A New Year's Serve

[stotty]

The Perfect Cup of Tea

-Place the tea bag squarely in the bottom of the cup.
-Pour boiling water directly on the tea bag
-Leave for 90 seconds
-Squash the tea bag firmly up against the side of the cup, just once
-Remove the tea bag
-Add milk
-Add sugar if required
-Stir well
-Sit down and enjoy

[bottle]

The Perfect Cup of Tea

-Place the tea bag squarely in the bottom of the cup.
-Pour boiling water directly on the tea bag
-Leave for 90 seconds
-Squash the tea bag firmly up against the side of the cup, just once
-Remove the tea bag
-Add milk
-Add sugar if required
-Stir well
-Sit down and enjoy

Yup, thanks. At some level the new serve has got to take the form of prescription. Here's some follow-up to my last post.

The serve worked best for me if I tossed during very beginning of knee compression/hips turning back and core gressing forward.

The late Gladys Heldman inveighed against knee compression during toss for reason of common sense, but most serves took a different form in her day.

The knees can compress more slowly than they then extend, it seems to me.

Besides, leftward lean is then happening, which helps support and add to vigor of the toss.

Also rules were made to be broken by those who know them.

[bottle]

Advised: Tennis Instructions Designed to Self-Destruct

All the numbered items in post # 3539 were intended to self-destruct. The idea was to get the racket as far as possible behind you in one swell foop. Consciousness of each way of doing this needs realization once and only once. To which I now add another item, the classic ATA, i.e., Vic Braden's ancient primitive cry of "Air the Armpit."

Early ATA puts the elbow-- early-- on shoulders bat line. That is an imaginary line running through both shoulder balls and the upper arm-- a long lever in other words. And if you can find a way just at the right moment to add forearm to the straight line you will have established an even longer speed lever.

If you are the earth being moved, you can stub Archimedes real fast into outer space.

In terms of iteration, we have now edited out all the stuff about low elbow position (relative to shoulder!) I earlier wrote about.

There won't be more loose motion in a delayed elbow rise, in fact there will only be one elbow rise and that will be early.

If rotor cuff limitation (tears or adhesions or drive band insufficiency) then prevents the racket tip, possibly farther back by now, from getting low enough, one is, if still serious about one's tennis, looking at grip change past continental toward backhand or even extreme backhand.

Even a player of limited shoulder flexibility can bounce balls high over the net with ISR, can hit good ISR overheads, is this not true?

He only then-- if all else is perfect-- need change grip to develop consistently good serves too.

I go to court now.

Trial at court: Didn't like grip change enough to continue with it. Did have success using ATA as only thing to think about. Concluded that although it's unhealthy to have elbow much above shoulders bat line, as cue one might think for a while of pointing racket tip at top of fence-- just to get elbow all the way up to bat line. At the same time one can offer the ice cream cone in one's tossing hand to a person standing at that fence, inside or outside of the court-- doesn't matter.

A further thought due to this realization: I really would like the tossing shoulder to be assisting the leftward lean and independent arm movement to produce the bent arm toss.

But I started with horizontal wind back of shoulders. I now would like to minimize that belly turn so more range of it is still available to continue as hips do their backward thing.

As a result of this, the hitting shoulder will now come down more to meet the elbow rising to bat line.

The scheme in this is that the hitting shoulder next will rotate upward more-- and with vigor because of the longer path-- as tossing arm whacks the belly to bump both hips in one direction and both shoulders in the other.

[bottle]

If

If the right shoulder is trying to twist up over the left shoulder but both shoulders are being bumped in the same direction, something interesting ought to happen!

But what about if you go ATA first? Haven't tried that one. Until you toss you can do anything you want.

So, ship to ATA first. Then turn shoulders slightly to offer your ice cream cone to the person standing at the fence.

Then complete the belly turn as hips turn backward due to nifty foot arrangement. As core proceeds forward.

The girl didn't accept the ice cream cone so you toss with it instead and continue compressing downward on the legs.

[bottle]

Soft Slice the Opposite of Irish Dancing

Dennis Ralston and Bill Tilden both say it, so why won't any modern servers try it?

The arm whips around the body, they say. Forget all the groaning and moaning and lugubrious heaving of various body parts.

For soft slice I certainly will give this idea new tries. Quite by chance I rediscovered my soft slice out wide which sometimes goes into hibernation for eight months at a time.

Use modern splay-foot flat-foot stance, thus establishing lower body stability, the opposite of Irish dancing in which upper body is the stable part.

The rediscovery also relates to the various takebacks recently experimented with.

In this one ship the racket to ATA but at the same time turn the shoulders back while bod from the waist down remains in its deep freeze.

Toss occurs as upper bod changes direction to passively squeeze the two halves of the arm together for elbow knifing toward the ball.

The arm then naturally straightens and carves to a paveloader finish by one's left side.

There is no ISR whatsoever in this trick shot.

But what did the tossing arm do once it tossed? It came down and thumped the belly or chest to stop the upper body and hence accelerate the arm.

Such thumping also occurs in a normal serve but for different purpose.

[bottle]

Default Serving: Both Gut Turns are Horizontal

Only in that way can one achieve the long shoulder over shoulder action one seeks after punch-clasping one's middle.

But I'll try this, to see. Might not work at all.

Note: I may have left out an hand-written iterative post here in which there is a return to hips first, shoulders second backswing sequence, with both firing simultaneously in the forestroke.

The hips establish the leftward lean and shoulders tilt. Then comes the late toss helped by shoulders turning horizontally back.

The racket which started with independent arm movement never will point at top of fence. It will go back level instead. The hips tilting shoulders down will establish the ATA position. So there is a lot of levelness or unexpected horizontality of two different kinds in this new serve that I now envision or speculate upon, i.e., dunno about good result but maybe.

Progress from this specifically iterative approach has definitely occurred in other strokes. I am a better tennis player at 77 than at any younger age with everything relative of course and I bet I could get some people who knew me before to agree. But service is the most difficult and forbidding shot of all, a last holdout for improvement in my view.

[bottle]

Enjoyed this Episode

But must overcome my tendency to toss too soon. Found that keeping toss arm up as in the Kirsten Dunce film WIMBLEDON is still good advice no matter how bizarre the serve. I even am recommending to myself that I move tossing arm back a bit while holding it up to make sure the shoulder over shoulder tilt remains uncompromised.

Also, from previous post entitled "Soft Slice the Opposite of Irish Dancing" (# 3545) discovered that these serves are not too soft, look zippy, ought to do well at least at my level of competition and perhaps more. They are not the tearing silk acutely angled soft slice with almost no weight on it that Vic Braden demonstrated in Winchester, Virginia, but are fast enough to give opponents some trouble, especially if mixed in with more bod-gyrated serves.

[bottle]

One Abbreviated Serve

Starting with # 3545 I have decided to add leg compression on the backswing and leg extension on the forestroke with serve remaining the same in other respects.

Did I try all this simultaneity? Not yet. But doubles played this morning leads to this decision. See this proposed version as circular more than linear. Think sharper angles from the forehand court should be attainable if one produces topspin slice. The ball can go higher but still come down short almost in the alley.

[bottle]

Riffing on an Idea is Pure Jazz, and I Love Jazz

The idea is to be a rebel by introducing carved serves into one's repertoire.

"Stop thinking so much about body parts," Martina Navratilova said.

I have, I did, but needed to think about the body parts first, got the backward arm roll just right, abandoned the unnecessarily complex palm down middle frisbee in-and-out that I didn't enjoy for my whole life.

Now I do everything together or will do that when I play social doubles tonight letting the chips and scores fall where they may. The arm will roll, the shoulders will coil, I'll leftward lean, the hips will cock, and it will all happen at once.

The bent-arm ice cream cone toss will occur where it keeps telling me it wants to occur at beginning of the forward traveling triple rotation.

This may no longer be a double helix serve but that might be all right.

I will have earned so much time I'll be able to do what I want, i.e., stop the bod altogether and let the arm go.

Then I'll be ready to try some kick and next flat off of same preparation and toss but with ISR now that I didn't have in the carved version and with more body bend/"husking" upward too.

And with elbow held back not squeezed forward into a preparatory needle as before.

Jazzy riff, that's all this will be.

The carved slice will be all bod then arm.

The kick, the flat and the non-carved slice will be arm first then bod.

[bottle]

My Ass in a Morass at the End of Moross Street in Grosse Pointe

As I explained to the mom who watched her 18-year-old son and me get to 5-0 before we started to falter and had to gut-check ourselves, all my writing about tennis strokes has helped each one except for my serve.

"I would have a better serve if I had the one I used to have and didn't study any serving stuff at all."

It helped that I thought her son was a prodigal tennis player. "What an athlete," I said, mentioning in particular a pair of his towering straight up topspin lobs.

A good player herself, she laughed about my serving woes. What else should a person including myself do?

Try down-and-up again, I suppose, in my serving sessions at the end of Moross.

Down however shall be both arms connected by the racket from the elbows to create great straightness out to the side.

Up shall not include toss at all. The toss shall be delayed.

Up will take the racket back in the rolling way I outlined in previous posts. The racket will go level but the shoulder will take it up to bat line. Put another way, happening tilt will bring rear shoulder down to the line where the two shoulders and the arm form a straight line.

Up will also raise base of the tossing arm although that arm shan't toss yet.

Up will also bend the knees to turn the hips then shoulders back and create great tilt.

Toss shall be straight arm from the shoulder with ice cream cone configurated hand helping create desired parabola from right to left.

Toss shall include bending of the right arm to keep this service a single continuous motion.

The legs to drive up as the racket drives down.

Forget anything else.

[bottle]

Rolling Arm Backward: the Idea

The idea is to get racket tip way back, not necessarily fast, but with a bit of racket momentum carried along.

In this light I propose that arm roll not start until double arm straightening has concluded but last all the way through hips and shoulders backward sequential rotations.

Edited out is the notion of shoulders rotating backward as part of the toss.

This makes simultaneous straight arm toss and hitting arm bend a pure double action unalloyed by any kind of bod rotation backward or forward, and similarly not messed up by leg compression since that already will have happened.

Still, some linear travel forward can be going on.

Overall serve: backward rotations (including rotation of arm); the toss and beginning of throw; the upward and forward serve itself.

[bottle]

Humeral Conflict vs. Long Straight Runway as Explanation of Racket Head Speed in the Serve

Everything is iteration. There is no theory or speculation here, only a question. Can the new roundabout arm swing combined with maximized arm roll (racket face can be closed to more than vertical at or before end of double arm straightening) give the rotorded server more space in which to generate humeral conflict?

That would be conflict in which the humerus was spinning one way while trying to spin the other.

And there is no reason why humerus can't already be spinning backward as arm begins to break at the elbow.

Just a question. Youth wants to know.

[bottle]

The Tossing Arm Treads Water

But the water rises from underneath.

The expression "treading water" is of curse subjective in that the arm does not have legs.

But the arm swims in place without going anywhere.

The other arm, also straight, seems to wing it far away from the first arm as shoulder tilts down to shoulders bat line.

One ought to experiment with the speed of this down-and-around backswing. Common knowledge is undecided on whether it's better to compress and extend the legs with no pause between these two parts. If pause is the better option the pause is the time to toss, the success of which will depend on speed and rhythm.

Who is to say that a fast or slow action serve is better or worse?

This has been a message from the monoliths on Easter Island.

[bottle]

"Don't bend your knees right away," Scott Murphy said.

Can't remember the reason he gave. Something to do with bad earliness. But he is a guy who knows his stuff.

So I stayed tall and did my new twist-the-arm thing while rolling weight on rear foot.

Put toss between that initial hips rotation back and shoulders rotation back, which became part of the post-toss body bend and protruding forward of front hip.

It was Easter, so a black guy walking past said, "That was a good one."

Soon used distance but less splay between the feet.

New Year's day is bullshit. Easter, Passover, whatever the equivalent is in some other world religion is where it's at.

Believe in the rainbow nations. (Song in a new Toronto musical preparing for Broadway.)

[bottle]

An Explorer Frequently Finds Himself in a Morass

So what does he do about it? All slice serves, followed by less slice on them to make them flatter, followed by flat-and-kick, followed by kick.

Worth a try.

Have to go with what has worked, not with what some other person says is a good idea.

Return to bent arm toss (with hitting arm equivalently bent "to keep form"). It's just as good if not better than straight arm toss so long as both are from the shoulder.

Start pushing elbow of toss arm toward right fence as racket drops.

Raise that elbow more as hips turn back.

Toss as shoulders turn back and knees bend with front hip pressing forward.

Employ kinetic chain as it ought to be employed-- a Muhammad Ali jab rather than a linkage of spinning disks in the red Smithsonian Museum of 19th Century American Technology.

Jab from rear foot to include elbow inversion and adduction and body cartwheel if cartwheel is something in which shoulders go end over end.

The jab, a hell of an attacking whollop, includes complete bending and straightening of the arm but more important plenty of ESR to put strings on outside of ball.

At last instant, with arm straight, one's ISR snaps the racket through a tight arc that mystically speaking hits back of ball and then inside of ball.

With left arm clutching one's chest not to make the shoulders lurch forward but to stop that process already underway and convert it into rotation about the spinal axis as front leg also drives up for the same purpose. Because axis is tilted slightly forward at that point, the final turn of shoulders will add to rise of racket if struck at beginning of this final tract.