A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Finding Zero-- Backhand

1) Put TennisOne in search engine
2) Enter TennisPlayer password
3) Click on Doug King: Finding Zero-- Backhand
4) Click on Finding Zero.

For the purpose of this post, click only on this one video, ignoring
the many other tempting choices just for the moment.

There is no shame whatsoever in returning to one hand topspin
backhand basics again and again although I think you'll find Doug's
basics a bit different from anybody else's. My friend John Boros,
director of tennis at Indian Village, Detroit, suggests that improving
one's backhand is a lifetime project for anyone. (He has a one-hander
of course.)

The kata Doug King demonstrates in this backhand video, near the
beginning, is similar to the waterwheel image I now am using for staple
forehands.

In this kata, the arm goes round and around thus maximizing double-ending
effect as one contacts the ball.

But the backhand in slow evolution here will look quite different.

For that matter, once you have added essential big muscle motions (rotating,
rocking, straightening) to the corresponding forehand, that stroke too stops
resembling a waterwheel.

Doug's experiential focus stressing addition and subtraction while using
Nicolas Almagro as example is in my view the best or at least most
useful to me one hand backhand teaching video I have ever watched.

[stotty]

The New York Times. Whoops. Sorry I said that. Everybody knows the Times is awful by now. The thing the critics miss, however, is the size of the thing. On a given day I'll find four things to detest and four to love. As I said, it's awful.

Recently, I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle. I encountered a phrase I've never seen before: "Make America white again." Pretty good. Pretty right to the point. So maybe that's a good paper though certainly not as good as The Guardian.

The Wall Street Journal is noted for its news writing, especially small stories such as rabid cop bites raccoon in barn. But is equally noted for mental retardation on its editorial page.

When we were in England, Hope's son-in-law from the Rhodesian diaspora got me The Telegraph every day while buying The London Times for himself. He never asked but did that every day. So I never did get to the Guardian, am more apt to see some of it online when I am over here which sadly is too much of the time.

Maybe the best course (no of course it is) is never to view anything or anybody as part of a monolith. Labels suck, in other words. But every statement deserves an exception. We all need to recognize fascists so we can stop them.

Thanks!

The Guardian is wonderful. Some of the articles are mediocre, but far more are excellent, some absolutely outstanding. The Telegraph was once THE newspaper for tennis coverage, mainly due to Lance Tingay, but it remained good even after he left. Nowadays their coverage is no better or worse than any other paper.

I just went to NYT and the first thing I read was this:

One by one, American and allied forces have killed the most important of roughly a dozen members of an ISIS cell that the F.B.I. calls “the Legion.”

I didn't like the sentence. However, I will persevere a bit longer.

Stotty

[bottle]

No, I don't like that sentence either. It refers to a special enemy cell. With a special name, "The Legion." If this were a western, the baddest of the bad guys would have a funny name, maybe Cap'n Hook. And he'd have a bronze hook. Maybe be played by Johnny Depp. Anything to glorify the enemy once we've killed him. (We killed him but boy was he tough. We had to be good, real good.)

And we ALL killed him. No more "think you can push around Mr. American." Last week we killed the absolute premier leader of Isis. We got the head of the snake. We've turned this thing around. This is a great day in a glorious world! I feel so alive!

Rise up, dumbasses! Give us the new episode of your wonderfulness next week!

[10splayer]

And...which is more...




You are a good man. You impress me with your control. We can all be better men. There's always room for improvement. Here...read this. I am sure you will agree with me.

If...Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:


If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:


If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’


If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And— which is more— you’'ll be a Man, my son!



Punctuation, pronunciation, grammar...mere words. Manliness...quite another thing.

Thanks DB,

I'm comfortable in my own skin.There's no point arguing with a guy like this.

[bottle]

Yeah, just leave Rudi, I mean Rudyard alone, just let him go his own way.

[don_budge]

10splayer...a man of fewer words

I'm comfortable in my own skin.

In these six words (or is it seven with the hyphenated "I'm") you capture what Rudyard Kipling so infinitely and eloquently expresses in his epic poem..."If".

[bottle]

A Big Personal Implication of Three Katas Close to Service Contact

1) Speed. This to me is the slap of the hi-5 that teaching pros often discuss.

2) Push. This is the famous ISR lauded by sport scientists as the most potent part of any well constructed serve.

3) Turn. This is delayed bod turn.

Please understand that I follow specific courses of empirical change in my tennis posts. Of course I am aware of other lines of thought.

"Speed" is best enabled by treating first half of arm extension from arm squeeze as continuation of body coil. Some raising of shoulder might also occur right then if it didn't occur before. "Speed" or "hi-5 slap" then occurs in second half of arm going straight.

Next comes push. Does push come then before contact? Probably, in which case the ideas "speed" and "slap" may no longer happen at once, i.e., the racket does hi-5 slap but the actual slap of strings on ball comes a nanosecond later.

Doug King, in discussing the three katas of speed, push and turn urges prospective servers to maintain them in distinct sequence rather than mush them together.

I embrace this advice and why not? First, I am a "rotorded" server, i.e., a server like most other servers in the world rather than the double-jointed Sampras or Roddick who can coil racket tip much lower. And we learn (are dogmatically taught, one might say) that long runway up to ball is absolutely essential to producing significant upward spin.

Short acceleration offers a good alternative we don't so often hear about.

[bottle]

O 10splayer, so Comfortable in his Own Skin

And a very thin skin it is. But he needn't worry. He has lots of company.

[10splayer]

O 10splayer, so Comfortable in his Own Skin

And a very thin skin it is. But he needn't worry. He has lots of company.

Ouch, this from a man whose had 30 jobs.

[bottle]

Waterwheels

Here they are (https://www.google.com/webhp?sourcei...%20waterwheels).

Man, do they make nice ground strokes. But I don't know why I had to wait to the age of 77 to find out. Poor tennis instruction in the land, water and air.

Like a convert to any new religion, I am now ready to become obnoxious with all the new information I have recently acquired. I am happy to advise anyone, just name the person, to throw out everything and make waterwheels on both sides of the bod.

Try it even with a hitting partner having skipped self-feed-- I don't care. But make sure to get the racket high enough so that gravity becomes your friend. The racket picks up natural speed down around the bottom of the wheel, right, you notice? You don't need to use any muscle at all, in fact you do need not to use any muscle at all except maybe to get the racket high. On forehand side I advise an immediate stacking of both hands about a beachball's distance from one another. Opposite hand is down by waist, but don't worry, it will easily come up to a healthier position. Everything points to that.

In matches, try using your water wheels to take speed off of the oncoming ball. This will drive your opponents nuts, at which time you can finish them off with powerful drives.

For powerful drives, just maintain the excellence, the purity of such gravity-accelerated toppings. And keep the same double-ending on the ball. Remember, the double-ending starts before contact and continues toward the target, at which point you can wipe home (forehand) or keep double-ending up behind your head (forehand).

Easy shots, easy toppings of the ball.

That's the kernel. So keep it. Don't mess with the kernel, the waterwheel in great ground strokes. Grip is light but contact firm.

To add power, as I started to say, use body rotations in both direction, dip, rock, straighten, do aeronautical banking or power cord-- all the stuff you should have learned by now. Add bod, in other words, so that your power strokes no longer look like waterwheels although they still are. Remember, friends: my words here don't matter. My new ground strokes do. The reading, listening, watching of the new videos along with my own words were just one good means toward progress.

[bottle]

Ouch, this from a man whose had 30 jobs.

And proud of every one of them. And I didn't get fired 30 times, incidentally, if that is the Trump-influenced insinuation here. Only got fired twice-- once for getting lost while chauffeur to the ambassador of Sri Lanka in West Germany. Every time I drove around a corner there was the Berlin Wall. The other time I got fired from my job as secretary in accounts payable in an electrical construction firm-- for writing my novel at work once my work load diminished. (I was following Garrison Keillor's advice to write one's novel at work and wouldn't be baby-sat!)

Leaving the other 28 jobs was pro-active moving on. Sorry if any of this is boring or off-topic. I was not the one to bring up my resume here and am sure I should now demand an equal accounting from my every antagonist. If taking me up on this (wimps won't), please include the expression on each boss's face as he or she fires you.

[bottle]

Demented Tosses

Nearly everybody knows that Elena Dementieva could have gone right to the top and stayed there a long time if only she had a more reasonable toss that consistently placed the ball more over the head.

So why do gazillions of tennis players persist in down and up placements far too far to the right? Because of the down of down and up.

Perhaps:

One should fiddle with different positioning of both hands to begin the serve.

And once having found nice position one should leave toss hand there and let initial body turn backward-- from the hips-- be the only element that takes toss hand back. The racket hand meanwhile does whatever it is going to do.

Now upper body coil starts. Right shoulder goes around and down and back thus shifting racket path from one side of bod to the other in a double-helix serve.

If right shoulder went around and down and back, then left shoulder went around and up and back to toss the ball.

Many players who try this will consequently find themselves getting a better upward strike on the ball.

Me, I use ice cream cone hold. Could one toss a scoop of ice cream kind of upward and sideways out of the cone? I think so. Should one turn in both hands slightly palm down while making initial turn of the hips?

Perhaps.

I hope to experiment with this notion out on the court today.

You know, I like this stuff for itself. That helps.

[bottle]

Crack Service Whip then Apply Big Fast Push

All I'm trying to do is work out King's triple kata for top of a serve (speed, push, turn) and make it personal.

Tennis instruction in my view must use logic. But logic can only go so far. The logic has to be good and better than good so that when the student finally takes over he or she can find miracle, i.e., magic.

So the inflexible students who are all students when measured against Roddick and Sampras commit to spaghettiness of arm once and for all.

Could turning both palms under on the fly help achieve racket crack, i.e., hi-5 slap?

Perhaps.

Turning one's hitting palm down in this way adds speed without force, i.e., reduces racket head momentum so apt to destroy bod balance and pull the service out of form.

Confession: I don't understand the serves that start with open face that one sees on TV so often. Nor have ever found anyone able or inclined to explain this open-facedness very well. So I start with palm down serving since that's what I learned to begin with and have continued.

If you crack whip a bit low you leave yourself upward tract for ISR (internal shoulder rotation which sport scientists tell us is the fastest move available to any human) combined with cartwheel of bod.

Service crack involves whole bod but is transmitted from late coil in arm.

[bottle]

Remembrance

I remember a tennis-obsessed faculty member of some southern university, perhaps Tulane or Vanderbilt. He wrote both in this forum and in the letter section of TennisOne. He argued here that the whipcrack that everyone aspires to on their serve is a myth.

Not so. Vic Braden, often stupidly maligned (even I wanted to get in that number), made a strong video where one of the instructors he employed demonstrated hi-5 .

Without a racket this guy would toss a ball, come up to it with edge of his hand then bop it over the net.

That is whipcrack. It all worked from pronounced build-up in the arm just before last instant turn of the strings (or in this case the guy's hand).

I now want to transfer image of that move to a point that is earlier in the service tract.

With absolute confidence that whipcrack does exist I next shall effect it through improving my late arm coil and even rearranging earlier parts of the serve if I have to. The idea then will be to make ISR (internal shoulder rotation) maintain or even increase the supersonic speed just attained.

Will whipcrack happen on the ball however? Not. Just before. Will be delayed, yes. Will be delayed more than seems possible, yes. Still, just before.

Will speed of the whipcrack truly be supersonic like that of a wet towel?

One can hope.

[bottle]

Noticed a Tent

Should one write down what one noticed during a self-feed session? I think so. Write down your ideas as you have them, said the filmmaker David Lynch "or else you'll want to kill yourself."

Today while following my new service development path, I noticed,

that,

if

one forces the palms down as hips turn back,

the racket then gets more of a swirl in it,

and the strings want to come down closer to the back.

So why not keep them in that close position while moving hand away from it to pitch a little tent.

This tent creation is definitely an example of late coil of arm. And hips can rotate forward into fixed front foot as arm does its loading extension or coil, i.e., there will be backward and forward movement going on at the same time (can you hiss?).

The total coil pattern then becomes quite interesting. Hips coil, then shoulders, then arm as hips rotate forward without moving the bod.