Backhand Thoughts

What's the difference between a blog and a webcam? Both are products of an Internet age, an age where privacy has given way to openness and sharing. Information, such as it is, is disseminated to those who care enough to pay attention.

The difference is a blog is a diary (at best). It is (or should be) an introspective perspective. It is a person talking about themselves, so you gain insight into how they think, how they feel, what's most important to them right at that moment. It is, by its nature, biased to the person presenting the information. Certain facts may be left out either by choice or lack of omniscient knowledge.

The webcam, were it situated in the same person's room, is a piece of technology that allows a viewer to see someone's life. Without sound, the day to day movements are broadcast and chronicled by those who choose to observe. Intention is lost. Thought process is lost. What seems like a person lying in repose on his bed may be someone wallowing in the depths of depression or deep in philosophic thought. The webcam reveals all and yet reveals nothing.

So it can be said of learning tennis. The tools that present itself is the equivalent of the webcam. It is the video recording of tennis professionals. It offers insight into how they do what they do. You can observe, and inspect, and scrutinize. But is it enough? Do you see enough? You can't feel what the players feel. How much information are you getting?

Lately, I've been thinking about the backhand again, and in particular, the one-handed backhand. This stroke seems sufficiently different from the two hander that the thought process doesn't seem the same.

It's very easy to perceive the one-hander has a motion that is initiated by the arm. The arm is the centerpiece in the action. For the casual observer, this feels very true. The arm is the most active part of the stroke.

And yet this hides the fact that it's better to think of the stroke from the shoulders and from the chest. Let it initiate the action. Let it be the source of the movement. By focusing on that part of your body, you involve the torso, so often called, the core, into the shot and let the arm do less work and therefore get less tired. The core, once involved, can assist the shot by providing mass.

Tennis is a game of momentum, but not the kind sportscasters talk about. It's not which team is playing well at the moment and capitalizing on play after play. It is momentum of the physics variety. Mass times velocity. The more you can incorporate the core, a difficult task because the human body isn't rigid, and even if it were rigid, it wouldn't help because the other component, velocity would be lost, the more mass comes to bear.

It is a delicate dance your body must go through, at once optimizing speed by letting your body be limber enough not to slow you down, and yet also working as a whole, so that mass is your friend.

If you understand how to initiate the action with the core, then you can decrease the amount of arm you need. This is a mistake many players make because they choose to re-invent the wheel. But what choice do they have? The information is not readily available. When you learn tennis, you often start from scratch, and despite the ubiquity of the Web and access to information, there's no easy way to find a definitive answer.

It's taken me a while to fully appreciate this, and only because I read it in a forum where someone whose life has mostly been devoted to teaching tennis made the point clear. The torso initiates the one-handed backhand and for much of the hitting, the arm is just along for the ride. It does, of course, play an increasingly important role the closer you get to actually hitting the ball, but again, that interplay between torso and arm, when does one end, and the other begin?

I use words when a visual would be helpful, something that, in effect combines the blog and the webcam. The two together offering not only insight, but a visual illustration.

Given the time challenges of making a video, I will now use words, as paltry a substitute as this may be, like Velveeta for Brie, a travesty, but the best we can do under the circumstances.

Stand in the ready position, and form a U with your upper arm making one side of the U, the forearm the bottom part of the U, and the racquet pointing up, the other side of the U. Turn your body to the left, enough so that eventually your back begins to point to the net.

Using your left arm, lift the racquet so your forearm eventually gets to shoulder height. Use your left hand to lower the racquet behind you, until the racquet head points to the right side of the court (were you facing the fence, it would be to your left). The racquet is nearly completely behind you from the perspective of your opponent.

Rotate your body so the racquet travels 180 degrees around and strike the ball, then lift your arm up as if you are holding a torch for the Olympics way up high.

There are other factors to consider. How high is the ball? If it's low, you bend your knee more and stay down more. If it's high, you lift up your leg and get on your tiptoes. Different situations demand different setup.

This is what makes tennis challenging. There are many situations to take care of under the name "backhand". This is why hitting thousands of balls is needed, so the body learns how to cope with such variety. But behind all of that is the basis for the shot, the skeletal framework by which all variation sprouts from. And this is what you often need in sage advice so you make the move that the pros do, not the one that is easy to see from the eye, but the one that is felt from within.

Musings on Tennis

I look at India and find their fanatical devotion to cricket a contrast to the devotion of Americans to sports. Americans love their sports, don't get me wrong. There are plenty of passionate watchers who spend their weekends perched on sofas to watch groan men dressed in modern day gladiatorial armor, run as fast as they can to hit someone as hard as they can. And fans can be mesmerized at this, reeling off stats, exclaiming how sick a particular play was, lamenting the bone-headed play.

Still, it feels like the love of cricket is pervasive throughout India, especially among men, though women certainly enjoy it, perhaps as support of their men, much like the wives that make the trek with their husbands to a weekend college football game, even as they can hardly explain the rules of the game. They know enough to see a big play or a touchdown, and can celebrate those moments.

This pervasive love of cricket seems to stem from the lack of what I call the jock mentality. The jock culture in the US is where the athletes are heroes and make fun, that is deride those that lack athletic skills. Such kids often seek solace in geekier pleasures, whether it be computers or anime. Perhaps the love of Japanese culture is an indirect indictment of the culture of America. Anime lovers envision a world that is different from the one they grew up in and reject traditional American culture.

Indeed, such kids, having grown up with jocks have an antipathy to sports. They don't care about it, they don't watch it. Perhaps, at a minimum, they might do something that's not quite sports, like ballroom dancing, or something that doesn't involve team, such as running or hiking or biking. These pursuits are at least healthy and still reject sports as whole.

Indians don't seem to have this issue. Maybe kids are magnanimous when it comes to cricket. No matter how poorly you play, you'll be allowed to play and enjoy it. The key is having fun, and not making fun of those who play badly. You just need a few people who are willing to defend those that aren't skilled.

Or maybe it's how the whole country shuts down when an important cricket match is on, so playing cricket equates to getting out of work, so even if you don't care about cricket deeply, you like the idea that it means a respite from the daily grind.

I can't say, while I grew up, that I recognized the jock culture in our school. Perhaps it was there, but because of the way our school segregated the smart folks from the more academically challenged, I didn't encounter those folks every day.

Tennis had its heyday in the US during the 1970s. Not only did Americans dominate the 1970s with players like Jimmy Connors, Chris Evert, and John McEnroe, but there were rivalries with players from other countries, like Martina Navratilova (who became naturalized) and Bjorn Borg.

Tennis was driven in popularity during the height of the modern women's lib movement, a movement that has been squelched by a brilliant if evil counterreply by Republicans who equate feminism with lesbianism, an accusation that seems to work just as well on women, if not more so, than men. During the time, Bobby Riggs, in his 50s, and once a top player in men's tennis, challenged then, number 1, Margaret Court to a match. With his dazzling array of spins and slices, and his trash talking, poor Margaret Court got completely rattled and lost easily.

Billie Jean King, then a leader for women's tennis, knew she had no choice but to play Riggs. She played him smart, and didn't allow Riggs tactics to rattle her, and it gave such a lift to women's sports that its repercussions are felt to this day.

And it boosted the popularity of tennis like no event since Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan got whacked on the knee by hooligans hired by rival Tonya Harding in a soap opera that was too weird to be true, and yet was true.

Tennis managed a resurgence of sorts as McEnroe and Connors were finishing up their last hurrahs in the early 90s, to be replaced by the greatest group of Americans to play in quite a while. This group was lead by Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras but included Todd Martin, Michael Chang, and Jim Courier.

During this whole period, I'd go out and play tennis occasionally. The height of my tennis playing was from 1989 to maybe the mid 1990s. In those days, the best you could do to learn to play tennis better, short of taking lessons, was simply to play more. There was no Internet. The books that were out there were simplistic.

Even when the web came out, there was no YouTube. YouTube and its brethren have become a kind of second web revolution. Sure YouTube contributes a ton of crap to the general viewer, and occasionally, viral videos spread like wildfire in a dry California summer, with no apparent rhyme or reason. From the deeply baritone singing of Chocolate Rain, to the desperate pleadings to "leave Britney alone", to Charlie, the laughing baby that bites the finger of his older brother.

In all of that, you can find pretty much lessons on anything. Want to learn how to parallel park? Watch YouTube. Want to cook? Do the same? For anything you could possibly want to learn, there's some chance someone put videos up on YouTube. The quality may not be good, but it's often there.

This has lead to a minor revolution of tennis. Perhaps it's affected other sports, but I can't say for sure because I simply don't care enough about those sports to comment.

In particular, YouTube, and various pay sites have been the source of many slow motion videos of professional players giving tools to the net-savvy tennis player to inspect how the best hit tennis balls.

Although I've seen some videos dozens of times now, there are always small details that I'm missing. And there are details that are not readily visible to the eye such as a waist rotation.

I contrast playing tennis with racquetball. Racquetball is played indoors in a large room. The goal is to eventually have the ball hit the front wall. Once it does that, the opponent must also hit the front wall before the ball bounces twice. Now, you don't have to hit directly to the front wall. It can hit the side wall or ceiling or back wall first, but it must eventually make it to the front wall without hitting the ground.

Since the front wall is huge, and swinging hard or high will typically get you to the front wall, then you can play the sport with bad technique. Nearly anything you do is good enough. That moves the sport away from technique and more to strategy with the goal of trying to hit the ball so your opponent can't run it down. Because the penalty of bad technique is low, there's little incentive to improve.

Ah, but what is technique? Technique, at least as it applies to hitting sports, is how you hit. What are the mechanics of what you do to swing a racquet to hit the ball. The better your technique, the more power you get, the more accuracy, with less effort.

The key to tennis is understanding some physics. Not a lot, mind you, but a little. In physics, momentum is mass times velocity. Physics also says momentum is conserved. Though it's simplistic, this says that the momentum of one mass can be transferred to the momentum of another mass. Thus, the mass times velocity of a player hitting a ball is translated to the mass times velocity of the ball being struck.

There are two basic ways to make a ball go faster. Hit faster or hit with more mass. Now you might imagine there's no way to hit with more mass. The racquet weighs what it does. However, if you merely swing with your arm, something that seems obvious in tennis, then you will only have the mass of your arm plus the racquet behind the ball.

If you can involve your body more, that is use your torso and your legs, you can increase the mass. However, that requires timing your body movements just right so you can bring that mass to bear. This is why diminutive Chinese women can hit harder than a muscle bound guy. It's not purely about muscle, it's about using the rest of your body to bring additional mass to the momentum equation.

Not to say swinging fast isn't also important, because it is. However, the faster you swing, the more likely that you are to swing incorrectly. It can take a great deal of time before you gain enough coordination to swing fast and swing accurately so you can take advantage of the other part of the momentum equation.

Much of this is simplistic explanation because the body, the racquet are all complex masses. They aren't simple balls of steel whose behavior can be explained simply in physics. As a player, you need to think about how your body moves until muscle memory ingrains it properly.

My strokes, now that I've seen them on video, are more rigid than most. This has lead to an awkwardness in my technique, so I've spent time observing the pros trying to find someone that I can emulate.

At first, this someone was Novak Djokovic. Ah, but his motion was a bit complex. So I sought a simpler model. Roger Federer. But as it turns out, although his motion was simpler, it still had a hitch (which I won't go into). Finally, I settled on Andy Murray, world number 4, who has a simple motion I like and have been trying in the last month or so to imitate.

They say the proof is in the pudding. In this case, the proof is in the video camera. With that, I can see what I am doing and see how close I am to achieving what I want to do. If I had full time to devote to this, I might be able to get there much quicker, but alas, I have to make money to make it possible for me to pursue this lark.

As I've watched the pros and read more, I see more and more. It just takes a while to translate that to my own game.

I don't know that there is quite the equivalent of this in the intellectual world. You can't see someone thinking so much, but you can observe how someone hits a ball. And while this makes the task of imitation easier than imitating a mental genius, it is still, by no means, easy.

These days, I've been working on the beginning part of hitting a ball. This is called the takeback, or at least, I call it that.

You can break down hitting the forehand into about four parts. First is the ready position. This is a stance you take as you wait for the ball. Usually you hold the racquet grip with the right hand, the throat of the racquet with the left. As soon as you identify that it is coming to your forehand, you rotate your body to the right and eventually drop the racquet so it points to the back fence. This is called the takeback.

The takeback I am imitating requires that I lift my elbow up to shoulder height, have my upper arm and forearm at 90 degrees, causing my racquet to point up to the sky. The racquet face is pointing to the right. Then, I drop my forearm so my arm is more or less straight, all the while the racquet face points to the right.

The motion from the racquet being fully back to the moment the racquet hits the ball is called the swing-forward. Or at leas, that's what I call it. During this phase, I rotate my body to the left, hit the ball. My shoulders should be square on, that is parallel to the net or a little left.

The rest is follow-through. It is from the point of contact until the racquet is wrapped over on my left side. I continue to rotate left, arc my right arm from right to left, bend at the elbow, and let the racquet go to the left of my body.

Although the ball has long since gone, the racquet head speed being propelled by a loosely relaxed arm is so quick that the arm must continue to move before it can properly decelerate. A long follow-through means your arm doesn't slow down and cause the ball to likewise slow down. It provides a minimum speed.

When I focus on my tennis, I invariably pay the most attention to the takeback, mostly because that starts the motion up. I have spent 6 months working on that part, and it's been a long journey.

So why do I do it? I don't have a good answer for that. I believe it's a challenge between my mind and my body. I feel I can make my body do a certain thing if I work at it long enough. It's strange to think of the mind and body as adversaries. Certainly without the body going on its merry way and doing what it does without interference from the mind, we wouldn't live. And yet, the mind feels, to some extent, that it can make the body do what it wants.

That's what I feel too. I know it takes a while for the body to listen, so I try to be patient.

Perhaps it's like Buddhist monks who learn to slow their heart rates or chop bricks. If your mind really wants to do it, it can. Many people use their mind for mental pursuits such as solving equations. But it can also be used for physical pursuits.

The funny thing is the mind initially dictates what is to be done, but to get good, eventually the body must react without mental interference. The body simply knows what to do. It has ingrained its responses, and the mind directs it minimally. It is like the parent to the child.

So that's where things stand. An ongoing journey to tennis enlightenment.

Milk

Unless you've watched your fair share of American documentaries, you probably have never heard of Harvey Milk. In the last few years, the topic of gay marriage has come up. The notion that evangelicals and the right discovered this topic that appeals so strongly to the base that they will come out in droves to vote is not something that's ten years old. It dates back to the 1970s.

The anti-gay movement found an unlikely leader, one Anita Bryant, a Christian singer and promoter of orange juice. Raised a Baptist, she fought against anti-discrimination laws saying that gays did not deserve equal protection for employment. In other words, it was fine for gays to be fired for being gay.

At that point, there had been no openly gay official elected.

Harvey Milk ran as supervisor, which is a kind of city representative for several years. Although he could court the gay vote, he really needed a coalition to be successful, so he recruited union workers, the elderly, African Americans, etc. Although he ran and lost three times, the fourth time was the charm as redistricting gave him enough votes to get elected (the election used to be city wide, rather than different parts of the city voting for the person that might best represent their interests).

At the same time he was elected supervisor, so was one Dan White who grew up Irish Catholic and ran on more conservative grounds, despite living in the fairly liberal city of San Francisco. At first, Milk tried to work with White, but when he realized it was not in his interests to do so, White greatly resented what he perceived as backstabbing and chose to oppose every action Milk proposed.

White eventually resigned his position because he felt the salary he made was too little to support his family. However, the conservative police encouraged him to ask for his job back. As the sole conservative supervisor, other supervisors, including Milk begged the mayor not to give White back his job. The mayor agreed. White decided to sneak into the building through an unguarded window (even at the time, there was a metal detector to enter the facility) and proceeded to shoot and kill the mayor and then shoot and kill Harvey Milk.

White then turned himself in to the police. A sympathetic jury let him off with manslaughter, moved by his plight. He spent five years in jail. When released, he wanted to move back to San Francisco though was advised not to do so. In 1985, White killed himself through carbon monoxide poisoning in a car in his ex-wife's garage.

The film, despite my summary of history, mostly focuses on Milk, as it should.

He's not made out to be particularly saintly, but a man who feels that gays needed to be more proactive. While most gays in San Francisco were willing to let change occur slowly, Milk, who loved the publicity of campaigning took a more direct route.

The problem with telling a story like Milk is that a person's life is not easily summarized in two hours. There's a bit of a clunky voice-over, in this case, Milk reading into a tape recorder (which is based on something Milk did). Then, you have to pick and choose what events to cover, including two boy friends (the activist/politician Scott Smith and Latino, Jack Lira), and various campaign bids.

When you want to be reasonably truthful to history, then there are speeches that need to be used near verbatim. Of course, one takes a few liberties. In the film, Lira kills himself as he did in real life, but in real life, Lira had already split up with Milk though certainly still liked him.

Gus Van Sant is generally an experimental filmmaker, more so than most in mainstream filmmaking. Despite that, he occasionally makes blander fare, telling a more straight-forward story. These would include films like Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester.

Van Sant does have a few visual flourishes. At one point, Milk is running away from someone he perceives is out to attack him. To achieve this visual effect, the entire background is blurred until you just see hazy lights and the shadow of a person.

Van Sant uses his trademark "following camera" used as early as Elephant where the camera is behind a person's head as he walks down hallways, and occasionally in front of his head as he is walking. This is used when White goes to find the mayor and Milk.

Although it is a film about a gay man, the gay scenes are not particularly explicit. In particular, there are no frontal nudity scenes. Most of the scenes are usually close up kissing, usually much closer than conventionally filmed scenes.

The film has a pretty simple theme that it tries to get across. It starts when Milk complains that at the age of 40, he's not accomplished anything in his life that he's proud of. By the time he's nearing 50, he is able to get himself elected as city supervisor, which is surprising given the year is 1978, a scant 30 years ago. Despite the progress in the gay movement and the changing public perceptions, this is still very recent.

His death stirred tens of thousands of people to mourn, bringing candles out into the street.

So how was the film? Well, it is clunky in parts, because of the need to tell important parts of his life. Van Sant does what he can to keep things light and humorous and not perpetually angry.

Sean Penn does a masterful job at creating Harvey Milk. Honestly, if you wanted to get an actor that looked like Milk, you'd probably hire Hank Azaria. Penn, nonetheless, does a great job. The funny thing is that Milk didn't have a gay campy voice where Penn chooses to play him with a slight affectation, perhaps to increase the believability to the audience, who might otherwise not feel Milk was gay enough.

And there may have been a point. Perhaps Penn felt that people might like Milk more if he didn't sound gay, but that they should like him regardless. So by voicing him this way, audiences would have to accept Milk despite a potential dislike of the way he speaks (as portrayed by Penn). Or maybe he just wanted to up the level of difficulty in portraying Milk.

The other capable acting comes from Josh Brolin who plays Dan White. Early on, Milk suggests that White may have been a closeted homosexual, although this is never played up beyond that mere suggestion. Brolin captures how wired up White is, unable to make friends, wanting to do something for his constituents, feeling backstabbed by Milk who found himself wanting to help White, but feeling that he couldn't.

The good thing about historical films is what they teach you. Admittedly, this may not make for the best drama. Indeed, the acting is stronger than the plotting and pacing of the film, although the film gets stronger towards the end.

Although a lot of progress has been made in gay civil rights, the film shows, in the backdrop of today's politics, that in some respects, some things, especially scare tactics, have not changed. Where the film had a political happy ending (the defeat of Prop 6 to prevent gay teachers from teaching), real life did not match that (with Prop 8 passing).

Overall, a good well-acted film but not a great film. Good for its historical insight and even handling of the characters. B.

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