always dangerous.

Note: Waggle three times instead of two if you want to be a pain in the ass.