A New Year's Serve

[bottle]

Rotorded Serving: One More Time

The roller coaster of don_budge is a brilliant idea.

As are the windmills once propounded by John Yandell.

And the figure eights of tennischiro.

And the throwing exercises of Alan Jaeger (https://www.jaegersports.com/staff/), particularly those Alan advocates before long toss.

Jaeger's emphasis is that the arm is a human organism, not a metaphor for weakness. It is seen as individual (quirky) and best thought of as something stout and loose and full of blood from shoulder right out to one's fingertips. Arm health is everything, a passion even, at the Jaegersports website.

The windmill exercise seems an especially good beginning for this. So with racket in hand, do five backward windmills or more right now to animate and invigorate the arm.

Now squeak a few times: You are a mouse.

Now do some figure eights just as tennischiro (Don Brosseau) has explained in his videos, but with this exception for rotorded serving. Instead of letting them get facile and continuous like Serena's six or seven at the coin toss, save your complete continuity for the windmills.

My idea, for the figure eights, is to run each one through the full cycle you have carefully engineered-- through Don's online advice-- but stop at the point where you last started your service motion in its previous incarnation.

For me that is with hip bumped out and hands at medium height, which is not high enough.

The seminal cue, given to me by a teaching pro in Front Royal, Virginia, Jason Robertson, is hand behind neck as prime characteristic of a good serve every time.

That cue has the arm nicely bent as if poised to throw. The racket is neither open nor closed but on edge above the hand.

Well, both hands will be nicely bent now to begin every serve. But not high enough. So, to go the full roller coaster route I'll lift them to just in front of my neck as weight rocks forward. One might hear the clicks of an imaginary winch pulling the joined hands up.

This creates two roller coaster mountains, one directly in front of the neck and one behind it, with hand at same level in both instances and arm identically bent.

Now the hands fall to straighten arms and separate at the rate of gravity from the weight of the arms and racket; but, only the hitting arm comes up.

How should one do this? From momentum only? No, add a little muscular lift of the elbow. You won't need much thanks to the first tall drop point but still ought to add this small bit of oomph to buy time.

What else needs emphasis? A lot.

Especially the following idea for us restricted shoulder servers. There is no backward bod turn of any type until just before hand reaches its seminal position directly behind the neck.

But that bit of turn, kept purposefully small, gets to meld with liquid continuity into the full backward bod turns that occur in tandem with upper arm twisting inward and delayed toss now finally allowed to occur.

Such a delayed toss, it is my contention, should be hit at its apogee, not when it has dropped. And I started from a stance turned WAY AROUND.

And held serve every time in a two-hour doubles session as opposed to losing serve every time in the previous two-hour session.

[bottle]

Does a Flip Become Harsher or Milder with the Inclusion of More Elements?

One element previously included but now extirpated (https://www.google.com/search?q=exti...ome&ie=UTF-8): sudden, reactive lay-back of the wrist. I do it earlier to separate the two hands.

So what could be an expanded list of wanted elements with all of them driven by the bod turns? 1) hand straightening forward from the elbow away from the lagged strings, 2) a tugged shoulder thus prepared for power-adding release, 3) a turned down racket, 4) backward flow of bent elbow as knees and torso reverse direction, 5) a sense of pulling on the butt-cap.

[bottle]

Two Hundred to One

How many self-fed reps of a new forehand produce one example of the same shot perfectly hit in a two-hour session of doubles? About 200 in my experience. Most attempts at the shot stayed in the court and even figured in won points. Their quality however was only remotely close to that of the shots hit in self-feed. The one that did meet the experimenter's (my) criteria was a story in itself.

I've seen this same ratio of 200 to 1 in other experiments. To generalize, one self-feed session produces one good shot. Not much of a reward unless one believed that soon the number would grow from one to four then 16 then success every time one attempted the new shot.

Idealism, in other words, so difficult for those singed by life to accept.

The shot that provided so much promise was perfect in some ways, imperfect in others. First of all the player (I, me, he) was well out ahead of oneself, returning serve from the ad court.

The return did not pin the server on the baseline as intended.

Instead it went down the middle barely clearing the net before plunging at the ankles of the paralyzed net-man.

But, was it turbo-charged? Absolutely. Was it an ideal combination of pace and spin? Absolutely. Did it inspire the whole game of the player who hit it for the rest of the morning? Absolutely.

[bottle]

Exigency

I probably owe it to myself not to write a post today, just to concentrate on the two images identified, one motor and the other visual, just as I said.

The geezers' carousel is scheduled for later this morning. There I can attempt to put the two images into practice but with the arrhythmic difficulty that comes with doubles tennis or even when trying new stuff whatever it is in actual play-- what about all the buildup time needed?

My hitting partner of the moment, Iryna, is on her way back to Kiev to take care of her sick mother and so my best chance will come predictably in a few forehand returns off weak serves.

Not a sufficient trial of anything. Especially when there are good servers interspersed among the geezers. I further dilute the trial now by the wish to talk more. The exigency here (https://www.google.com/search?q=exig...hrome&ie=UTF-8) is to do something reasonable for my tennis. But this thread too has its exigency, I tell you whether you, reader, believe that or not.

I simply cannot believe that, in the annals of tennis thought, there has not been more explicit attention given to the difference between passive arm and active arm forehands. I see rampant confusion everywhere on this point.

When Norman Ashbrooke asserts the efficacy of passive arm and then does so again-- with no response either time-- I understand that no one except for possibly don_budge with me wants a quarrel.

But drain all emotion away from the substantial question here, so as to see it, to understand it, or at least to recognize it.

I only know that, when I hear Stotty declare that there are a lot of great forehands around nowadays, I want to be in that number no matter my age. But if I want to do well I'll need the other kind of forehand too.

[bottle]

Hiss

The legitimate critics of my verbal approach to tennis-- as opposed to the cheap shot artists who also love to get into the act-- find an excess of detail in my permutations.

They might be right if their judgment pertained to a single post.

Always however there is movement-- often between posts-- which I argue is toward feel and more vivid sensory cue and proper spacing between those theatrical cues.

And so, in the present, outlined forehand the first cue-- a movement cue-- is the bent elbow still sliding toward rear fence even when the shoulders have abruptly changed direction.

Second cue is racket on still laid back wrist pointing at left side fence.

Everything must go now into concentration on these two images, the first a motor image, the second a visual one.

All other detail must temporarily be pushed aside. As well as the vector considerations that go along with bod staying low like a striking copperhead or uncoiling upward like a striking rattlesnake-- two separate subjects that must be saved for another time.

[bottle]

The Clash of Two Tectonic Plates, the One Sliding over the Other

Guy says arm is passive. Other guy says arm takes off. So what does that make me? A trouble-maker but one who is covered since he has both kinds of shot.

[bottle]

NE (Next Experiment)

The major shift I recently made from linked bod turns to bod turns with a transition between them LEE (like everybody else) does not mean I can't occasionally go back and try the old way but with inclusion of SLTTMMABD ("some little thing that might make a big difference" in the centenarian Aunt Frieda's words).

A natural progression of iterations now has me sweeping the court in opposite direction-- an antiquated way of hitting a tennis ball-- or is it if one dissolves all transition between the two long broom sweeps?

Senator Paul Laxalt after all came out of his high Virginia mountain house one morning and saw me sweeping his tennis court and immediately suggested that that was the way he thought I ought to hit the ball.

And we know what Helen Wills Moody did for him with some such sharp observation the nature of which is forever lost (https://www.google.com/search?q=athe...hrome&ie=UTF-8).

And Senator Laxalt was always more than ordinarily interested in anything about Katharine Hepburn because of his Nevada connection to Howard Hughes.

And Howard Hughes once landed his plane on the par 6 fifth hole at Fenwick, Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Both Tennischiro and now Brian Gordon have indicated in a way that other tennis instructors won't, that, a mondo or flip can be too harsh for sustainability.

Well I have straight arm forehands, the category in which that is most apt to be true and yet haven't sensed danger up until now.

"Perhaps you're not trying hard enough, Bottle," I find myself saying to myself, "Tack closer to the big rock. Create some danger and then if you have to back off."

And so, in search of a harsher flip, I abandon dogpat or floating milkweed altogether. The final straightening of the arm is from back to forward away from lagging strings. The flip and arm straightening and small loop if you insist on that term become one and the same.

More harsh or less harsh-- if it worked, who would care?

To court: So why couldn't I do it before? Because my idea of flip included sudden racket roll-down and wrist lay-back both. No, the wrist must lay back before the flip. But as with so many experiments, I have only found my success in self-feed. It is the occasional exception to this rule that builds my game.

Getting as much spin? Perhaps not. But who knows? One competes to find out.

Are parameters the same? No. Racket butt is now farther forward at same elapsed time. The combined arm slam and arm roll is accomplished in a space closer to two feet than three feet. That would be two feet from end of spear to contact.

One thing less is being done! And whatever the trade-off, a strong argument has to be made for a believed ease of production in this new shot.

[bottle]

https://estream.to/zqfuynes90bf.html

Fun. Patricia Pemberton, Frank Parker, Gussie Moran, Babe Zaharias, Aldo Ray, Don Budge and Little Nell the horse and Charles Bronson (?) all playing together. Written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, the same guy who wrote TRACY AND HEPBURN, the best by far of the too many biographies.

So Dick, the brother who called me with the offer that I play the skinny fool in Coco, had the idea that they all tie themselves together with a single long rope. One by one they crawled out of the same window. Together they then made it to The Riversea on barely higher ground.

When we lived there (two parents and five kids), the rear section shown in the postcard no longer existed but the place still was big enough. And most of the people in the Borough of Fenwick, but not Dick Hepburn, came to the ballroom there whenever there was a dance or a hurricane.

[don_budge]

https://estream.to/zqfuynes90bf.html

[bottle]

$6,500? That's What my Father Paid for it

https://www.amazon.com/Riversea-Sayb.../dp/B018P3LLGU

The building to which Kate and Dick and the rest of the Hepburn family escaped in 1938 as their own house floated down the lagoon toward the Old Saybrook lighthouse.

[bottle]

A Tight Whirl (Knees and Torso) Followed by a Broad Whirl

That's what I want to try.

[bottle]

People Don't React

And it's true whether the subject is tennis, politics, history, math or anything else. This is how you can tell that they aren't there. Hanging out with Katharine Hepburn and her family had its advantages. You HAD to say what you thought.

[bottle]

Baseball Announcers to the Rescue

Every once in a while a good baseball announcer will say something perceptive about hitting the ball.

Here it was. "Turn your hips with your legs. You don't want to move your head."

So here is the experiment. No moving of head through knees pivot and torso rotation. Not at all a classical idea. Mercer Beasley would have you use the pivot to dance onto the front leg.

Save forward bod press for the arm slam, which gets helped by your slowing overall bod rotation however you can.

[bottle]

Hand Linearity? Why then any hand verticality?

Why does anyone need an overhead loop? Tony Roche disparaged "a big overhead loop way back behind you" (demonstrating with arm and racket in an Australian instruction video long ago). But why do we need any overhead loop at all?

I guess the idea is to make a lot of space in which to build up racket head speed. But why wave your wand up and down when you can just wave it back and forth?

Today's experiment proceeds from that daydream, assumption, rejection of narrow frame forehands for the big doofus that would be me. Nothing shameful in this. Oarsmen are not built like point guards.

The personal paradigm has shifted toward semi-open, neutral stance, and even the old-fashioned and often derided closed forehands. If these closed shots just have gone out of fashion but still have utility, the derision is undoubtedly foolish. In any case this different range of stances re-establishes neutral stance forehand as the mean, the choice where one learns the most.

One takes the elbow back pretty much on the same level where it started, and this is as much a part of unit turn as anything else. I just tried this in self-feed and it seemed very good, producing high balls with the bottom suddenly dropping out of them.

Elbow thus gets quickly located on inner edge of the slot but way back in the same plane as the two shoulder balls. So what is the setting of upper arm? 45 degrees down.

The next move, extension from the elbow joint or "dogpat" or "floating milkweed" or whatever you want to call it may feel level due to being behind you but actually slants down. The elbow is a fixed joint, not a ball joint, therefore extends in one direction. So if upper arm slants down, the extension goes down. But, again because of the slant and the way the racket tip is pointing somewhat sideways like a scythe, goes farther back just as much.

In an earlier post I posited five feet to ball. What have I got now? Six feet? How about keeping the five feet but just from a starting place one foot more back. That might do away with a needle coming out of one's instep which was an unpleasant image anyway.

New rap on hand travel: It comes one foot from pivoting knees, one foot from rotating torso, three feet from blended arm slam and arm roll.

The new rap is same as the old rap but perhaps correct this time.

I envision a big neutral stance step-out.

[bottle]

Are Tennis Players Dumb?

They always are running around saying "Don't think," so I suppose they are.

I view them as gangstas or gang members. As the product of eight-oared crews, I guess I am too.

But now I am a tennis player just as for a year in Cambridge, MA I was a single sculler who didn't have seven other oarsmen and a coxswain working with me.

Yes, tennis is best as an individual sport, and there isn't anyone with you out there on the court, and as the character Lisaveta Prokofyevna says in THE IDIOT, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, "Delicacy and dignity are taught by the heart and not by the dancing-master."

But every time I play doubles I'm in a gang of two, and I knew a lot of gangstas when I taught English in two Massachusetts prisons, and I certainly always have my gang of nine close behind me.

Last Tuesday, as we made plans to deal with the loss of our coach, Whitey Helander, the captain of my crew reminded everybody that we beat every other crew in the United States except for one, Navy, and only lost to them by .2 second-- twice by the exact same margin as I recall, two years apart but once at 2000 meters and the other time at three miles.

I thought we lost to Harvard, too, but apparently Harvard went out of the Olympic Trials before we did.

Navy were the 1960 American Olympic team, with the intercollegiate heavyweight boxing champion, Joe Baldwin, rowing in the number four seat, my position. Lost badly in Rome to Kiel-Ratzeburg, a German unification gang even before the wall came down.

But the gang experience that sport or prison can afford one (the "behind the walls" and "not behind the walls" distinction that jailbirds make-- like the Montagues and Capulets, the Jets and the Sharks) is very enjoyable.

One doesn't have to know history or anything about democracy, just how to bump off the other guy or more politely, "win."

Great until you try to apply this principle to real life. It just isn't a rich enough frame of reference.