A New Year's Serve

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Time to Update some Forehand Nomenclature

The McEnrueful should not ever change its name any more than its mechanics. Best hit, it is a solid, connected shot. Occasionally it will go off, I think because of one's natural tendency to push one's arm, good habit in other shots, bad in this one.

The Elly-boom should be The Elly-bam.

The Waterwheel can remain a waterwheel but only if one can master a new trick-- to accelerate one's rising elbow so as to then slow it down for a bit of racket float up top. And only if one can replicate the cleanness of contact one discovered six months back. One oughtn't to go around giving names to shots that aren't at their best. The trouble I think is not knowing exactly how far to TURN the racket tip back. One must calculate forward upper body turn into one's equation. Forward turn of the shoulders is central to "big push" in this shot. And anything that turns the strings toward a square contact can also be the agent of disfunction junction. Upon further reflection, I rename "The Waterwheel" "Big Lots" after the commercial chain of that name that sells big items such as rugs that don't apply to me.

One ought to have a few frill shots, e.g., forehand slice and forehand chop. In the game of nomenclature, however, we have covered three of the four staples of one forehand repertoire.

The fourth is our old friend The Federfore. One can keep that name, in fact do anything one wants in tennis and life if one has the talent, but intellectual honesty requires me to admit that, increasingly, the backswing /upswing for this shot no longer resembles the elegant tip rise of Roger Federer but rather the ugly elbowing of Nick Kyrgios.

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Addendum

Naming one's shots can help one's tennis game. Reader, do you want to challenge that? Play then without naming your shots if you'd like? But are you very sure you play better that way? Could be. People are different.

The great Satchel Paige named all his baseball pitches. The colorful names he gave them helped keep them straight in his mind. Also, I would argue, sharpened focus and offered clear purpose.

Satchel Paige is the guy I'd like to learn from.

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More Cheap Topspin

The amount of topspin one can deliver-- in my very personal view-- has more to do with stroke design than muscle or even natural timing.

I've never found enough on this subject available to read, and what I did read was pretty technical, so I'll have a go myself right now.

The image of two rackets butt to butt in hand or baton or airplane propeller embedded in a forehand seems useful. And these shots are quite different from one in which a player slams over the ball but severely from right to left at the same time.

Here's added material I wrote while off-line for several weeks:

Do Anything to put Easy Spin on Forehand Baton

Try slightly earlier mondo on the dogpat. High speed photography shows mondo happening at bottom of the dogpat but put that mondo in middle of racket descent instead. Now straighten the arm during end of the mondo too. This stratagem recognizes that the mondo we see in the stills needs some space in which to fully occur. There ought to be maximum conflict between racket spinning forward and racket spinning backward before racket actually does spin forward, no?

Easy spin as I said is the goal. Can you imagine a drum major being any good if he strains? And, knowing exactly WHERE and WHEN the twirl begins should be another goal.

Rick Macci says not to conk one's imaginary dog on the head and knock it out. Well, we won't because of newly instituted dynamic delay.

The addition of late arm straightening adds to this delay-- adds to the infinitesimal pause in which one does not knock out the dog. And begins the twirl a smidge earlier. Now in fact the baton starts its twirl at bottom of the dogpat or even before. I get that idea from one stop-frame in the old Barron's book, the old book of German tennis with the Czech guy Ivan Lendl on the cover.

Very late straightening of the arm seems crucial-- at least here on the clipboard (a real and not virtual clipboard). And thus resolves the age-old question of whether to wipe with straight or partially bent or fully bent arm. I have a rationale now-- again since these things seem to come around-- for going with straight-arm form. A bent arm creates a bumpy looking spinning axle with elbow jutting out.

One feels more spin pressure on one's forearm but does one need it? Obverse of the argument could be that just straightened arm makes the spin more succinct through turning the racket through a tight circle on a straight axle. Or maybe we should simply ask which form makes some physically varied individual feel in better command of his early twirling baton.

Arm bent or arm straight? With which do you feel strong?

Whatever the case the spin will continue after the dog pat, alloyed by shoving rising arm.

One last question: In what kinetic direction did the arm get straight? I am well aware of South Africa originating Brit teaching pro Luke Digweed's admonition to his student Cate Cowper to point racket at right fence and then at the sky and then at the left fence.

But that is a manner of speaking, the sort of thing a good teaching pro says to elicit desired result.

We're not supposed to ask whether the thing actually occurs and we shouldn't because it doesn't.

The axis of the spinning baton is angled to right or put another way at inner edge of ball. So by the time it gets to ball it will be directly behind it or on outside of it on a line to the target. This is deviation from the great Digweed tennis tip ("right fence, sky, left fence"). But if any deviation is going to happen, better to put it before the ball rather than just as strings are sliding off of the ball.

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No One Knows how Ellsworth Vines Hit his Forehand

One of the greatest shots ever in tennis. And yet only Bud Collins was brave enough to hazard a guess about how it was hit. That is the way I see it. A bunch of pusillanimous turds-- sorry, I mean toads. I do feel brave or foolish enough myself to perform a re-enactment.

My way of attempting this shot is a total guess, you say, and you are right. And I am not producing the same result as Ellsworth Vines (four years as number one player in the world). You are right again about that, too.

But I am living in a different part of Detroit now, and the seven courts still with a net up at huge Rouge Park-- bigger than Belle Isle, Detroit or Central Park in Manhattan-- is the perfect place or rather the inner court nearest to the parking lot on Plymouth Street is, for mad experiment.

Also, Ellsworth Vines himself wrote a lot on the subject of composite or "Australian" grip.

These courts are so gone-to-seed that some of the weeds growing through the cracks are two-and-a-half feet high. When I want to quit self-feed I drive through Hamtramck and east Detroit and use my $10 annual membership in the Grosse Pointe Senior Men's Tennis Club to try the new stuff out.

What I've got going for me is my McEnrueful, a brief flat forehand with upside down takeback, an easy motion rhythmically bowled down and up.

To hit the Elly-boom or Elly-bam, I extend the exact same rhythm farther back and farther up until I look like a student with racket around neck in Vines coach Mercer Beasley's old green book HOW TO PLAY TENNIS.

From there I believe it is important not to put on power too soon.

More joints in both direction are involved than in more modern forehands, and I've got my topspin when I become too miss or hit.

The forward stroke begins with speed but no force, realigning racket so that strings are ahead of hand.

Is the rest of the stroke a windmill as Bud Collins suggests or a train piston as I like to think? Both.

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So I played doubles today with the Elly-bam for the first time. Didn't hit it exclusively but enough to know I want to go farther with it. We played for two hours. In the first hour I didn't miss one, and some of them were really good shots. Then, in the second hour I missed one long and then another, so resorted to other forehands. All this seems about right for a forehand that only was in self-feed a couple of days before.

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Elly-bam Had Too Much Sequence Built in

HAD: Wrist go as elbow descended and opened out a bit, followed by forearm coming round on elbow pivot.

WILL HAVE: All this happening at once. But the elbow still will stay back until big push.

This gives a shallow U-shape to the whole stroke matching same pattern on backswing, in fact.

Next thought: One sends strings ahead while keeping weight back in violation of the Stan Smith principle that "the weight is where the racket is." On the other hand rules were made to be broken by those who know them. Next question: Does this train of thought lead naturally to a wish to temporize? Elbow could stay close and low during the up of the down and up backswing. Now elbow goes up and BACK during the other items which comprise the speed without force section in this two-part forward mechanism. Good for balance, good for closing the strings, good for establishing one's piston rod, good for speed without force before the application of the big force from farther back.

Just tried this in the living room. Felt awful. But I'll keep slowing it down and try it on a tennis court soon in self-feed.

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I don't much like the Direction the Elly-bam Development Project has been Taking

Such skepticism is healthy, of course, the only way to truly get anywhere.

The trouble is the possible disparity between teacher and student, the gap between Mercer Beasley, coach, and Ellsworth Vines, world's number one tennis player.

Did Vines truly revere his "dear old coach?" How much did he think the old boy was a moron whose every idea he ought to refute?

Bud Collins tells us, after all, that Vines took racket down almost to the court, while Beasley's green book HOW TO PLAY TENNIS shows anybody about to hit a forehand with racket curled around his neck. That doesn't add up to happy coach with happy pupil all on the same page, now, does it?

What we know from the little information we do have is that this new forehand racket path should be the longest, flattest and most level there ever has been. With wrist totally open and jet engines revving at beginning of the runway.

And that wrist will gradually close to straight so that one can hit the ball with a firm straight wrist exactly as in a McEnrueful.

But who knows how wrist got poised-- open-- at beginning of the runway? Did one commit early to a notion of what level the ball will be? How can we build wiggle room and precise late adjustment into this great/old new stroke?

While we start as in a McEnrueful with down and up backswing, on the down the racket arm can twist racket low and to the inside.

On the up the wrist rolling the opposite way can unfurl and not with gradualness at all. This creates a threat of unmanageable racket head momentum pulling the whole forehand out of form.

But again rules were made to be broken by those who know them. And the sudden burst of momentum can channel into racket drop-- wrist cocked-- to precise level of where the ball will be.

Now long swing/push commences with wrist gradually closing toward ball. Now straight firm wrist continues this protracted shove. And weight throughout is where the racket is.

Speed without forward force started in the backswing and continued through a transition-- the racket drop. This whole section of the stroke is quick but relaxed.

Next one's power goes on, creating a smooth long path. Is the racket work slow? Compared to that in a topspin forehand it is.

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"Swing into it smoothly, employing timing, ONE, TWO. One, swing-- Two, hit. When you hit the ball, your work is over."

-- Mercer Beasley, HOW TO PLAY TENNIS, p 41 .

"The flat forehand is used mostly by the champions in tournament play for the reason that it is the speediest of all strokes. Furthermore, it is the shot most difficult for the opponent to handle owing to its lack of spin and its low bounce.

"Ellsworth Vines is master of the flat forehand. This, more than any other factor, is responsible for his being the world's foremost player in 1936 . It is the champion's power play."

I just found this great old dark green book in a cardboard box after talking about it so much. One thing I immediately notice is the two-handed wrap around neck followed by footwork and a breaststroke like that used by Juan Del Potro nowadays.

I bypass that by building on the upside down backswing of a John McEnroe forehand.

It is in the forward action that there should be closer similarity between what Beasley teaches and what I am trying to accomplish with my Elly-bam.

The issue of fixed or free wrist does not seem addressed in the tight, modern prose of Mercer Beasley. I take my free-wristed notion from Paul Metzler of Australia.

A big difference between the Beasley and Bud Collins description of this generic forehand (Collins alleging a Vines' "windmill" and "360 degrees") lies in these two functional tips from Beasley:

1) "Where you point your racket for the ending is where the ball will go.

"This changed ending controls the difference in the pivot or actual hit which is necessary to send the ball in the desired direction... If you had let go of the racket when you struck the ball, the racket would have followed the ball over the net. But, as you need your racket for the next stroke, you do not let go of it. You merely allow it to follow the ball until your arm is fully outstretched."

2) "IN EVERY CASE, THE RACKET FINISHES ON A LEVEL WITH THE ACTUAL HIT."

Note: I was mistaken in my recollection that Beasley's tire target was suspended in mid-air. In photographic depictions of the Beasley forehand the tire target is on edge down on the opposite court and always in a different place.

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If the Mind Wants to Race, Should one Let it?

Or should one, as always, slowly climb the ladder of reasonable increment one rung at a time?

I am not aware of some rule on this topic woven into the do-not's and doughnuts of one's Pocket Companion.

At 77 one may do better to give one's mind its head.

Here I am not even having tried, in self-feed OR actual play, the dynamic new backswing for the Elly-bam, yet am so confident of its efficacy that I want to shift thumb over to next pointy ridge and try the same thing to generate the small plane propeller of topspin forehands.

Right now I have at work two diametrically opposed backswings for two topspin shots and for two flat shots. Nothing wrong with that yet I have always known that one's game would cohere better if one always did one or the other but not both.

And I have tried, without enough success, to apply the down-and-up, the bowled backswing of John McEnroe, to one's full topspin.

Racket not high enough to generate maximum spin? Well, there has been a change. Who says the new dynamic momentum infused into one's backswing cannot next float the racket down or up or leave it where it is or take it a little sideways? In the composite grip forehands-- the McEnrueful and the Elly-bam-- I see this as flexibility and late instant discovery of accurate coordinates of the ball.

One makes same late discovery while using one's waterwheel, but wouldn't it make sense to rid oneself of the waterwheel once and for all?

And so, with bowled backswing packed with energy and floating high thanks to the combo of rolling arm and opening wrist (one's mondo actually just set early in the stroke) one then thrusts arm straight to create essential mondo-conflict for earlier starting propeller.

Probably this scheme will not work and get rejected thus preserving one more historic waterwheel.

But what if it does work? How will one know unless one tries?

Note: One thing for sure. The wrist once open will stay open through spinning baton or small plane prop.

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Shoulder over Shoulder Movement in One's Service: Friend and Enemy of the Rotorded Server (most servers)

FRIEND in that lower bod, particularly rear leg, can crouch with heel coming up on toes thus providing starter-block connection with earth for delayed implementation of hip over hip movement thus sparking the shoulder over shoulder power unit in anybody's serve.

ENEMY in that the fuller one's end over end (let's unify the hips part and the shoulders part as a single thought) the higher the spring-loaded racket gets before it lets go. This is not a problem for a server with extraordinary flexibility in twist capacity of his upper arm, but for anybody else is a terrible problem because the springing racket springs forward rather than upward every time.

So what is the possible antidote so that the rotorded server like a playing pro on the circuit can happily use this essential power unit? To substitute Alexander Technique (straight up body extension; Alexander the rattlesnake strikes high, Wimpy the copperhead strikes low) for some of the end-over-end? To stay on rear leg for longer and not glide forward during the toss?

These are real items that I never have heard any serving clinician seriously address other than to suggest taking elbow way up above the shoulders line-- something that leads to weakness and poor health.

The main question is what best to do other than go some dicey medical route that might or might not work. And I don't know how many times to say all this until somebody at least takes a shot at coming to the rescue.

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Don't Straighten Up!

Who in speaking of forehands would say such a thing? Probably the tennis players who still like the forehands of Bill Tilden, whose number one precept was to keep one's butt away from the ball, and those of Pancho Gonzalez, who always, in photographs, appears quite hunched from the hips.

In rowing we call degree of being hunched with strong straight back from the hips one's "body angle." You see it in golf. And you see it in tennis, just not in martinets like John McEnroe.

"Don't straighten up" is the advice of Mercer Beasley, avatar of the Ellsworth Vines forehand. Vines himself could write books and be quite the articulate fellow, but when it came right down to the heresy at the core of his greatest stroke, he didn't discuss it, left that to his coach, Beasley, just quit tennis and went into professional golf at the age of 28 .

If you are bent from the hips, it seems to me, you put a longer lever on the ball if pivoting from those hips just then.

I have to now admit or perhaps learn for the first time that when I hit my McEnrueful, I am bent over unlike John McEnroe, although I then do use aeronautical banking like him to lift the shoulder to the ball.

'Twill be different when I hit the Elly-bam. There won't be any banking. This shot is "stay down, stay down." And hips, not trunk or hips and trunk, is the dance element that pivots on the ball.

Hips will not rotate early to lower the hitting shoulder as in a McEnrueful. No, shoulders to stay level with one another.

And swing, for me at least, will come from two arm joints, shoulder and wrist. Push then will come all at once from shoulder, elbow and hips.

A swing and a push. Absolutely.

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Letter to a Friend

But while you're on the motorcycle you feel great, right? Same thing with me playing tennis. Had an unbelievable day using two forehands that were only theory just 12 hours before. So I never had hit them even from a dropped ball (self-feed, we call that) and yet I was hitting winners for which I was getting adulation from six watching geezers. They didn't know, couldn't know they were witnessing shots never seen before on this earth, the one an imagined reenactment of Ellsworth Vines from 1936 which I call The Elly-bam,, the other an upside down backswing topspin producing number I just invented to go along with my other best shots and make everything consistent.. Now I just called in to my family physician for a new prescription of Celebrex..

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Shoulder over Shoulder Movement in One's Service: Friend and Enemy of the Rotorded Server (most servers)

FRIEND in that lower bod, particularly rear leg, can crouch with heel coming up on toes thus providing starter-block connection with earth for delayed implementation of hip over hip movement thus sparking the shoulder over shoulder power unit in anybody's serve.

ENEMY in that the fuller one's end over end (let's unify the hips part and the shoulders part as a single thought) the higher the spring-loaded racket gets before it lets go. This is not a problem for a server with extraordinary flexibility in twist capacity of his upper arm, but for anybody else is a terrible problem because the springing racket springs forward rather than upward every time.

So what is the possible antidote so that the rotorded server like a playing pro on the circuit can happily use this essential power unit? To substitute Alexander Technique (straight up body extension; Alexander the rattlesnake strikes high, Wimpy the copperhead strikes low) for some of the end-over-end? To stay on rear leg for longer and not glide forward during the toss?

These are real items that I never have heard any serving clinician seriously address other than to suggest taking elbow way up above the shoulders line-- something that leads to weakness and poor health.

The main question is what best to do other than go some dicey medical route that might or might not work. And I don't know how many times to say all this until somebody at least takes a shot at coming to the rescue.

It could be that I answered some of the questions in this old gripe just in trying to express it. There has been a lot of discussion at TennisPlayer recently about still body for the toss, and about slight tilt from lower body as opposed to "archer's bow." These suggestions, taken together, today achieved more upwardness of spin than usual for me, and I was more apt to hold serve. For physical reasons, I'm quite sure, I have problems with upward spin that carries sufficent pace as well. I'm beginning to think that a rotorded server such as myself is better off tossing with weight still on rear foot rather than tossing while traveling forward. And I've thought this before yet couldn't cash in the difference.

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Who Said This, Roughly? "Every place is okay for a while but then begins to stink for your own personal benefit?"

Google didn't know. Google came up with stuff about deodorants.

I'm in a new place, in western Detroit, with great freight trains wailing at the low protection street crossing here (flashing lights but no moving gates of any kind) and then whistling past for a long time. But there are few, well, actually, NO friends. But friends on the internet have been good, an old friend or two has reappeared, and commuting to Grosse Pointe to play tennis with the geezers I know is a joy-- especially when they praise new shots which they don't know are new shots.

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Is Mondo Useful or just a Fashion Statement?

Mondo or "flip" as I understand it is simultaneous late flyback-of-the-wrist-and-turn-down-of-the-forearm as racket approaches the ball. To me the wrist flyback is all show, i.e., "Look at me. I can lay back my wrist just before I hit the ball and I'll be just as good as you who don't do that or better."

The wrist doesn't then do something, does it? No it just stays laid back until the ball is gone. Did the sudden loading result in a sudden unloading? Does any kind of loading (cocking) lead to a corresponding unloading or uncocking? No. Not in a modern topspin forehand.

Now forearm twisting racket down behind itself (behind forearm) is a different story. As is whole arm twisting racket downward behind itself if that happens too.

But all these movements tend to be loose. So what is the point of them?

It is the muscular stretching of one's twisters that matters, and since when does ballistic movement help one to stretch?

One wants conflict between arm rolling backward and arm trying to roll forward until arm roll forward finally gets in the ascendancy and springs.

Loose motion for a player who is not a great virtuoso, who is not a great hot dog, could be what is confusing the issue and leading to lower rpm's.

Besides, people grow old and need to start something a little early to make it happen on time.

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The second part of this disquisition concerns Pancho Segura's assertion that a great tennis artist can loop up and around and down at even speed before he hits the ball well. But most players, Segura says, are better off not burdening themselves with such a heavy challenge. It is safer, as Segura sees it, to use either a pause or a slow-down up high, thus abbreviating the amount of constant speed one will use to get near the ball.

I like to think of the racket "floating" a little when up top if you are using an upper register or tortoise shell loop.

Now that I've gone to upside down backswing, however, I see full pause, i.e., change of direction as replacement for the floating slow-down in that overhand loop.

What kind of stop should there be in The Elly-bam? Down sometime, up sometime, sideways in toward bod sometime, leave racket where it is sometime.

But I just said there won't be floating and all four possibilities, which I insist be practiced in self-feed, do seem like floating. Yes then but a different kind of floating because of more direct change of direction and because of racket acceleration just before the "float."

Will this work? On a consistent basis? I can honestly say I don't know. But I got off to a good start in finding out.

Early on in round-robin doubles play with the Grosse Pointe geezers I found myself receiving serve from Ken Hunt, third in the Midwest. Now is the time to try the new shots, I said to myself, since Ken will beat up on the old ones.

The topspin version of the new upside-downedness was low priority but I decided to try it anyways. This as a shot was pure theory. I had never aired it in self-feed, in actual play, ball machine, backboard, hitting partner, etc., etc.

And I hit a clean winner deep in Ken's alley. Encouraged then, on next reception of Ken's serve, I tried new version of the Elly-bam also never hit before. And produced another unreturnable return.

Later, Ken told me he had been unable to get the power going that day (yesterday) on his usually reliable serve. Fine, I believe him, but this story was a bit more dramatic from my end.