Jack Kramer explains various Grips...

[bottle]

I come from a hockey family, and it's the same. God help you if you kinetic chain is not in order, and if your grip isn't absolutely perfect, cause that head of the hockey stick is more unforgiving that golf! Well, and then you have to shoot, and make sure you don't get hammered with a hard check as well. So, it's a science as well, and it takes so many hours to learn. So, yes, I get it as well.

I'm sure you do get it. But you said somewhere that some of us came down on you hard in grip discussion, and I certainly don't want to be critical of a person whose varied experience has so much to offer.

In fact, if I were in the Ukraine right now, even though I am 74 and thanks to a sudden move to Hungary (and home again) don't even have a pair of skates and we were talking about something other than Russia, Crimea and Putin, I would ask you to show me the basics of a slap shot. When I did play hockey I was a defenseman whose strongest shot was a wrist shot from the left side. But I don't think I could ever have learned a slap shot from the left side even if I had had a good coach. As it was, I tried to learn a slap shot from an ice floe in the Connecticut River. The target was on the shore, don't you know. My confused efforts dislodged the floe, which started drifting out into the shipping channel. I jumped and made it to shore through the water but my mononucleosis turned into pneumonia, etc., etc.

I figure that grip is the most technical thing in tennis. Please see-- if you want to-- my post today at A New Year's Serve where I attribute great importance to straightening wrist BEFORE deft change to thumb along spread fingers diagonal backhand drive grip. I then went out to a court and discovered for once that I was right-- made a huge difference.

Anyway, the more technical something is, the meaner (goes with left-brainedness) the person indulging in it. I learned that from the polymath Leonard Shlain, surgeon and anthropologist, in his book THE GODDESS AND THE ALPHABET. The book is a history of the world featuring many sons of bitches. With the bitches seen to be much, much nicer.

So lawyers and technicians and writers (it has to be since writers use alphabets) have to be left brain and mean. Well, poets might escape the judgment since they use imagery. People who are overly logical though-- whew-- there are many times when one should give them a wide berth.
(Dunno if that sounds right.)

I figure that meanness and overly fastidious technicians are so closely associated that the technicians might even sound mean when they're not.

Note: Everything, as you already seem to know, has to do with the corpus Abdullah, I mean the corpus callosum, the organ that mediates between the two frontal lobes. No jock is going to be good if he doesn't have a good one of those.

Also I have to tell you about the late Jim Fullerton, who was varsity hockey coach at Northwood School and then Brown. Our freshman eight-oared crew didn't have a coach so he stood in although he didn't know the first thing about rowing. But in a race in Cambridge, Massachusetts he noticed that MIT was rowing on the square in the middle of the race to catch a boost from a tail wind.

So he made us learn how to do that. The only trouble was that in the big championship race in Philadelphia at the end of the season there was a headwind and we blew backward.