A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Movement on the Four Choices

For my "antecedent" as I say to Hope when I don't know what she's talking about, see earlier posts about doubles poaching from the deuce court.

For Higgs boson poach, for hit-at-netman's-feet-poach, for hit-between-opponents-poach, I run directly for my projected intersection with the ball, somewhat behind my left ear in the Higgs boson case.

For cut-ball-back-into-the-tramline-behind-one, however, I won't do that but rather will side step or side step with a carioca behind me so that I'm ready to shift weight perpendicular to the net and meet ball way out in front.

In this case I'll deep six (eschew) neutral movement straight toward the net that precedes the other three poaches. Because success depends on cutting the ball off early, as Stotty recommended.

For that purpose, my thinking on straightening or not straightening the arm may be about to evolve, as well.

Here's the previous thought:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ph...on-discovered/

When a volley is contacted way out in front toward the net, a bent arm enables sharper crosscourts compared to the straightening alternative.

But when the contact is almost behind you, a bent arm also helps to preserve the shortness of angle that one desires to opposite edge of the court.

I still go with the second paragraph but perhaps not with the first. Because as I'm sitting at this old dining room table right now and straightening my right arm I can see my fist turn a bit more to the right if I get the arm straight.

How good a player is somebody? How fast? How nifty and quick? How fuzzy-brained?

A variety of angled volleys may work if one is sufficient in cutting the ball off.

Note: Very interesting, this question of how much a player should think once he's been taught the basics. A lot in my view. I'm an extremist here. One of the topics he ought to think about is how can American or any tennis improve. Through more post-basics thought or less? Or a combination of both? I am convinced that half of the shortcoming of American tennis players is that they haven't put in enough post-basics thought. In fact, one bleating, wheedling teaching pro whose voice could otherwise be described as capable of breaking glass-- during the basics phase-- probably turned their brain to mush in a single half-hour lesson which could even have occurred on an adjacent court.

[bottle]

Half a Dozen Points

1) All tennis instruction is overly detailed or not detailed enough.

2) How can one run an unconscionably long distance and then hit a precise target off of an oncoming ball if one can't do the same thing off of a ball with no momentum?

3) LHC or Large Hadron Collider, on the border of France and Switzerland, sounds much better than LWTCWITAFWD or Large Waxahatchee Texas Collider With Its Tunnels All Filled With Dirt.

4) Anyone can master the Higgs boson poach if they are relentless enough in working backward through logic from a specific target, allowing this target to focus complex possibility into a set piece or something repeatable in its simplicity.

5) The recent spate of pop books starting with Malcolm Gladwell's assertion that one needs ten years or 10,000 hours to master anything is ignorantly off-putting to ongoing invention and innovation-- particularly tragic in that aging persons and elders have a unique capacity for cleverness.

The story of the former ping-pong champion of Great Britain Matthew Syed failing in his attempts to return Michael Stich's serve in tennis is a compelling one, illuminating the phenomenon of "chunking" in sport or anything else.

If one gets lost in details, allowing oneself to become "too de-chunked," one won't, in fact, be able to return ANYONE'S serve much less hit a decent drop-shot.

6) Calvin Trillin of The New Yorker Magazine has written a mock-rueful piece, I think in The New York Times, on the subject of injecting a viral phrase into American society.

Using Tom Brokaw as an example and feigning jealousy, Trillin points to Brokaw's invention of the phrase "The Greatest Generation."

My father coined the phrase "The Brown Cinderella Crew" to help my eight-oared crew at Brown University establish rowing as a recognized sport.

He also used one hand to keep an Army Colonel from jumping out of his jeep as he (my father) drove over a small wooden bridge in Normandy while Germans shot at both of them. But if my father were still alive, I don't know whether he would approve of Brokaw's phrase "The Greatest Generation" or not.

Personally, I hate it for its smug sentimentality and anti-historical bias. Is any age or generation or country intrinsically better or worse than any other?

As far as "Higgs boson poach," I couldn't care less whether it enters somebody's lexicon so long as I can hit it again and again with assurance that I can keep it in the court.

[bottle]

Twists and Turns Through Relentless Following Of MOO

My MOO is to stand at center of service box in deuce court and bloop a ball fairly high into adjacent service court and pursue it (following one feinting step with either foot straight toward the net).

One needs to wind bent arm around body to the limit, aiming the strings carefully.

I veer toward the tossed ball on a beeline which continued or projected through the ball on the other side would hit my target in the alley.

Others would probably call my MOO (my Method Of Operation) my "MO," but if we are going to permit acronyms in this world, there should be an exact correspondence between each letter and a reasonable word, and the whole expanded version should make good sense, unlike CERNA, the Center for Energy Research, Northeast Asia, when, clearly the jewel of CERNA, the LHC or Large Hadron Collider is located in Switzerland, Europe, not in northeast Asia.

If from the beginning the scientists of CERNA had made themselves clear on this point, the Higgs boson, providing accumulation of all mass in the universe, would have been lab-smacked after 30 rather than 40 years of research.

As for my MOO, it's leading to startling discovery as well, only at close to the speed of light. There is no reason for a grip change of any kind. Continental grip with big knuckle on 2 slat will do okay. For a forehand volley down the line, one might put knuckle on 2.5 pointy ridge, a good place for a continental forehand, too.

Running through a volley is the same as gliding through a bunt in baseball. Simultaneous with this power source, I'm twisting racket down to an approximately level position and very slightly extending arm from the elbow and slightly moving elbow itself along the target line, and if this MOO still doesn't provide enough heft I may clench shoulder-blades together a small amount or pivot body a bit but probably not do both together.

Scamper through the ball.

[bottle]

How-to Seen as Different from Autobiography

Now, challenge the grip change hypothesis of # 1623 . A flying grip change will immediately set strings toward the target while preserving arm roll for actual thrusting out of the lower frame. And don't be overly doctrinaire about extension from the elbow. A small bit of this, quite short of full straightening, may or may not provide the most comfortable optimum.

My personal journey is not the subject here. How to lay the shot down on the target is.

Will the bloopy ball most likely be hit at its apex or after it has begun to fall? And will it have passed hand to strings or not?

Remember, using flying grip, you can adjust the pitch to any setting you want.

The best prospect for trial today would be flying grip change encrusted on normal volley preparation, with encrustation changing the aim.

Actual volley stroke: a blended combination of backward cranking and limited straightening of the arm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFL1bAhk0rE

http://www.videojug.com/film/how-to-bunt-a-baseball-like-a-pro?sourcelink=playlist#playlist-urlname=how-to-bunt-a-baseball-like-a-pro

[bottle]

Higgs boson Update

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/physics/higgs-boson-discovered/

One can see, from this article, that there may be more than one kind of Higgs boson, which could be very confusing indeed. And me, I’m trying to add another, my personal version, which could open me to a charge of deliberate obfuscation, something I’ve been accused of before.

No, no, I’m only stealing the term Higgs boson in the context of “prolonged and difficult research but with a real pay-off.”

As Liv Ullman said, “Sex never hurt nobody,” and I see my attempt to find the best and most reliable way to poach a service return into the far tramline as fairly harmless.

Anyone who knows me or my tennis realizes that I have other special goals in the game common or not to most players: zippier slice that skids low from pace and trajectory as well as spin, a solution to rotordedness in serving, ATP Forehand that produces topspin more easily, continental forehand as well that’s a real sockdolager or penetrating flat drive.

The out wide poach however is all in a special category, not only because of natural difficulty for anyone hitting it, but because a sensible person will use it rarely if he or she knows the easier options.

HBP (Higgs Boson Personal), while certainly not explaining the composition of the universe, does provide focus by saying, at least to me, “Pursue this avenue and you’ll get an even more fizzy tonic than you did from spending so much time studying Rosewallian slice.”

So, today I’ll think of the total range of volleys I’m aware of, including those from more than one teaching pro asserting increased quickness through keeping shoulders parallel to net whatever the volley's nature.

I don’t buy this as best way to go, but I have seen such volleys work including when delivered by me.

My point is that great variations in setting of the shoulders line (that’s an imaginary line projected through both shoulder balls) can be effective when one volleys.

So, today on my backhand side poach I’ll aim my shoulders line not at my real target (an alley point approximately one half of the way from net to service line) but farther to the right to allow for deflection from oncoming ball. Think billiards with your racket the long cushion of a pool table.

Rotate hand backward over racket handle at the same time to effect a widely variable grip change while activating the brain impulse to carve.

I love my flying grip change for all backhand ground strokes and some volleys, but in this case, I’ll keep left hand firm to do the x change with hitting hand alone.

At same time I’ll wind the bent arm quite far back to raise the hitting elbow.

The idea will be to sum two different chopping actions: 1) twisting down of racket tip from upper arm, 2) lowering of elbow on a shallow forward slant.

Because this shot is manufactured behind one, it is important to keep the arm bent.

When a volley is contacted way out in front toward the net, a bent arm enables sharper crosscourts compared to the straightening alternative.

But when the contact is almost behind you, a bent arm also helps to preserve the shortness of angle that one desires to opposite edge of the court.

[bottle]

Rotorded Servers: Learn From Bad Servers Who AREN'T Rotorded

See how they completely bend the two halves of their arm together and then straighten it up to contact. But they don't use upper arm rotation in either direction. Which is why they're bad.

So watch them carefully. Imitate them. I suggest that the two halves of the arm should squeeze together while on the left side of a right-hander's bod.

Do the old Braden thing: Make the reversing shoulders form (passively) the desired palm down spaghetti-like arm work.

Our freeze-frame camera now shows that the two halves of the arm have naturally squeezed together.

But as you-- rotorded server-- throw your arm straight (perhaps primarily from transverse stomach muscles), add a bit of backward upper arm rotation to the mix.

That's all there is to it.

[bottle]

Same Tack-- Higgs boson Continued

Forty years of theoretics, some would say "diuretics," were followed by the actual discovery.

If one simply watches YouTube videos associated with Higgs boson, one may be surprised to learn how many scientists were rooting against the discovery.

They were tired of thinking about dark matter or molasses or the Higgs field everywhere in space and longed for a different real explanation of the universe, preferring to "go back to the drawing board."

Nope, Higgs boson it is.

And so will be my shot, under possibility 3), which concerns a right-handed poacher playing doubles in tennis and stationed forward in the deuce court while entertaining the nefarious scheme of leaping into the ad court and bunting the oncoming ball into the far tramline.

The best way of doing this is my arcane subject, arcane because, as shot choice, it's the worst.

Best for our poacher when receiver won't close toward the center-- that would be for me, John Poacher-- is to firmly block the ball between my two opponents.

If the receiver closes the center, best is to cut the ball into the tramline behind oneself.

Hitting the ball down hard at the netman's feet-- a classic move-- is overly apt to put the ball on a good player's sweet spot.

That de-values the main subject here or specialty shot of all specialty shots in my view; but, on the other hand, "Develop Superior Poaching Skills," axiomatizes the very good tennis player and writer Pat Blaskower.

Hey, where should one's weight go? Lacking an answer from a smart person, I plan to answer my own question (but not definitively, no not today).

Think of the bunts that fail in baseball.

And the hitting coach who bellows, "The ball doesn't tell you what to do, you tell the ball what to do!"

Think now of the line of the service returner's ball and how well it is hit.

Anything down the center is your ball. Take responsibility! Anything out wide and hit well is your partner's ball. Anything out wide and bloopy, high and soft is YOUR ball requiring significant running followed by scientific discovery.

If the ball is bloopy, less deflection should be involved than from a line drive.

But just think of two converging lines-- oncoming ball and path of the moving poacher.

Does he run parallel to net and then take a sharp right turn? Or does he run on a beeline for the ball, certainly advisable for down the center or at netman's feet (shots), but how about for the other two choices?

For cutting ball to tramline behind one, one's weight needs to be traveling longitudinally, i.e., shifting perpendicular to net and rear fence.

To make the Higgs boson equivalent discovery, all one really can say is, "Depends on the oncoming shot."

[tennis_chiro]

I was looking on the internet for some intercepts...found nothing worthwhile yet but sooner or later I will.

By way of a brief interval, who are these guys in the clip. They're American players (I think) from the sixties. Do you know them? Were they ever up there in the rankings?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz3li_tUlok

One comment mentions Barry Mackay, but I didn't recognize him. Could be a young Clark Graebner in the singles ( unless it was Mackay). I thought I recognized the movement and shoulders of Marty Riessen in the doubles.

don

edit: I looked again. I think it is Mackay in the singles.

[stotty]

A one-post interval between intercepts...

I was looking on the internet for some intercepts...found nothing worthwhile yet but sooner or later I will.

By way of a brief interval, who are these guys in the clip. They're American players (I think) from the sixties. Do you know them? Were they ever up there in the rankings?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cz3li_tUlok

[bottle]

Higgs Boson Poached Egg

Where to hit your poach?

1) at the opposing net player's body; a favourite amongst less sophisticated poachers.

2) down the middle, between the two opposing players - a good, solid plan.

3) to the opposing net player's tramline; tricky, volley has to be faded, often requires intricacy and good hands

4) back into the returner's tramline

Number 4 is the best way to poach if your partner can deliver the right type of serve; a serve that pulls the returner away from the tramline and towards the middle of the court. It's the least used "poaching spot" to place the ball and an certain killer if done well.

MOO-- Method Of Operation for Solidifying Possibility 3)

Throw a ball in the adjacent court and take off after it. This won’t simulate sidespin-producing deflection of oncoming ball off of racket but will give one a chance of developing the exotic mechanics necessary to fade the ball at desired target—the real target—in the tramline.

Many methods will work. Push a U. Swing an L. Straighten arm from the elbow. Adopt stronger grip and raise upper arm to parallel with court while raising racket tip vertical and high above head so it has 90 degrees to fall to get parallel to court. And you-- you're looking like a submarine with a conning tower-- didn't you always want to?

That alternative methods will work however isn’t the point, which rather is to find the method that works again and again, i.e., repeatability.

What game is suggested? Chess with a lot of figuring out. With figuring out seen as a good thing. Wanted: more simplicity. No: more cleverness. How about both? Think of “the pro shot,” the buggy-whip short-angled forehand so much easier for some recreational players to learn than others. We’re talking about a very specific situation: Two shots have been hit, a serve and a return, and this will be the third. Exactly where is it in chess that terms like Caro-Kann and Najdorf Variation of Sicilian Defense or English Opening cease to have meaning? After a few moves with number of variations rising exponentially as the two players immerse themselves in the labyrinth of the middle game.

And labyrinth is a great equalizer, almost like a windy day. Anybody has an equal shot in performing some experiment there and finding a solution. In fact, the lower level players have more to gain and less to lose and so might—conceivably—create more.

National Tennis Academy

Credibility is always an issue with me. To bolster mine, I decided to check in with the accrediting organization that declared me a tennis teaching pro. My first attempt produced the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oH4mctQc2o

Nope. Wrong organization. I tried again and found the National Tennis Academy (NTA) in Dallas, Texas. Could this be my NTA, run by Joe Cockersham and formerly located in Waxahatchee, Texas, site of the would-be world’s greatest particle collider, whose tunnels now are all filled with dirt? Perhaps the time had come to seek my credibility elsewhere, in the Hadron collider on the border of Switzerland and France.

What is the composition of the universe? The Higgs Field, similar to molasses through which traveling particles (but not the slippery photons) accumulate varying degrees of mass? Could I get two protons accelerating fast enough around the Hadron collider’s 17-mile track in opposite direction for the big enough mental collision that I require? Already, I’d had trouble with too short a runway in trying to perfect the kickiness of my kick serve.

Well, despite its huge success, the Hadron won’t power up full until one-and-one-half year from now, according to my friend Paul, a particle physicist from Wayne State University who frequently goes to Geneva and used to go to Waxahatchee, too. (You never know who you’ll meet in dance class.) The thousands of people who worked from the ideas of Mr. Peter Higgs believed so strongly in them that they took significant cuts in their benefits to keep up the pursuit, which paid off July 4, 2012 with arguably the biggest scientific discovery of this age.

Well, I see scientific discovery at a personal level as well. When Richard P. Feynman had all of his friends start counting seconds without looking at a clock and then indeed look at a clock to see how far off they were, each one became, in fact, a research scientist as he learned to evaluate a set of different influences applied to his accuracy.

So I’m thinking, “Build from present (habituated) elbow level. Use the opposite of 'flying grip change' system. Keep tip at normal height and hold racket still with opposite hand while starting to crank hand over top of handle to a stronger grip?

“How strong? Does this matter? Use a free grip system. Let grip be determined solely by shot result. If buying a ball machine, get a billion-dollar one so sophisticated that it can raise ball in successive increments of one centimeter.

“A) Slowly crank hand to change grip. B) Slightly firm up hand and keep cranking in same direction so that whole racket twists backward as arm extends into ball.

“Sometimes there will be a pause between A) and B) to permit you time in which to run and sometimes not.

“Some of these elements will subtract speed (the racket carving behind and under the ball), some add speed or rather firmness (especially the gliding footwork toward your target in the tramline).

“But you’ll want spin and lots of it. The Higgs boson, 126 times the mass of any proton that collided in a laboratory to help re-produce it, apparently does not spin."

That would be a knuckleball in my book.

[bottle]

Roland Garros? The French Open? How about The Courage Open? No, me neither. But that's what it is. Courage as imperative is the message that comes down to us from Roland Garros.

[bottle]

Remember, it's time to give a little of your time to udders-- elegance is attitude. Longine. Image is everything. All for one and one for all. You go to the hospital when you're dead (Hungarian proverb).

[bottle]

Post Script, Who was Roland Garros?

The four majors are an unparalleled opportunity for the world to learn more about the country in which each event is held.

Sometimes the country itself, as in the Australian, is able to share some local significance. I refer specifically to the whimsical "I want to know" ad that TV Australia wisely brings back every year.

It isn't just the cream on the girl's vermillion and labium superius oris that inveigles but the mystery of a triangle involving three characters ("I want to know where you go when you're gone"). Most impressive are the high ribbon-like cliffs that run all along The Great Australian Bight for far, far more than three thousand miles when one considers all of their convolutions.

That ad is an incredible success, perhaps the best television ad ever created, but what is being advertised? Australia, I guess.

The French would never produce something like that. So we have to provide all the legwork ourselves, and American historians always did, telling us about the corner of a civic building in small town Massachusetts that had to be mushed in to allow for the turning radius of Lafayette's long carriage.

When I criticize for a decline in attention to detail the New York Times (supposedly "the American newspaper of record"), I'm going beyond its well-documented complicity in starting and maintaining the Iraq war.

Not just the Times but other hacks (yes, ever hackier and even the hackiest hacks) tried this week to link the name Roland Garros to the American Memorial Day since he was shot down by Germans in World War II.

As probably was his disappeared postal buddy Antoine de Saint-Exupery. They both of them carried the mails in Patagonia when aviation was young and post offices were admired.

I've had some real adventures out of Antoine de Saint-Exupery and not just as a long-term substitute teacher discussing WIND, SAND AND STARS with eighth graders in public school.

When I moved from North Carolina to Michigan to be with Hope, her 10-year-old granddaughter came up to me and thrust her face in my face and asked, "Have you read THE LITTLE PRINCE?"-- her first words to me.

There is a potent section of WIND, SAND AND STARS other than the Hungarian descended Roland Garros courage part, which certainly does relate to the game of tennis. (Nicholas Sarkozy was Hungaran descended too but politically was different?)

This other section involves dinner parties in the de Saint-Exupery home in southern France. A self-important and usually too jovial and bat-brained older guest would arrive. Silently, de Saint-Exupery and his siblings would each assign a number from one to ten. I believe that John Yandell had similar experiences at a family summer place in New Hampshire.

In my own family, after my father died much too young, my mother started to date again. One suitor, who owned a couple of ships, had a favorite expression, "Holy potato!"

But he didn't know any French, and so he couldn't follow my older sister when she suddenly said, "Sacre pomme du terre!" and we all fell off of our dining room chairs and rolled around on the floor.

It was too much for my mother. She never dated that fellow again.

[bottle]

Who was Roland Garros?

The New York Times had a trivial article today about whether Roland Garros should be called Roland Garros or The French Open. The article didn't go deeper than identifying Roland Garros as a French aviator. And wondering about the connection between early aviation and tennis since Roland Garros played rugby.

The connection, as far as I am concerned, has to do with courage. If you want to know what I mean, read the book WIND, SAND AND STARS by Antoine de Saint-Exupery. And look for the part where Roland Garros has crashed in the Andes and walks an incredible distance in frostbite producing temperatures and deep snow.

This is the best prose ever on the subject of taking one step in order to take a lot of steps.

[bottle]

Stiffel-Steiffel Open

Where to hit your poach?

1) at the opposing net player's body; a favourite amongst less sophisticated poachers.

2) down the middle, between the two opposing players - a good, solid plan.

3) to the opposing net player's tramline; tricky, volley has to be faded, often requires intricacy and good hands

4) back into the returner's tramline

Number 4 is the best way to poach if your partner can deliver the right type of serve; a serve that pulls the returner away from the tramline and to towards the middle of the court. It's the least used "poaching spot" to place the ball and an certain killer if done well.

My two year quest to poach the perfect egg may have reduced itself to two months, but if I could get that figure down to two weeks I'd be happier than a witch in a broom factory.

The reunion of the Stiffel-Steiffels, the ancestral relatives of my partner Hope, is fast upon us. They meet in Wheeling, West Virginia for doubles every ten years.

Hope's cousin Kristin was captain of Yale. Kristin's son, an Amherst freshman, was the number two junior in Ohio just one year ago. Two of Kristin's brothers are the first-ranked team in the family tournament. One of those brothers, Bob Larson flying from San Francisco, is married to Monika, and she's from the Czech Republic, so she must be good, too. Well, I beat their son in chess, but he will be older and smarter now.

Of the four poaching possibilities outlined by Stotty, I already have 1) and 2) .
And 4) has been coming along. It's 3) I'm most worried about.

Previously, I outlined two possibilities for the intricate mechanics that 3) will require: (See posts # 1592 and especially #1605 in which I suggested using martial arts preparation discovered for power volleying by the ubiquitous and kindly and great American teaching pro Shea Brown).

Instead of so much intricacy I'm settling on a John Alexander subdued bonk with level racket.

The Australian tour player John Alexander, asked the seminal question, "How do you hit a volley?" once sat at a table and gently straightened his arm. I'll never forget it. He was wearing a sport jacket and looked quite dapper. He was tennis-racketless. This in the Australian VCR series MASTER TENNIS.

So, radio viewers, will this innovation have occurred in time for me? Stay spavined.