Tilden: American Twist Serve...

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Gravity as an assist

Without re-checking the original: "In the last point of a long match, I was finishing off a young Turk with a short-angled forehand three feet beyond his reach when I noticed a young lad watching studiously from the right netpost. "Son," I said, "would you like to hit a few balls?" "Yes I would," he said.

Maybe it's just me but I find this scene hilarious. Of course I know from the Deford biography that Tilden really wanted a career in theater and film just as Hepburn wanted a career as a tennis pro. (She said before she died that she'd like to come back as a tennis pro.)

My second take-away of the day has to do with a principle of serving explained somewhere in Tilden's books, that arm wants to go around a relatively still body (in a rather vertical manner, perhaps). Dennis Ralston makes the same point in his wonderful article on slice serve in this website (http://www.tennisplayer.net/members/...ice_serve.html). To still the body at a certain moment or moments in the serve seems the generalized idea-- and often generality works better in tennis instruction than lots of detail.

One can see independent, horizontal travel of the arm in the serves of Pancho Gonzalez, Rafa Nadal or Stan Wawrinka. But easier to do than that, as Don Brosseau has pointed out to me and no doubt to a thousand others, is to use gravity for an assist, i.e., let the arm drop naturally before it comes up.

People have accused me of "embroidering" good information before, but I don't think that's what I'm doing. I wish to combine Don's information, same as that coming from Virginia Wade in her published instruction, with some coming from Mark Papas at the "Revolutionary Tennis" website.

We hear how Vic Braden tried to include this firebrand in learned conferences but Papas didn't want to be co-opted. The idea here is "arm going around body." Papas makes fun of almost all servers in the world from great to lousy for pointing their racket toward their opponent to start their motion, and I think he's right!

Exactly what does a lot of backward body rotation during one's toss accomplish? My idea is to stand very much sideways with both arms bent and racket pointing somewhat to right of the netpost. One could get hips or shoulders a bit offset in this still position-- I'm still exploring that. Regardless, the two hands can go down together as one starts compressing knees.

Racket can go down and up in very relaxed fashion, but go around body at the same time. One can be transferring weight forward during toss with hitting arm straight. Conscious, delayed bending of the arm to a right angle can be coincident with final loading on front foot.

I see this iteration as similar to Wawrinka even though his arm goes with more pure horizontality around. His is an especially interesting serve to me in that it is very slow when it is slow and very fast when it is fast (if that doesn't sound too trite).

Obviously, there are many different forms a successful service motion can take. Because the human machine is capable of doing so much more than we can even imagine. But a lot of us are not so gifted and have trouble developing a consistent toss and service rhythm. My argument is that if you use the assistance of gravity, it can be a great help to your rhythm and therefore your consistency. I don't think it makes that much difference to the speed of the serve, but I feel not enough emphasis is placed on developing a motion that is repeatable and has a consistent rhythm. Gravity is always the same. If you can get gravity to determine the speed of your backswing, that will be a great comfort to your inner computer. It will say, "Oh yeah! I remember that. We've done that before." And will reproduce the same rhythm. Now if you can synchronize the movement of the left hand with the right and gravity is determining the speed of the right hand, then gravity is determining the speed of the toss. That would be a pretty comfortable and consistent toss with a very consistent rhythm.

If someone has no problem making a consistent toss and their motion is working for them, but needs a little tweaking, I will leave their motion alone, but if they are having trouble getting a consistent toss, I know gravity works for everyone; although it can be difficult to change a habit at first. I think too much emphasis is spent on trying to get that last ounce of explosion out of the leg drive, when it would be a whole lot more effective to serve 10 mph slower and get in 70% of first serves instead of 55% or 60% at the higher speed. Worse, the numbers are more like 40% to 50% for anyone below world class. And sometimes even world class players.

As for the direction of the backswing relative to your opponent (pointing the racket), think of the action of a gyroscope (yeah, it is operating at right angles to what I am talking about, but it is a similar principle and this is just a metaphor). The spinning action of the gyroscope it upright. You could "imagine" that the movement of the racket in the serve swing keeps everything aligned. Every movement of the racket sends a message to your "kinesthetic computer". If you swing off to the right of the net post, that registers. If everymove you make reinforces the direction you want to hit the ball, that makes it easier for your body to control the motion and be more accurate.

Tennis is and always has been C...A...P. Consistency, accuracy and power. The more powerful players win by forcing the weaker player to play at a speed where they are no longer consistent or accurate. It seems less so today, but on the terms that I am defining right here, tennis is still C...A..P. A little more consistency and accuracy on a serve that might or might not be a little slower could be a very good thing. I'm just saying...

Bottle, I'd like to hear more about Kate. She seems like she was very much like some of the characters she played in her early movies...just living life to the absolute fullest. Demonstrating a lot of the qualities I like to think you need to be a great tennis player...but I digress!
don brosseau

[bottle]

Yes, gravity is a great comfort (it's so much easier to fall down than to stand up!). I'd love to tell you anything I knew about Katharine Hepburn-- it's positive. The actors at the North Carolina School of the Arts cannot believe that she offered me the part of the skinny fool in the New York show "Cocoa" but that I turned it down. (I WAS a skinny fool.) That offer came, I believe, primarily as the result of the one tennis match I've described a few times too many.

Living life fully? I'm not sure. She never married or had children but let her
two beautiful sisters do that. So, yes, she lived her life fully but not in the more usual directions.

I have to be careful since I've annoyed before. My friend Katharine Houghton
really is the one who should write a biography of Kate. She told Larry King
when he interviewed her on television that every biography of Kate that's been written is horrible. I knew Kate well enough to believe that Kath was correct about that as she is about most things.

[bottle]

Since the Larry King show is coming to an end forever, and my last post has occupied an overly prominent position here for some days (why isn't there new material about Bill Tilden?), maybe I'll add something more about Tilden's student Kate and her niece Kath.

Kath said, on "Larry King Live" when King suggested that she was the logical one to write a biography of Kate, "Enough has been written about my aunt already."