How about Steffi Graf?

[marius hancu]

She certainly deserves some representation here.
As I see it, the best mover of all time. I am still sticking to Margaret Smith-Court for the best player of all time with 24 Slams.

[johnyandell]

Steffi Where Are You??

Marius,

If she comes out of retirement for 1 minute--or I can scale the wall at their compound when she and Andre hit without breaking my camera--then we'll get her. The (sad) point to keep in mind is that there is no good historical footage and even if there was, it would lack the high speed shutters to really see what is happening... makes us treasure what we are developing now--probably will be as or even more appreciated in 20 years than now...

John

[marius hancu]

I know this is no high speed, but couldn't you use old TV footage? I prefer seeing former champions at the top, even if not filmed at the current camera speeds. Now, I do not know about the royalties you'd have to pay, this might be a concern.

[johnyandell]

First you wouldn't be able to see the stroke. It'd all be a blurr--you have to distinguish between the shutter speed which freezes the frame and the frame rate which is how many frames you have. Plus there are no data bases that I know of that even have the footage by player. Even if it existed it wouldn't be worth it from the educational point of view and I wouldn't even want to think about the cost. It's just a historical loss.

By the way--we put up the first of our own high speed footage in a special section of the Stroke Archive! The Federer forehand I sent to you is up there along with a lot of others...

[marius hancu]

How did you get those clips of Bill Tilden?
There were any digital cameras then.
I guess from film?
Couldn't you do the same for Graf and others?

[johnyandell]

Those were all put together by our contributor Ed Atkinson for his wonderful Kings of the Court video. He researched film archives all over the world. Nowadays (for Graf et al) it would all be network footage--very expensive and actually not even as good quality as the film Ed found in many cases.

The TV replays even if you went to the trouble to get them would be blurry and useless in frame by frame. So it would be a long expensive and unproductive enterprise that just isn't a priority for me.

Too bad. It's a loss for tennis. I think there may be one Steffi Graf clip in the Allen Fox article on choking....