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.