Face and Vase

There's this famous optical illusion, where you see two profiles of a face in, say, black, and a white vase. It's the positive and negative space.

Today, I both took a lesson and gave a lesson.

Last night, that is, Saturday night, the day, which had started off rainy and gloomy, a day I spent driving to Reston, taking an advanced Ruby course given by Chad Fowler and Dave Thomas that lasted until 4:30, which then gave way to a few hours of sun. When I got back up 270, I spent some time hitting against the wall.

Adam told me about the handball walls at Cabin John. Handball appears to be like racquetball, except that instead of four walls and a ceiling, there is just one wall, the front wall. This wall is about the width of a tennis court, which is apparently 27 feet wide. However, what's key is the height. The wall goes up about 15 feet high.

Tennis walls, if you can find them, often don't extend to the ground. Often, it's up maybe a foot or two from the ground, and extends maybe 4-5 feet above the "net" (it's just a painted line). Clearly, such a setup is meant to be low-cost.

Due to the lack of popularity for handball, these walls make better tennis walls than real tennis walls, with the only problem being the lack of a line demarcating the net. Although it takes about 15 minutes to get there, I like to play there since few people seem to use it to practice tennis (when I went there this morning, three guys were practicing kendo).

I called the guy up about the lesson, and it seemed like he had just woken up, so I delayed the lesson for half an hour. That was good because it allowed me to hit against the wall for more than the 15 minutes I would have had otherwise.

The problem, I find, when hitting against a wall, is that my arm gets engorged with blood, due to repeatedly hitting the ball at a pace faster than I would hit against an opponent. I need to hit a few, then rest a few, otherwise my arm because like a rock, and it's painful to boot.

During the lesson, Sharat and I went back to playing mini-tennis, with the goal of getting me to slow down my shot, and hitting it relaxed. His point, and it makes some sense to me, is if I can't hit the ball relaxed hitting it slow, then I'll be even more tense when I try to hit it hard.

Since I had been practicing this shot somewhat in the last week or so, it was better than it was before. It was such a good thing to think about, I decided it was worth taking a second lesson.

This time around, we hit from the baseline, and I was hitting more of the wrap-around forehand that you see Federer hitting. The one suggestion I was given was to not use so much wrist on follow-through, that my arm needed to follow through too.

Now, this is the kind of advice that I know because I stare at a lot of tennis video, but is really helpful, because while I may intellectually know this, I can forget this when I actually hit.

The funny thing is that I've played tennis longer than Sharat has been alive. Obviously, the quality of my tennis training has been rather inferior to his. In particular, the tennis advice you could get from more than 10 years ago didn't hit all the advice you can get now. In any case, during the last 10 years, I hadn't learned that much about tennis. Only in the last 6 months or so have I started going back to relearn tennis.

Sharat's approach is based on Wegner's approach, which is to reduce the number of things a player thinks about so they can focus on hitting and relaxation. My personal approach is very technical. I want to know where my arm, legs, waist, etc. are supposed to be. I look at videos a lot.

But videos can be deceiving.

For example, when Federer hits his forehand, he has this one odd movement. At one point, his racquet is faced down. To visualize this, imagine standing between Federer and the net, looking at Federer. When his racquet is face down, it points not quite to the fence.

If you were to draw a line between Federer, yourself, and the net, that would be parallel to the sideline. His racquet would point a little to your left of that line.

As Federer moves his arm forward, the racquet starts to point to the right of that line. It looks odd, and I was trying to imitate that little movement.

It took me a while to realize why this movement is there. It's not that Federer is changing the direction of the racquet. What's happening is that he is opening up his shoulders (i.e., moving from being parallel to the sidelines to parallel to the net).

This rotation of his torso causes the racquet to move backward, in that Newtonian, every action has an opposite reaction, effect. Once you understand that, you realize he isn't purposely moving it that way. His body rotation is causing this motion.

I only realized that on Friday.

Anyway, after the lesson, where Sharat gave me some advice on serving, I headed to College Park to teach Jeff how to play tennis.

Jeff is not an athletic sort. The extent of his athletic skills is basically ping pong. He prefers anime and video games.

Ironically enough, I thought he might make a better person to teach tennis because he wouldn't have all these other sports skills that would interfere with him learning tennis. Staney, for example, has played cricket and table tennis. He has a peculiar way of holding the table tennis bat. When he started tennis, he combined the two together.

He hit his backhand like he was playing a cricket shot, and he played his forehand like he was hitting a table tennis shot, most notably, sticking his index finger straight up on the racquet.

Jeff appears to make the kind of errors many beginners in tennis make. In particular, he tends to "arm" the ball, that is, hit the shot with his arm, rather than use his upper body. He tends to stop hitting after he has hit the ball. He tends to come underneath the ball, causing the ball to sky upwards.

Now, Jeff is an intelligent guy, who has a degree in computer science and finishing up a law degree. However, being intelligent works the brain. The body reacts differently. To learn a sport, you must train the body to move in a way that is not intuitive.

And, for most people, their body will not react the way they want it to. You tell them to hit the ball a certain way, and they hit it completely different. For a sport like racquetball, it doesn't matter. That's the kind of sport that you can have the worst technique in the world, but can play it competently and enjoyably.

Tennis, on the other hand, requires a lot of training. If you play, say, squash, you might translate the skills over. I've seen people who play table tennis that manage to translate the skills of hitting. Even people who play baseball don't do so badly.

To teach Jeff, I had him play some mini-tennis, which is where you hit from service line to service line.

Here's the issue I had. First, if I teach him part of the stroke, then he's likely to just master that, get it ingrained into his head. Therefore, I would have to teach him to add something else to his stroke, and he has to unlearn the first thing I told him, and learn the second thing I told him. The longer he spends hitting one way, the harder it is for me to try to reteach him. A video would be ideal.

Jeff had this tendency to hit the ball up, and after my short drills, he had a tendency not to pull his racquet back to the fence, so I had him shadow-stroke the shot, plus I had him finish with the racquet face pointing down. This seemed to, for the most part, help him avoid flipping the racquet up so it would sky upwards.

For the most part, other than hitting the frame of the racquet, he did all right, hitting a shot that didn't look horrible, and a motion that looked reasonably acceptable. For less than an hour's training, it was decent.

I noticed that I am far more technical when I teach someone, trying to get them to correct this shot or that shot, hold the racquet this way or that. It's a contrast to the way Sharat teaches. Now part of that is impatience on my part.

Jeff isn't that serious about learning tennis, and so I would very infrequently teach him how to play. He's likely to forget everything I said (or at least, his body is), and I'd have to go over it again.

Now, I'm sure, if I were to ask Jeff how long it would take him to learn a musical instrument, he'd say a very long time. It would take a lot of practice. Indeed, one might argue that, at least to a first degree, it's easier to learn to play a music instrument than tennis, because the instruction is there already. What's hard is to master the difficult songs.

But what is similar is the amount of time it takes, and the time it takes to learn how one should hit the shot. That kind of commitment is hard to get from folks, which is why most people learn to play sports when they are young, when they are willing to spend insane amounts of time. As an adult, they'd rather spend their time in other ways. I've only met one adult who was this kind of insane learning to play tennis, and got to a good degree of proficiency.

It probably says something that he studied martial arts and learned about discipline and body awareness, and applied these ideas to tennis.

So, that ended the day, when rain fell, and I had both been the student and the teacher.