Topspin to Better Tennis

Section 1

The serve /s a throwing motion, but in what direction? Down toward the service court? Out toward the far fence? Up and forward through the ball toward some point above and to the right of the court?

In fact, the last motion is the correct one: virtually every top tennis player in the world hits up on the serve in order to impart topspin to the ball and make it come down into the proper service court with accuracy and power. But most tennis books never cover this vital point, and their readers are left to fend for themselves on the field of battle, left to wonder why that serve they so carefully hit with a throwing motion down toward the court so often goes into the net or long.

Paradoxically, the tennis book | react against most strongly when beginning students mention it is one that | personally rather like. It is the most popular tennis book of today, Tim

Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis. \n this book, Gallwey

presents an excellent discussion on the subject of how the conscious, assertive mind (Self 1) of a tennis player can get in the way of his instinctive, reactive mind’s (Self 2) ability to play that person’s best tennis. Through the course of the text many good things are said about concentration, relaxing, mental conditioning, and how an understanding of one’s inner mind as gained through tennis can extend beyond tennis into other spheres of life. All well and good.

But the primary impression left in the reader’s mind, as ex-pressed to me-by dozens of my students who read it, is that if you will only relax and “‘let it happen,’ your tennis game will suddenly improve beyond your wildest dreams. And_ this simply is not so. | am appalled at the thought of tens of thousands of people picking up this book, reading it, and then going out to just let it happen. If these people do manage to relax their “Self 1” and let ‘Self 2”’ take over the business of hitting the ball, they should indeed play up to their game’s best potential. But what if that potential is very low, due to a faulty realization of how the strokes are produced?

serve doesn’t /ook as though the racket goes up through the ball to most people, unless they happen to know that it does.) That person will relax, let it happen, and still hit his serves long or into the net.

What Mr. Gallwey says is all quite correct—relaxing the mind, letting your body play the points—but it is useless to anyone who has not already learned proper strokes.

So by all means read Mr. Gallwey’s book, but after you’ve read this one.

In the following pages | have tried to set down as accurately as possible my thoughts on the nature and mechanics of the game of tennis. | have been labeled a “‘topspin fanatic” by my students, and | warn you that this is indeed so. | also feel that every player, if he or she means to be any good at all, must put in a learning period devoted to the “‘turn-step-stroke” fundamentals of tennis before they can ever hope to “‘let it happen.”

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Tennis is war. Players enter into a battle of annihilation worthy of any pair of boxers, any pair of knights of old who rode each other down atop charging warhorses. The sport is as aggressive an encounter as can occur between two persons who remain alive and on speaking terms at the end of the confrontation.

What else is tennis but an extended attack upon your opponent? With each stroke, you are trying to do something to him: make him run until he can run no more; jam him so that he cannot swing; trick him; rush him; throw off his timing;

break his game; defeat him. A tennis match is an assault conducted in a realm of sporting allegory that allows the participants to coexist once the combat is over, even to enjoy that combat while it is underway. The winner of a tennis match leaves the court strewn with the wreckage of his opponent’s game. It is only outside the confines of the match that peace is maintained, by the traditional handshake and all it implies.

Tennis is a wonderful game because it allows our competitive instincts to come raging forth, but in an athletic situation that will not injure us, a situation so devised that human society can welcome the display of these instincts rather than strive to suppress them. The rules of tennis give the player a territory to defend, and offer him the opponent’s territory and tennis game to attack through the medium of a moving tennis ball.

The etiquette that surrounds tennis is one of the most distinctive aspects of the game, and for years—before the recent tennis boom—it caused non-players to consider tennis a sissy sport. That etiquette is so thick because of the total aggressiveness which is at the very heart of the game. Players are directed to be always courteous, truthful, pleasant, and observant of the rules, while their games are left free to hack and chop at each other with brutal intensity.

Various players are known for their blazing tempers, but such attention to the personal behavior of a player is quite beside the point of a tennis match: it is the player’s tennis game which is conducting the assault, and personal behavior is relevant only to the degree that it helps or hinders the execution of the opponent’s tennis game. ‘Murder most foul” is what any tennis match is about; ‘“‘match” implies this and the murder that occurs is that of one player’s game by another.

Watch any tennis match between good players. | mean really watch it. No matador could go in over the horns and thrust for the heart with more exuberance than the great players go about their business of winning. Think back to the Outstanding matches of the recent past, ones featuring Borg,

Connors, Nastase, Ashe, Rosewall or Laver among the men,

Evert, King or Court among the women. In every one of the matches featuring these players—in fact, in any properly played tennis match—the winners went for the kill relentlessly.

The victories scored in topflight contests come as the result of a long process during which the winners create the most devastating tennis game possible for themselves, and the courage, determination, confidence and physical strength to test that game against any other in the world. Before they go on the court, the winners of these matches energize themselves by insisting inwardly that nothing will stop them from victory—least of all the tennis games of their opponents—and then they proceed to demolish those opposing games as efficiently and relentlessly as they possibly can, within the rules of tennis.

The weapon these players use in their assault against their opponents is not so much their racket or the tennis ball as the tennis game which directs each of these. The great players have internalized a complete set of automatic responses to any court situation which may occur in.a match, acquiring these responses through years of learning, practice, and competition. Because of these automatic responses, the world’s best players will tend, without thought, to hit the best possible shot in the most effective way out of any situation in which they find themselves:

it is this ability which makes them the world’s best. They have absorbed, over the years, a complete understanding of the angles and percentages open to them on any shot, and they routinely use this knowledge with deadly and unthinking efficiency to beat down their less able opponents.

It is a reasonable thing for anyone who plays tennis to decide that they would rather win than lose when they play.

Winning, after all, is fun—usually more fun than losing—and since someone has to win, it may as well be you. The very fact of keeping score implies a competitive situation, and it is this competitive clash that makes tennis so enjoyable.

If you decide that you would like to improve your game in order to win more often then you must strive to develop at least some of the automatic responses that make the best players so formidable. You must learn how to produce the most effective strokes possible. Then you must hone those strokes and your understanding of how to use them, through practice and play, to the point that your tennis game will prove superior to the games of your opponents.

The goal of this book is to serve as a whetstone to sharpen the cutting edge of your game, to give you a weapon equal to the assaults you may face on the tennis court. A principle of stroke production—topspin—is presented, with suggestions on how to go about learning it, and how you should use your strokes in competitive situations.

Topspin is the single most prevalent characteristic in the attacking games of all the top players in the world today, and you simple cannot hope to compete efficiently without it. The competitive aspect of tennis is a joyous reality, but you will be unable to partake fully of that reality until you develop a weapon—your tennis game—that is capable of dealing with those of the competitors you find around you. Topspin can help you create such a weapon.

“Two things will help you develop more power. One is learning the fundamentals and being well grounded in them. The other is learning to execute topspin.

“The only way you can effectively and consistently hit the ball hard (on your groundstrokes especially) is to put a little topspin on the ball. Topspin is the fundamental, basic stroke. The good players over the years always have hit with topspin— not with an excessive amount, but enough to put great power into the stroke and to keep the ball deep to the opponent.

“If you want to be an offensive player, and that’s pretty much what the power strokes are all about, you have to become a topspin hitter. If you want to play defensively, then do whatever you want. Kick the ball, if you think that will work. A good defensive player will always be beaten by a good offensive player.”

The great player is on the run, rushing to head off his opponent’s wicked shot. Then comes a ripping swing, and the crowd erupts as the ball bullets away for a winner.

“Fantastic shot!”’ the announcer says. ‘‘What a great topspin drive he pulled out from that impossible situation.”

Turn on the television and listen for five minutes to almost any well-played tennis match; you are sure to hear some reference to topspin. Topspin is as ubiquitous in topflight tennis today as long pants and skirts were 50 years ago. Topspin allows the pros to hit the hardest shots they possibly can and still keep those shots in the court. Topspin guides the delicate passing shot, letting it sneak over the net and then dip down before the opponent can close on it. Topspin is what allows adventuresome pros to hit full-drive lobs that still manage to come down inside the opponent’s court before bounding over the back fence. Watch film clips of the great players hitting groundstroke winners. Those winning shots were hit with topspin.

Unfortunately, it is possible for a beginner to take dozens of lessons from a variety of tennis pros and never hear a word about topspin. If the neophyte hears about topspin at all it will probably be through television or in conversation with other beginners, who use the term as though it describes some impossibly difficult and secret technique better players employ to keep beginners at bay.

In fact, the student should hear about topspin before he or she ever hits a ball. It is virtually impossible to hit a tennis ball without imparting some sort of spin to it, so that spin might as well be topspin. The strokes most pros teach—‘‘Turn, step, swing forward and up to a nice high finish”—are meant for topspin. But if they never say that the aim on the ground strokes is to roll the ball forward as it travels down the court, the student may never realize that this is the goal. He may never master topspin.

Topspin on the ground strokes, and a variation of it on the serve, is the best way to propel a tennis ball from one end of a court to the other in an effective, aggressive, and consistent manner. This is true no matter what your level of play...

With topspin, you have access to the greatest possible area of your Opponent’s court. And you can deliver the ball to all points of that area with power, if you wish to use it. But topspin shots need not necessarily be hit at a thousand miles an hour. Gentle shots hit with topspin can also be productive as the ball dips and dives and sneaks past your opponent. Topspin produces an efficient shot, requiring a minimum of effort to produce a well-hit, accurate ball, and even medium-paced swings will produce excellent results. No matter what your level of play, a drop of topspin added to the brew of your strokes will improve the flavor of your tennis game.

Topspin is not the easiest skill to learn. If it were, many more of the 30 million Americans who play tennis would be outstanding. But players who do not use topspin are, for the most part, hoping that their opponents will miss. Players who have learned the art of topspin will have the firepower to make their opponents miss. And once you have topspin in your arsenal of shots, you will discover that you not only possess an enhanced shotmaking capability, but also a new psychological perspective on the game which players without topspin do not, and cannot, have.

Before going on, we must arrange for some common terms when talking about a moving tennis ball. Looking down the court, what | call the back of the ball is what we see as it approaches. The front of the ball is around the other side, and it will lead the way down the court after we hit the ball.

This viewpoint from behind the court is different from what a player would actually see as he hits the ball, since at that instant the player would be standing to the side of the ball, rather than behind it. Actually, we are looking at the ball the way the racket strings would see it just before impact. These points on the ball will remain the same regardless of how the ball is spinning.

Now we are going to shift our viewing position to the side, so that we see what a player would see when hitting the ball, but the labels remain the same, as though we were still viewing the ball from the rear of the court.

If you could strike the ball absolutely flat on the back, with the force of the racket moving on a perfect line through the exact center of the ball, you would produce a true “‘flat” shot.

It would go away from you without any spin whatsoever, in a straight line, with only gravity pulling it down.

If you lower the point of contact from the back of the ball to a point down toward its bottom, but still have the force of impact moving directly through the center of the ball, you would again produce a “‘flat” shot. But this one would sail up into the air in a high parabola before gravity brought it back to earth.

Topspin is a combination of parts from each of these actions. To produce topspin, you hit the back of the ball, as in the first example, with a vertical racket face. But the racket (and the force of impact) moves at an angle, upward and forward, as in the second example. The result is a ball that is “topped,” the line of force now passing above the center of the ball.

A ball stroked in this manner will leave the racket in an upward direction because the line of force drives it that way. But it will also be spinnning—rolling forward—as the ball travels away from the hit, and this spin will cause the ball to dive back toward the court. This, then, is all there is to topspin. By lifting the racket face forward and up through the ball while hitting, and at the same time keeping that racket face fairly vertical, you produce a shot that at first rises into the air, and then dives back toward the court. And these are excellent characteristics to have on your ground strokes, since they must get over at least three feet of net before plunging back into your opponent’s court. With topspin on your shots you can drive the ball high over the net for safety while hitting it as hard as you can, and still bring that ball safely down into the opposite court. In effect, the user of topspin plays against an opponent whose court slants back and up from the net, offering a target like a wall. No other spin can produce such a target, and underspin (the opposite of topspin) in effect drops the opposing court down away from you, offering the most difficult target of all.

The reason the ball behaves the way it does when you hit it with topspin was first explained by Daniel Bernoulli in 1738. With 150 years of forethought, Bernoulli knew that tennis players would want to know why spin affects a tennis ball the 14 way it does, so he devised his theorem: the pressure in a fluid decreases as its velocity increases. Air is a fluid, and when a tennis ball is hit down the court it gives a velocity to the air passing by. If the ball is also spinning as it flies forward, it drags a film of air along with it, thus creating different air speeds on different sides of itself. The result is a difference of pressure on the ball from the air it passes through, and that pressure causes the vall to dip in flight. If you hit with topspin, you are asking air pressure to help you drive the ball back down toward the court, while if you hit with underspin, you are creating a pressure that will help hold the ball up.

The amount of. topspin applied to a ball depends on how the ball is struck. For example, if the racket’s line of force strikes the ball at a steep angle, the amount of topspin will be greater.

If the racket is swung on a flat plane through the hit, climbing only a little while the ball remains on the strings, a ‘‘flatter”’ shot (with less topspin) is produced. If the climb of the racket is very steep, much more topspin results. The shot will climb and dive more sharply, with less forward momentum. There is a range of possibility in the relationship between the amount of force moving the ball down the court and the amount that generates topspin: these forces vary according to how the racket drives through the ball. And the player must gain control of

Low drive Sharply dipping shot this entire range of possibility, because he needs all of it to produce the various shots of tennis, such as the flatter, driving ground stroke, the quickly dipping ball needed to pass a player at net, and the offensive lob. Each of these shots carry topspin, but in varying degrees. All of them benefit from the effect of air pressure pressing them back down toward the court after they clear the net.

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The opposite of topspin is underspin. Many players who pick up a racket and take a swing at the ball for the first time often hit down at it, and underspin is the result. The racket face is opened—tilted up toward the sky to get the ball over the net— and it slides under the bottom of the ball, producing backspin.

(The line of force from the impact passes below the center of the ball.) With a little practice, the players who hit this way will adjust their racket faces correctly, and the underspin shots will begin to land in the court.

There is a danger with underspin, however. If you don’t hit the underspin shot too hard, you can clear the net by a comfortable margin and still have this ball land in the court as well.

Putting backspin on the ball makes it want to climb against gravity—air pressure holds it up—but if you hit gently enough the climb dies and gravity pulls the shot back into the court. As you become more and more aggressive, however, and begin to hit harder, you will find that you have to bring your underspin shots lower and lower toward the net in order to keep them from sailing long. But this will increase your chances of hitting the net.

Even the underspin shots that do make it into play have drawbacks. The shot not only tends to sail instead of dipping back toward the court, but also it tends to be slower than if it were hit with topspin.

Because of these characteristics, a player at net has a fraction of a second longer to intercept an underspin passing shot. And if the man at net does get to the shot, the ball will be higher above the net than if it had been “topped.”’

In other words, underspin shots will bother an aggressive opponent less than topspin ones. With topspin, you can dip the ball down on your opponent’s side of the net, forcing him to volley up. You can hit sharper angles successfully as well, because the topspin shot will dip down toward the line, while the underspin shot keeps on sailing.

Of course, no player hits every single ground stroke with topspin. There are some situations where you would choose to hit with underspin, such as when you hit a backhand approach shot down the line to your opponent’s forehand, keeping the ball low, or when you want to drop a ball just over the net, bringing your opponent in. There are other times, as when you face such a big serve that you can do nothing other than block or chop it back, when topspin gives way to simply getting the ball into play. But in all situations except those where you actually need underspin (i.e., that backhand approach) topspin would produce better results if you could manage to employ it. In other words, the more you can train yourself to hit with topspin, the better results you will have.

Perhaps the saddest sight in tennis occurs when youngsters who are successful in the 10s, 12s and 14s with undercut shots find themselves eaten up alive in the 16s and 18s by opponents who have learned to hit with topspin. These youngsters have received good results with their undercut shots, winning through consistent placement against opponents without the size or strength to defend themselves. But this changes in the later

Please take careful note of how simple it is to produce topspin. In all of the foregoing, there is no mention of “turning the racket face over the ball,’”’ ‘“coming over the top of the ball,”’ or any other sort of involved motion. People struggle and struggle to make the production of topspin much more complicated than it actually is, and get miserable results for their reward. If you don’t think topspin is simple, look back at the diagram of how it is produced: a vertical (or near vertical) racket face moves forward and up through the ball on impact. Period.

Like any functional device, a topspin ground stroke is clean, simple and logical.

Someday, you may be on the run, rushing to head off your Opponent’s wicked shot down the line, aware of his closing in on the net. But the hours you have spent making the topspin ground strokes automatic will fill you with complete confidence.

There comes a ripping swing, and the crowd erupts as your shot bullets away for a winner.

Memorable moments come in tennis when a player instantly analyzes the unfolding situation, intuitively perceives how best to attack the opposition, and then produces that attack flawlessly. There is no thought; there is only a reaction to the situation at hand.

Such moments happen in an instant, but they are the end product of enormous amounts of careful learning and intensive, thoughtful practice. One must learn tennis before one plays it, after all.

It is important that you understand clearly how a person learns, because only you can teach yourself tennis. A common mistake is believing that any tennis pro or instructional book can teach tennis to you. They can show you the best way to go about learning, and the best strokes to devote that learning process to. However, you must understand the strokes, you must put in the hours, you must guide your body and you must strive to develop your strokes to their greatest potential.

Good tennis players move and hit effortlessly because everything they do happens automatically, without interfering conscious thought. These players have moved beyond the mechanics of hitting. They can devote themselves fully to the question of where to hit the ball rather than how to hit it. For the most part even that “‘where” is not thought out, but rather is a grooved, instinctive reaction to situations faced and solved a thousand times before. The good players play automatically. Their conscious minds may be offering encouragement or making plans between points, but mostly their minds are quiet while play is going on.

Can you play in this automatic way, similar to the world’s top players? Yes, without any question at all. The human body has an amazing talent for doing complex sets of motions automatically. And, happily, our bodies are very bright at learning new sets of motions, if you will just help it to learn in a reasonable way. If you can learn to tie your shoes, sign your name or drive your car, then surely you can learn to stroke a tennis ball correctly. The only things needed are time, understanding and application.

Different persons learn tennis at different rates, and sometimes one person may require varying amounts of time to master the individual strokes. Often, the reason for such varied learning rates is the amount of data students have in their minds about how. to move their bodies. Some people have never engaged in ball sports involving hand-eye coordination, and these people take longer to learn such a sport than people who have developed these skills. The non-players not only have to absorb the specifics of tennis, they must also learn a large amount of more general knowledge about how their bodies perform.

The best student | have ever taught, in the sense of how quickly she picked up the strokes, was a young girl of 16 who had studied ballet for over 10 years. | explained each stroke and demonstrated them in turn. Then | asked her to try. She reproduced them all, perfectly, on the very first try. This girl, who had played almost no tennis before in her life, advanced in 10 minutes to a point many people never reach in years. It was quite an experience.

The source of this young woman’s astounding performance lay in her training for ballet: because of those years, Jane had a beautiful control of all of her body, from the top of her head to the tips of her toes.

Most of us, unfortunately, have not had this kind of training. Our bodies are not fully under our command. Additionally, they are not programmed to learn new physical motions quickly and efficiently, as a dancer’s body is. We face not only the task of learning what the tennis strokes are, but also the problem of getting our bodies to produce the strokes when we finally comprehend them.

For most people, learning a physical sport such as tennis takes time—time to understand what the sport and its techniques are all about, and time to train the body to produce the required movements, smoothly and automatically. That time can be cut dramatically, however, if the student understands the learning process.

Two analogies come to mind to describe the learning process in tennis. One is that of an empty computer filling itself with data, the other is of somebody starting to cut a board with a Saw.

If you are new to tennis, your mind is like a computer without any data specifically relating to tennis on its tapes. You may have a good deal of information concerning how you go about moving your body, perhaps a fair amount on catching, throwing and hitting things. Or, if you play tennis but have developed faulty strokes, your computer has a great deal of material about tennis in it, but portions of that information are incorrect, and ineffective. In either case, you must work to gather correct data on how to produce effective tennis strokes, as well as information, in the second case, on why the strokes you have developed are incorrect. With this information in hand, you can set about printing a new control tape, through practice, where the motions of your body match your information about sound stroke production.

Now for the second analogy. When you begin to saw a piece of wood, the blade sometimes skitters over the top of the board, moving aimlessly from side to side. But if you make a determined effort to hold the saw on the proper spot, you get the cut started. After that, the blade stays in its own groove.

“Grooving” a tennis stroke follows a similar sequence. At first, the instructions to your brain go skittering about over its surface, producing almost random body motions. This continues until you make an effort to narrow things down, to control your stroke, and imprint on your brain the correct motion you want your body to perform. As the correct motion is re-peated, the groove in your mind deepens, and as that happens, it becomes easier and easier to repeat the motion smoothly and accurately. After sufficient repetitive practice, the motion becomes yours, something that you can produce automatically.

Unfortunately, an old, ineffective habit can have just as deep a groove as a correct, effective one. No matter how much you may wish to change this stroke, as soon as you have a ball coming at you in play you will go on “‘automatic”’ and define your swing by that old groove. Until you do the work to create a new groove, the old groove is the only one you have. To replace an old stroke with a new one it is necessary to create a new groove at least as deep as the old one, so that when you go on automatic in the face of an oncoming shot, you will produce the correct set of motions rather than the wrong set. Many players can quickly duplicate proper strokes under ideal practice conditions, but far fewer apply themselves to the repetitive practice routines that are needed to make a stroke automatic under all conditions, including play.

Luckily, you can form a new groove with less time and effort than it took to create the old one. As soon as you hit a single ball in an easier, more effective way, you will feel it instantly, and positive feedback will speed the learning process greatly. Correct tennis strokes feel good, almost effortless, and if you can hit just one, you are well along the road toward more correct play. If you can hit one shot correctly, you can hit a million. You can then deepen that groove through repetition. When you hit that first ball correctly you will have located the spot for the new groove in your mind.

Learning a new stroke also requires relaxation. Be easy. Don’t panic. No one is asking you to throw out your old strokes (bad as they may be) and reduce yourself to naked impotence in the face of your tennis enemies. Undoubtedly, while you are acquiring your new weaponry, it will be those old strokes that continue to do battle for you. Think instead in terms of adding new strokes to your repertoire. You must relax about the learning process—welcoming new ideas about how to produce tennis strokes and enjoying what your body does with those ideas—because you can’t learn if you are filled with stress.

And | will announce at this point one hateful but unavoidable truth: You are going to miss a lot of shots before you are done. You are going to miss every time you try something new.

You are going to flub shots you hit perfectly against the backboard or ball machine when you try to show them off to your spouse, tennis friends, or worst of all, your tennis enemies. You are going to have embarrassing moments, “‘off’’ days, and times when you are going to wish you’d never tried the game. In a word—you are going to lose. All of these bad things are going to happen to you, without fail. They have happened to everybody, even to Laver, Connors, Borg and Evert. All of the world’s great players missed before they began making the shots for which they are famous. But they all persevered through the low points of their tennis education. So can you.

In short, you are allowed to miss while learning. In fact, you are expected to miss. Very quickly, though, if your persevere, you will emerge on the far side of the learning process with strokes that are effective, and very much under your control.

Learning a new stroke requires thought, then thought and practice, then practice and play. You must prepare yourself to sneak up on a new stroke one step at a time.

1) You must understand what you are trying to do. |n the case of a topspin forehand, for example, you must realize exactly what you are trying to produce: a shot with a forward roll on the ball. Through reading this book, or instruction from a pro, or through watching and talking with other players, you must gain an understanding of the sort of stroke that produces topspin. When you watch good players play, really watch, so that you will see how clean and neat the required stroke actually is.

2) Get your body to duplicate the stroke you can now visualize in your mind. Standing anywhere, but preferably away from the tennis court, alone, and in front of a mirror, you must practice the swing until your racket duplicates exactly the motion you now know to be correct for the forehand.

In this second stage of learning, with a mirror or reflective window for reference, you are working to get in tune with your body, to realize exactly how the correct stroke motion will feel.

3) Apply your correct stroke to a ball. Toss a ball up with your left hand, underhand. It should bounce to your right, far enough forward so that it will still be out ahead of you after you pivot and step forward. (You can make it simpler by standing sideways to the net to begin.) Toss the ball high enough so it will bounce twice, in the same place, while you get ready. Then use your correct stroke when the ball is at the top of its second bounce, about waist high or a bit lower. Having hit the ball, don’t worry about whether or not you’ve hit it well. At this point, you are just trying to produce a good swing, and to see the effect it has on the ball.

Having hit the ball, you learn about your swing by observing the results accurately. How did the ball spin as it flew away from you? This indicates whether or not you have hit with topspin. Was the flight of the ball too high—did it go long out of the court? Or too low—did it go into the net? This tells you how open or closed your racket face was. Did the ball feel easy on the strings as you stroked through it, or did it clunk off the racket or turn the racket in your hand? This is the signal for whether or not you hit the ball in the middle of the strings.

Having noted all this information, try the stroke again; and again. Try to produce smooth, flowing stokes that carry the ball nicely over the net, but if something goes wrong don’t panic or criticize yourself. You are simply gathering data. The information will come flowing in if you observe it accurately, and it will come from mishits as well as fine drives.

4) Concentrate on keeping the shape of your stroke correct, and apply it to a moving ball. Have someone toss balls to you gently, so you can hit the balls easily. They should be tossed underhand, high enough so they will bounce and set up nicely for your stroke. Always use the correct swing—a complete, full one—even if you miss the ball with it at first. At this stage, hitting the ball over the net still isn’t as important as learning to produce the correct, topspin-producing swing in response to an approaching ball. Make sure that you stroke through the ball 24 rather than making any attempt to hit at it. You are producing a full swing that the ball gets in the way of, not simply trying to poke at it with the racket.

Analyze the results. Look at the outcome of each swing, and think about it. Tennis strokes are very logical in their construction. You can easily figure out what has gone wrong with a missed shot if you understand the mechanics of the stroke. Far too many people regard successful tennis strokes as elements of black magic, which is sad. When you do miss a shot, as you will, it is absolutely useless to say “That was rotten,” or worse,

“That was rotten;!’ll never get this.”’ It is much more reasonable to say “The ball clunked off the racket and it went into the net, although it did have topspin. | must have swung correctly, but | hit the ball off-center and with a closed racket face.’’ The elements of the strokes are quite separate, so that you can produce a correct swing and still hit a bad shot due to being off-center, too early or late on the ball as it moves past you, or swinging with an open or closed racket face. If you recognize the element which contributed to your missed shot, it is much easier to correct the next swing.

5) Rally with someone. Get a good player, or hire a pro, to hit gently with you. You could have him volley for control, with all the shots directed to the stroke you wish to work on. Spend about 15 minutes trying to gently rally with just that one stroke, go on to something else, then come back to it for another 15 minutes.

6) Try hitting with more pace, using all of the court. Again, after warming up, concentrate on just one stroke at a time for about 15 minutes. At this stage you are not trying to overpower the ball, but just to increase the pace smoothly and solidly. As you rally, try to get control of direction and depth.

(These elements are covered in Chapt. 7.) At all times, make sure you are hitting the shot with topspin, rather than just swatting at it carelessly. If you are to learn, you must produce the correct stroke time and again, and you must maintain the form of that stroke correctly while rallying.

7) Play. \deally, you will have practiced enough that by the time you reach this stage the stroke involved will be functional, and you won’t have to think about it to produce it. Usually, however, people don’t spend enough time practicing a stroke, so the learning process continues into play. If you are in this situation, but want to play anyway, set up matches with people you know you can beat, or friends you don’t mind losing to, and practice producing the stroke correctly throughout the match. You may even “run around” other strokes to insure practice with the stroke you want: you’ve got to use that stroke if you are going to gain command of it.

If you find yourself reluctant to use a new stroke for fear of losing, at least force yourself to alternate the correct stroke with whatever old stroke your body wishes to employ: use one stroke exclusively until you lose a point, switch to the other stroke until you again lose a point, and then switch back to that first stroke. \f you can get yourself to do this you will quickly put in enough playing practice on the new stroke to make it a confident and automatic part of your game. But do be sure to force yourself into some such practice routine as this for playing. Otherwise, you may become a member of that large group of people who take lessons, or work on their own for years to learn new strokes, are successful at learning to produce them on the lesson court or in practice situations, but never get around to using them in actual play.

As you progress from one step to another, you may find it harder to duplicate what you’ve managed to do earlier, at an easier stage. At this point you must back up to an earlier step, repeat it, then try the harder one again.

Throughout this process you should refrain from making value judgements about your new strokes, as long as you under-

Stand and agree with the reasons for trying to produce the strokes in a new way. Grabbing a number out of the air, | would say that you must correctly hit at least 4000 balls— probably many more—on any stroke, in practice, before you can have any real command over that stroke. Before those 4000-plus balls are hit you will have to think your way through the stroke, and as a consequence it may feel artificial and awkward, for a while. Don’t worry about how the stroke is going, just keep at it. It will come.

| can’t emphasize enough how important it is that you realize the very great difference that exists between the meaning of the word “practice” and the word “play.” Nothing kills a tennis instructor more than the following, all-too-common conversatjion:

Instructor to student whose service toss is off, week after week: “How much did you practice the toss on the serve this

Student, happily: “Oh, quite a lot. | played two sets every day.” If the tennis pro doesn’t scream at this point, the student is lucky.

As far as stroke production and its mastery is concerned, playing is not practicing. Too many things become involved when you play—‘‘What’s the score; Am | going to win? What if | lose? How can he hit that net cord everytime? Wow, look at that sharp girl/great guy watching me.’’ You can’t concentrate in the way that you must if you wish to perfect a new stroke. And if you do manage to concentrate on that new stroke, you won't be able to play. So separate the two activities. If you have two hours a day to devote to tennis, and if you really want to learn, you will spend half that time practicing, the other half playing. During the practice portion of your time you will repeat the strokes over and over again, trying to hit each one as perfectly as you can, one after another, concentrating on the feel of the racket, the way the ball is responding, whether or not you are in fact repeating the correct motion. If you find you are not being successful in this, you will stop whatever drills you are doing, go over the stroke, get it right without the ball, then go back to trying to use it against the ball.

Then, when you go to play, just play. Forget all about stroking if you can. Just relax, and concern yourself with where you want the ball to go, rather than with the mechanics of hitting it there. If you practice enough, the proper strokes will emerge in your play. At that point your computer will have enough data to produce the strokes smoothly and automatically. The strokes will emerge sooner in your play if you relax about them and just let them happen. . . after you have drilled them into yourself in your practice sessions! By all means play as well as practice, but try not to confuse the two. If you do, the learning process will be much longer than necessary.

For speed of learning, it would be best for you to recruit another student at your level of ability. Set up a practice schedule during which time each tries to help the other as much as possible: taking turns throwing balls, rallying, discussing what the strokes look like and so on. Make your practice sessions a regular part of your week; at least three sessions a week, preferably more, in addition to your playing time. Your goal is to really nail down your strokes to make them as automatic and correct as possible.

If you cannot find a practice partner, don’t dispair and don’t give up. Dropping and hitting balls yourself, rallying against a wall or backboard, practicing the strokes without a ball in your living room or backyard, all of this can help you learn the game, as long as you perform these sessions regularly. On rainy days, too, or days when you can’t play, make sure you still practice the strokes at least to the extent of swinging your racket properly. All of these actions are sources of input, and they all aid in learning proper stroke production.

For most people, with limited time, it is better to break up the available practice time into smaller units rather than have it come all at once. For example, if you are working on the serve and you have an hour and a half each week to devote to it, practice for three half hour units, spread out through the week, rather than in one hour-and-a-half session. There is a point of diminishing returns in the practice of any stroke, beyond which your body is largely numb to any further learning. Quite often time off between practice sessions can be as useful as the time spent practicing; your mind will work on the strokes without you being aware of the process.

If you could graph a tennis student’s development, the line of the graph would show a series of plateaus and slopes up to the next higher plateau, rather than any sort of continuous climb in ability. You the learner are going to work and work, perhaps without being able to see any progress, then one day you will wake and suddenly be much better at the strokes you were learning. Then will come more work, and another sudden jump.

Because of this you must resolve to keep on trying, pressing to get better, no matter how much your game seems to stay the same. Otherwise, you will never get to that next plateau, which might be just a day or two away if you keep on going.

At times, learning is like isometric exercise. You push against an immovable object, see nothing happening, but get stronger in the process. Many people have managed to learn tennis. They went through exactly the same learning process you will have to go through, and they emerged successfully on the far side of it.

So will you.

Finally, anger has no place at all in the learning process. If you miss a shot, relax, try to recall the characteristics of the missed shot, and from them figure out what corrections need to be made in your swing to make the next one better. Usually, rage over a missed shot simply slows the learning process. Anger is most common among youngsters (of all ages), and is usually displayed to tell all the surrounding world—which really couldn’t care less—that the angry player is actually much better than the missed shot suggests.

If anger has any value in tennis, its use is to get extra adrenalin pumping during match play, producing greater effort and concentration. However, few players can control their anger to such a pinpoint end. Cliff Richey and Pancho Gonzales are two of the very few examples available. For all the rest, anger simply shatters concentration and leaves their tennis games in shambles. As for learning and practice, these are both rational pursuits, and anger has no place in either operation. The learning se-

1) Understand what you are trying to do. 2) Get your body to duplicate the strokes as visualized in your mind.

3) Apply your correct stroke to a ball. 4) Continue to keep the correct shape of your stroke and hit moving balls.

5) Rally with someone. 6) Hit with more pace, rallying the length of the court, practicing the stroke so that it will become grooved in your mind.

7) Play.

In pursuing this learning process, if you also are pursuing tennis excellence for yourself, you face quite a bit more than just flitting through each stage as quickly as you can and hurrying on to the next. If you mean to be an excellent tennis player, you are trying to construct not only serviceable strokes, but ones that will stand up against any sort of pressure your opponents may throw against them. You are constructing the weapons of tennis, and you will want them to be smooth, automatic and flawless. For your strokes to have these characteristics you must work until they are letter-perfect. And then keep on working. It would astound most weekend players to really watch a group of tennis pros at practice, especially if those pros are ones on the way up, trying to gain that little edge of excellence that will move them closer to the top. These players will practice a single shot—say, a backhand down the line—for hours. Every single ball they hit may be perfect, but they sti// practice. They want to make that stroke’s groove so solid that nothing, not even match point against a great player at Wimbledon, can possibly prevent them from producing that shot perfectly, one more time.

In such combat sports as boxing or fencing, a player may lose a bout simply by assuming an incorrect ready position at the outset, giving the opponent an opening through which to attack.

It is the same in tennis.

The ready position for tennis is the solid neutral base that gives you, the player, the best chance to get to any shot your

Opponent may hit. | call this position ‘‘neutral’”’ because you must be ready for any shot that may come from your opponent without favoring one area of your court over another. You can’t hedge too far one way or another, or you may find yourself trapped for time when your opponent hits to the other side on which you are not ready.

To assume the ready position, hold your racket in front of you, the top of its head pointing down the court. The pressure of your grip on the handle should be that of a calm handshake:

any tighter and your whole arm will be tight, unable to swing smoothly and easily. (If your racket turns on contact with the

The ready position requires bent knees, heels off the ground and eyes on the ball.

ball, you don’t need a tighter grip. You need to hit the ball in the center of the strings.) Your knees will be slightly bent for balance and stability, and they should stay bent through the stroke. Your weight should be forward, on the balls and toes of your feet, so that your heels are just off the ground. Your feet are also apart, a bit wider than your shoulders, so that you can pivot on one foot or the other when a shot comes toward you.

The ready position involves more than body position, however. Perhaps the most important aspect of the ready position has to do with your eyes: you must watch the ball. \n the ready position, and at all times during a tennis point, you must watch the ball intently, excluding everything else. Do not watch the opponent as he or she hits the ball: it will take you 10-20 feet of ball travel to focus accurately on it again. (Ever have the feeling that your opponent’s shots are leaping at you out of nowhere, especially when he serves? You are not watching the ball accurately and continuously.) Do not take a look at the area where you plan to drive your shot. The court is not going to move, and your computer knows where it is without your eyes looking at it. Just watch the ball! This can’t be stressed enough. |

Watch only the ball as your opponent is about to hit it. If you watch the whole oppotime trying to focus on the ball again after the hit.

The ball is the only thing in tennis that gives you any worthwhile information during the point. If you focus on it, and adjust your eyes smoothly as it moves-up and down the court, you will see enough of what your opponent is doing with your peripheral vision to keep track of him and his intentions. Try to focus on the ball so tightly that you can see how it is spinning. Try to watch it clear into your racket strings. (You may not actually see the hit—it all happens very fast—but try anyway.) Watch the ball so intently that your mind can do nothing else.

Your ready position and ball watching will do little good, however, if you do not place yourself at the right spot on the

Hitter Hitter court in which to be effectively ready. Most people, when asked, say that they always try to get back to the center of the court after they have hit a ball, to get ready for the next. This is nota bad practice, but it is not totally correct.

You must assume the ready position in the middle of your opponent’s possible angles. This is the key to court positioning!

If your opponent contacts the ball at the center of his baseline, a ready position behind your own center mark would be quite correct. Standing there, you will be equally ready to get any of his possible shots. But if your opponent is hitting from either his forehand or backhand sidelines, for example, and you are standing at the center of your court, you are now quite out of position. Your opponent can hit down the line—the sideline defines one of his possible angles—or wide crosscourt, conceivably hitting to about where your service and sideline meet. If you stand in the middle of your court you are much closer to the shots down the lines than you are to the equally possible crosscourts. You are out of position.

To be ready you must position yourself in the middle of your opponent’s possible angles. Have somebody stand at the other end of the court and move from one side to another as though they are hitting shots. After each change of position look at the court, and figure out what angles your opponent could reasonably hit. Mark each side of the angle by placing balls in line with your baseline. Then stand midway between the two balls. This is the correct position to assume during play. Notice that as your opponent moves further to the side of his court, you will have to move further, but not as far to the opposite side of your court, in order to split in half the area you must cover.

Of course, in actual play your opponent may not be able to hit one or the other of his possible shots. If you discover this to be true (you learn by watching your opponent carefully during the warmup and first few points, to see what he can and can’t hit), you can slightly favor the side he consistently hits to. But don’t get trapped into trying to guess, out of habit. Good players command all the shots, and can hit to any point of your court they want to. Against better players, your end of the court will suddenly seem much larger as they consistently hit to the side you are not covering properly. So train yourself to split the possible angles before they hit.

Also notice how the idea of the “middle of the possible angles” helps determine your proper position at net. Have you ever noticed how, when the pros are at net, they will often stand off to one side of the court or the other, rather than over the center line? They are simply setting up in the middle of their opponents’ possible angles.

Imagine yourself at net, playing an opponent hitting from his right (forehand) sideline, in the backcourt. If you stand in the middle of your opponent’s possible angles you will find yourself to the left of your centerline. Yet you actually have your whole court covered. The point at which your opponent can get the ball by you the quickest is down your backhand line. But you are standing closer to that side when you are in the middle of the possible angles, so you don’t need as much time to reach your opponent’s shot on that side. You have left more court open on your forehand side, but you have a bit more time to reach a shot there because it must travel a longer distance before it gets past you. You are asking your opponent to “thread the needle’? when you position yourself correctly in the middle of his possible angles while at net, and very often he will prove unequal to the task.

Finally, face your opponent when you are getting ready.

Your feet should be perpendicular to the line that splits your opponent's possible angles. On service return, for example, many people stand with their feet on or lined up with their baseline. Yet the serve will be coming at them from an angle across the net, not straight down the court. Consequently, these players are cramping their stroke on one side in getting ready this way.

So, you have your ready position and are standing in the middle of the possible angles. The ball approaches, and now you have to return it.

You must move from the ready position the instant your eyes tell you where your opponent’s shot is going. If the ball comes toward you, so that you don’t have to run for it, the proper preparatory sequence is: turn, step, stroke. Turn toward the side the ball is coming toward, pivoting on the foot nearest the line of flight of the ball, with the knees slightly bent; step forward, parallel to the ball’s line of flight, so your weight is well into the shot; stroke through the ball. The turn gets your racket back and your body around, enabling you to produce the stroke.

You should be turned before your opponent’s shot from the backcourt crosses the net. You can check this whenever your opponent hits a shot into the net: is your racket back?

Also, make sure that you pivot on the foot nearest the bail, rather than stepping back with it: you want to attack the ball, not retreat as it comes at you.

On the turn, your shoulders and arms shifting as a unit do most of the work of getting the racket back. From the ready position, facing forward, you will find that your racket will have covered half of its entire backswing if you simply turn your shoulders to one side or the other. The backswing continues smoothly as you step forward, and then with your forward foot set you are ready to hit. At no time, on any stroke,

Should your arm be waving about at your side without help from your upper body to get it ready.

Your forehand turn does not move your body as far around as does the turn on the backhand. On the backhand you want to turn edge-on to the ball, as though you are standing sideways to fight a duel, your right shoulder pointing at the ball as it approaches. If you were to turn as far on the forehand, you would find yourself hitting around your own body, since on the forehand your arm is on the side away from the net.

When you turn, on either the forehand or the backhand, the racket should point back toward the back fence at the end of the backswing, but no further. Try standing with your back right against a fence, as though you were hitting along the line of the fence. Put your racket back. Your backswing and your follow-through will be just right when limited by the fence you are standing against.

At first, while you are learning, you will turn and with a straight backswing point the top of your racket back and slightly down toward the back fence as quickly as possible, move into the hitting position, and then stroke. Later, as you become more used to hitting the ball, your stroke will become smoother and more continuous, often incorporating a long, looping motion from start to finish (for timing), the racket flowing through the spot where it points back toward the back fence rather than being put there at the very start. In either case, you must turn as quickly as you can, as soon as you determine where your opponent’s shot is going.

Your step comes a moment after the turn, and it is your fine tuning for getting into position. If the ball is coming just right your step will be forward, your knee bent, parallel to the ball’s line of flight. The phrase “‘step into the ball’ refers to this step parallel to the ball’s line of flight.

With experience, you will know how long your racket is and how much space you must allow between your body and the ball’s line of flight. If the ball is coming a bit too close for comfort, you can step forward and slightly to the side. If it isa bit too far away, you can step toward its line of flight to get within reach.

If the ball is going to be really out of reach, then instead of just turning on your pivot foot (the foot nearest the ball’s line of flight) you must begin stepping toward where the ball is coming, with the pivot foot, to get into position. After that, you Step forward to the ball’s flight with the other foot, as usual.

Many players have a great deal of difficulty with balls that come right at them. These are easily handled, however, if you use a smooth response resembling a dance step. For the ball right at you, you take what would normally be your pivot foot and step around behind your other foot with it, away from the ball’s line of flight. Then you step forward with the other foot and there you are, after just two steps. You will never learn to do this, however, if you don’t practice it. Stand on a court, or in your home, and pretend that shots are coming right at you. Practice the footwork until you can perform all the movements smoothly and automatically.

On volleys the action is quicker but the principles are the same. Here it is important to step with the foot that is on the opposite side of your body from the ball’s line of flight. You should hardly turn your upper body on the volley, and you will use up too much time if you make any move with the foot nearest the ball. If you get in the habit of stepping incorrectly for simple shots with the foot nearest the ball, you will tend to do the same on balls that come wide, instead of crossing over. If this happens, you won’t have the “‘reach’”’ that you would have if you automatically stepped across your body with the other foot. On the volley, except on very wide balls over six or eight feet away from you, you should move only one foot once, the foot away from the flight of the ball, to reach the shot.

For balls right at you, you still step only once, but forward and to the side away from the ball, rather than just forward or forward and toward the ball. At the same time, you reach far forward with your racket, your arm slanting across your body on the forehand, out to the side of your body on the backhand, so that your racket face meets the line of flight of the ball.

One important point to be stressed is that you do not want to be moving with the step when you hit, on either groundstrokes or volleys. You want your front foot firmly planted on the ground to anchor you as your upper body produces the correct stroke. The proper sequence is: turn, then step, then hit.

Once you’ve put your weight out on your forward foot you have supplied yourself with energy for the hit. Now all you have to do is apply it, through your stroke. If golfers could get additional yardage by lunging or running forward past the ball, they certainly would. Yet they do nothing of the sort; they work to keep their heads in place throughout their swing. The same is true of baseball batters: they step forward, then swing. It is the same with tennis strokes: you gain nothing if you try to combine your step and stroke at the same time.

When you actually have to run to reach a shot you still must move in an easy, controlled manner. Ideally, you want to run to within stroking distance of the line of flight of the ball, then step forward parallel to that line of flight, so that you can stroke the ball normally. If the run doesn’t work out naturally and easily for you at first—most people do this correctly without any thinking or instruction—try running through the correct movements without a ball coming at you. Start the run by stepping with the foot nearest the ball—your pivot foot on normal shots—and take an odd number of steps to get within reach of the ball. You will arrive beside its line of flight on the proper foot this way (right foot for a forehand, left foot for a backhand). You are then ready to step forward with your other foot in the proper manner.

When you find yourself running for a ball, pretend your running legs and the top of your body are separate entities. Turn your shoulders and take the racket back at the same rate, with the same relaxed motion and timing, as you would when simply turning and stepping forward for a shot. Do all this while your legs are covering the court for you. When you are hurrying for a shot, very often you will intercept the ball at the moment you should hit it. If your racket isn’t back by then, your run will have been useless. Also, make sure that the effort your legs are making to get you to the ball does not get into your stroke as well: you still want to take a relaxed, correct swing.

Whenever you do have to run hard to get to a ball in the backcourt, your safest reply generally will be a deep crosscourt.

It is an easier shot to hit safely because you hit over the lowest part of the net into the greatest area of court. Also, you will have less work to get into position for your opponent’s next shot, in the middle of his possible angles, than if you hit down the line.

If you are running hard after a shot and can’t pause and step along its line of flight before you hit, don’t worry. Just produce the best stroke that you can. You would like to be fast enough to get into position and step along the line of flight of the ball before hitting, but if you can’t, then just go ahead and swing, and try to be faster the next time.

Whenever you have been run wide on the court, and you decide to play a crosscourt in response, be sure to make an extra effort to hit up through the ball. A very common ailment on this sort of crosscourt is to hit the ball into the top of the net, so counteract that by hitting slightly higher into the air than you may think is necessary. After investing the effort you have to get to the ball, it is a shame not to keep it in play, and as you will soon discover, that little extra bit of lift on the ball will cause it to clear the net nicely.

Once you have hit your shot, you still have to get back into position for your opponent’s next stroke. Instead of running back into position, however, you want to slide or skip sideways to get back, your body facing forward as you move, your feet not crossing while they slide you to one side or the other. The reason for this is that you must not turn and run back to your ready position, or even cross your feet, because your opponent may hit before you get back to the proper spot in the middle of his possible angles. He may hit behind you, crossing you up. If you slide back into position while intently watching the flight of your shot, you will be ready to move to either side.

You are still not done with body movement once you are back into the proper spot to wait for your opponent’s next shot. Most good players wait for a return by bobbing up and down in the ready position, on the balls and toes of their feet. This keeps their weight in motion so that it is easier to move for the next ball. The bobbing is done in place, with the feet coming just slightly off the court.

Putting smooth physical motions into words may make them sound awkward and jerky. But if you will watch for these movements as produced by good players, you will understand what they are. Then try them for yourself.

This chapter should provide you with the start of an understanding of how to move on the tennis court. Now it is time to talk about the weaponry you will be carrying with you.

The forehand usually becomes a player’s strongest ground stroke. We are used to working with our arms on that side, and the construction of the human body supplies powerful chest muscles to help swing the arm forcefully. If the stroke’s potential as an offensive weapon is to be realized, however, the forehand’s great force must be tempered with consistent accuracy. This is where topspin comes in.

Pick up your racket, hold it with the fingers of your left hand cradling the throat, the racket face perpendicular to the ground.

With the handle slanting down toward you, shake hands with the racket. You now have the forehand grip. The left line of the top bevel of the racket will run into the ““V”’ formed by your thumb and forefinger, and when the top of the racket points down the court in the proper ready position, your wrist will be slightly laid back. Your fingers should be spread out along the handle: you don’t want a hammer grip. Also, your grip must be relaxed or your entire arm will become tense. And you may as

For the forehand grip you shake hands with the racket, so that the left top edge of the racket runs into the V between your thumb and forefinger.

Your grip should be firm but not tight—no more than a reasonable handshake—and your first will be slightly laid back through the forehand stroke.

well use all the racket you paid for, so hold it clear down at its end.

In order to show the stroke to yourself, take up your ready position about two feet in back of the net rather than your normal position in the backcourt. Pivot on your right foot and turn your shoulders about 45° to the right, taking the racket with you as you turn, leaving your left hand in the air just about where it is in the ready position. (Your left hand and arm act as a balance for the swing, but try to let them take care of themselves. Your shoulders turn with the stroke, and your left arm goes with that turn, keeping out of the way.) Having turned your shoulders, smoothly swing your racket back in a continuous motion, until the top points down toward the base of the back fence. Most experienced players choose to take the racket back in a looping motion which gets the racket down below the level at which the ball will be hit, but for now we just want to get the racket directly back to that point, with the racket head down. \f you want to produce a shot with topspin, the most important aspect of the forehand swing is to get the racket head below the ball. The racket must swing forward and up from that point, up through the ball. Without this “low to high” action you can’t hit with topspin. (In connection with this, | must warn against accepting the advice, often given by teaching pros, that ‘“‘you must not drop the racket head below your hand at any time.” What they really mean is that you must not droop the racket head down by letting your wrist flop: if you do this, your grip will be too weak to hit a good shot. But there is nothing wrong with having your wrist firm, holding the racket in the proper grip, and then dropping your entire arm in order to get the racket head below the ball. Players the world over do

A swing that goes from low to high will impart topspin.

' your wrist, it is perfectly cor- _.. we Ye er el rect to drop your entire arm and the racket head down for lower balls: it is a myth that you must keep the racket times. What you must not do is droop your wrist.

this all the time. Your wrist remains exactly the same throughout the swing, but your arm gets the racket head below the ball.

You do want to bend your knees on low balls to get your weight and swing down, but you must not cock the racket up above your wrist so that you can’t hit at all.

Your elbow should stay about a ball’s width away from your side as the racket goes back on your backswing. You might try taking the racket back a time or two with a ball held between your elbow and side. It should drop away only after you have swung forward through the hit. You could even tuck your elbow in against your side, just below your ribs, your arm and the racket pivoting back on the point of the elbow. In any case, you must be sure to avoid letting the elbow swing or lift away from your side on the backswing, or you will find it very hard to control the racket.

After making the backswing, step forward toward the net. Your feet should be in line with the toe of your left shoe about two inches from the net. Your knees are slightly bent to get your weight down, your racket head is back and down below the level of your target, the net tape. The step turns your shoulders further around, which is proper. Don’t turn completely sideways, however, or your body will be in the way of your stroke.

Now bring the racket forward and up from below the net cord, swinging the racket not only with your arm but also with a forward turn of your shoulders. Swing until the fingers of your right hand and the racket face are flush against the net cord.

You have completed the first half of the topspin forehand stroke, and are now in perfect position to make contact with a ball to produce a topspin forehand. (See photo on page 49.)

Take a look at your position. You have made contact with the ball—or in this case, the net—with a vertical racket face. The face has risen up from below the point of contact, and the racket is parallel to the ground. Contact happened an inch or two out in front of your forward, left foot. Your weight is forward on the front foot, your knee slightly bent. If you plan to hit down the court, your racket must make contact with the ball while facing down the court, and that is now your position.

If you look down, you will see that your wrist is still laid back in order to lie flush against the net. In fact, it is laid back roughly the same amount as it was in the ready position, and hasn’t changed throughout the swing.

Now, lift the racket up past the net and forward, completing the swing. Your arm should be slanting up across your face in front of you, you will be looking over your arm down the court, and your racket will be pointing vertically up into the sky if your wrist is still properly laid back.

Once the wrist is laid back in the ready position, you want to leave it that way throughout the stroke. | hate to tell you to without the ball, can instruct topspin.

“lock”? your wrist, since you may also lock your arm as well. You should simply not move your wrist during the swing.

Put a ball between your vertical racket face and the net. Hold it there, with your racket and hand parallel to the net. Now lift forward and up on the racket, keeping the face vertical. As the ball pops up over the net and bounces on the other side, it will roll forward. That is topspin; your line of force has passed through the ball at a point above its center. And that is all that is required.

To see the spin on any tennis ball you must focus on a point on the ball as it travels away from you, rather than looking at the overall path of the ball. Learn to see the spin on the ball

_ The path of the forehand stroke is Sve, best visualized as running forward YF and up through the ball, rather than g as traveling through any sort of a wr) circle around the body of the player “Qe hitting the shot right now, with this experiment of popping it up over the net. i

Then be sure that you can still see the spin as you increase the | pace. If at any point you have difficulty, get new balls with good labels or put some big splotches on your practice balls | with ink or paint. : Now, try taking a slow but full swing from where you are standing by the net. Take the racket back with your arm and shoulders working together, making sure that at the back of | your swing your racket is no further around behind you than where it points toward the back fence, and that it is slanting slightly down rather than up. Then stroke forward and up, past

An experienced player will swing through the forehand stroke with a full, continuous looping motion.

the net, so that you finish with the racket head pointing straight up. This may seem too flamboyant at first, but watch the tournament pros at play—they all finish this high.

Make sure that you brush up against, rather than hit into, the net cord as your racket climbs past it. As you swing, turn your shoulders forward into the shot: on the forehand your arm is behind your body at the start, and you must turn forward a bit to give your arm room to swing past your body. Don’t yank your shoulders around, but let them swing forward in unison with your arm through the first part of the swing. Your hips will also turn forward, into the shot, as part of the same move-

The proper stroking sequence on the forehand is turn, step, hit and follow through.

& .

ment. (They turn into the shot far more on the forehand than the backhand, where your arm swings from the foreward edge of your body.)

Try to keep your arm ‘‘frozen’’ during the swing, except at the shoulder. In other words, don’t flex your wrist or elbow to help hit the ball. Just let your arm swing from the shoulder. There is no need for all the contortions that most people feel are necessary to put topspin on the ball. On both the forehand and backhand you could still stroke nicely if your arm and wrist were in a cast.

Your elbow and wrist should not flop around on the forehand. Ideally, you could swing perfectly well if your arm were in a cast.

On any ground stroke you want the racket face to travel forward and up through the ball for as long as possible (if you are hitting with topspin). If you pull the racket face off the line of the ball’s flight by turning forward excessively or pulling your arm across your body, you have introduced an unnecessary new direction to the forward and upward motions you want, and this can ruin your swing. Also, a lot has to happen during the hit for it to be successful: the ball flattens out against the

Strings, the strings bulge back and then spring forward, snapping the ball back down the court. You want the racket to be moving in as smooth a line as possible in the direction you are hitting during all this. You might think of hitting not just one ball but

10 balls in a line, so that you hit smoothly through the actual ball. There is going to be some departure from the vertical circle, because of how the human body is constructed, but you want to keep it to a minimum. Picture a giant Hula-Hoop on edge in the air at your side, lined up in the direction you want to hit, and then run your racket forward and up inside its rim. That is the sort of motion you want on the forehand stroke.

For beginners, the low point of the stroke usually comes at the end of the backswing. For more experienced players, the low point comes further along in the stroke, at a point between the end of the backswing and contact with the ball, because they swing their rackets in a looping motion for timing and rhythm. To see what the loop is like, stand in front of a mirror. Swing back along the top and then forward along the bottom of an imaginary oval object floating at your side and mostly below the level of ball contact. You will need the mirror to check that you are actually doing this motion. Some people, even beginners, find that such a looping swing aids their timing, but others are disrupted by it. However, | think everyone should learn at first how to just take the racket back and down: no matter what your level of experience, you will need such a backswing for service returns against hard serves, or any other hurried shot.

There is no need to flip or flop your wrist during the stroke. If you do this, you introduce uncertainty into your swing.

Whatever you do, don’t roll your wrist over to bring the racket over the top of the ball, thinking this will ‘keep the ball from flying out of the court.”’ When you make such a motion, your racket face changes its angle constantly, and you have to have perfect timing to hit the ball with the one “‘setting”’ that will put it back into play. It is much better to know the correct racket setting needed to hit the ball into the court (usually this is a vertical or slightly open racket face), and keep that setting, with your wrist firm throughout the entire swing. This gives you a large margin for error on timing, instead of no margin at all.

When you are actually producing a forehand stroke you must be sure to stroke through the ball, swinging from your start clear to your proper high finish, rather than making any sort of hit at the ball. If you hit at the ball, everything becomes jerky and the ball will pop off your strings without any control. The long, full swing is like a rifle barrel: it puts the spin on the projectile that gives you control of its flight. You should produce a full stroke when you swing, and move well enough around the court to put the moving tennis ball in front of that complete

Swing.

After you have brushed the racket up past the net several times, step back four or five paces. Take a tennis ball in your left hand and toss it up underhand so that it will bounce vertically. Let it bounce twice while you get ready, step forward, then duplicate the swing you used at the net, this time hitting through the ball when it reaches the top of its second bounce. To keep things easy, you should turn sideways before bouncing the ball at first, trying the whole “turn, step, stroke’’ sequence later. Make sure that you bounce the ball far enough ahead, and far enough out from your side, so that when you step forward the ball will still be situated where you can swing through it comfortably. Again, make sure that your step is forward, in a line parallel to the line of flight a ball would have if it were coming up the court. If you step toward the ball, rather than forward, you won’t have room to swing properly.

Stroke gently through the ball, moving your racket smoothly from start to the high finish. Can you stroke the ball over the net, putting a forward roll onto it as you bring the vertical (or slightly open) racket face up the back of the ball? If at first you can’t, step back up to the net, practice the swing there, then move back and try again.

Keep on with your practice, dropping the ball and stroking through it, until you can consistently hit the ball over the net with the proper topspin roll. Then start moving back in the court, two yards at a time, dropping balls and hitting them a bit harder from each position. Make sure that they all have the topspin roll, and if at some point they don’t, back up and start over again. Remember that you are not hitting to get balls from your side of the net to the other. Rather, you are trying to make them move away from you with topspin. If a choice must be made, it is better for now to hit topspin shots into the net than to not hit with topspin at all.

At this point, you should be able to make the ball roll forward away from you, even if it doesn’t go over the net. (In such a case you are swinging correctly but your racket face is closed. The racket face is directed toward the ground.) If you can’t get topspin on the ball for some reason, make sure that you understand what you are trying to do—you are trying to lift a vertical racket face up the back of the ball on a slanting climb— then remove yourself from the realm of proper stroking for a moment. Go back to the net and take the racket out of your hand. Open up your fingers, make your palm and fingers a single stiff unit, and brush your hand up past the net. Anyone, no matter how unathletic, can surely brush their hand past something in an upward direction. Then move back and grasp the racket, but this time choke way up by the throat. Now, drop a ball and brush the strings directly up past it. Don’t stroke forward at all, just lift up, from below the ball to a point above it, zipping the racket strings up its back. The ball will spin heavily, without going anywhere, if you do this correctly: you have produced topspin without any impact to drive the ball forward. Now, instead of just lifting that vertical racket up the back of the ball, try lifting up and forward. If the ball goes in the net, open the racket face—turn the side doing the hitting more up toward the sky—but make sure that you still force the ball to roll forward off the strings. Gradually flatten out the swing from the vertical you started with, until the ball is not only spinning with topspin but also moving forward over the net. Then move your hand down the handle. In this way you can sneak up on your topspin forehand.

When you begin hitting correctly, with a bit more pace to your swing, you will experience a sensation of “‘bite’’ between your racket strings and the ball, as they take the ball and not only drive it forward but impart topspin to it as well.

Having reached this point in describing the mechanics of the forehand, | would like to turn our attention to the backhand. | have a good deal more to say about how you control the direction and altitude of your shots, as well as how to practice the stroke to make it the automatic, heavy-duty weapon you need.

But such remarks apply equally well to the backhand, which is covered next. If you want to learn about control now, skip to Chapter 7, ‘Ground Stroke Control.”

The principle of the topspin backhand is the same as for the topspin forehand: you wish to swing a vertical racket face up and through the ball. But because you turn to your left instead of your right, and because you swing with your arm in front of your body rather than behind it, there are some important mechanical differences.

Move up to the net and take your ready position. Hold the racket with the forehand, “shake hands”’ grip, the proper grip for the ready position. As you turn for a forehand, your racket comes out of your left hand. But on the backhand, the left hand helps take the racket back. It is therefore easier to shift your right hand to the backhand grip as you turn. (Because of this left-hand support, many players have backhands that are more consistent than their forehands.)

To prepare for the backhand, pivot on your left foot and turn your shoulders and body 90 degrees to the net. A good idea is to think of pointing your forward shoulder at the approaching ball. As you turn, your left hand stays at the throat of the racket, supporting it, while your right hand shifts counterclockwise, bringing the knuckle of your index finger to the top of the racket, and your thumb up the back of the handle, ata slant. Once turned, you should be able to balance a coin on the flat back of your hand, behind your first knuckle. Take care to make the main shift with only the front end of your hand as you move to the backhand grip; you should not appreciably change the point where the butt of the racket rests against the palm of your hand.

For the backhand grip, rotate your first knuckle to the left until it is over the top left edge of the racket, while leaving the base of your hand on the same point on the racket as it touches for the forehand. You do not want a sharp angle between the racket and your arm on the backhand.

If you turn your whole hand to obtain a backhand grip, as many players do, you create an angle between the racket and your hand and arm. As a result, you must either snap your wrist in order to hit the ball squarely down the court, or else you must turn your body into the shot: two serious mistakes on the backhand. With a correct backhand grip, the racket remains an extension of the arm, rather than forming an angle with your arm. The reason for shifting the grip is to get more of your hand behind the racket, and also to make the racket face more vertical. If you swing a backhand with a forehand grip, the racket face will be more open and you will tend to slice under the ball.

So shift your grip as you pivot and turn your shoulders. For the topspin backhand you want the racket to be back and down, the top of the racket pointing toward the back fence in a down-

On the backhand, you want to get your shoulder around before the hit. Think of pointing your shoulder at the ball as it comes at you, and then keeping that shoulder around through the hit as much

A low-to-high swing will produce a topspin backhand.

ward slant. For now, it is easier to simply put the racket there.

(It practically goes there with your turn.) Later you might try a looping stroke, like the loop on the forehand, but for now just put the racket back and down.

When you step forward after your turn, try to get a sense of leaving the racket back where it is. In other words, you will feel that you are pressing the racket back as you step forward.

Please note, however, that | mean back toward the back fence, not wrapped around your body in such a way that your opponent could see the racket head behind you if he wanted. If you do this, you have bent your arm at the elbow and wrist,

Keep your elbow in at your side, behind the plane of the racket as it makes contact with the ball. If your elbow pokes out ahead just as you tennis elbow.

and all of that bend must. come out sometime during the stroke:

better to have no bend in the first place. Just put your right hand back by your left hip, with the racket slanting back and down.

Having stepped forward toward the net, you may discover that you are now too close to it. Because your arm on the backhand is on the side of your body nearest the ball, you need a bit more room to swing than on the forehand. In other words, on the backhand you take the ball slightly further forward than on the forehand. Move back a couple of inches from the net, and you will have enough room to swing forward and up.

As with the forehand, the lowest point in your swing must come at some point before you hit the ball, enabling you to lift the racket up and forward, through the ball, for topspin. A major and very common flaw on the backhand is for the player to take the racket back and up on the backswing, so that he doesn’t have time to drop the head below the level of the ball before it is time to stroke forward. When caught with this problem, players usually chop down at the ball. This sends the ball sailing, with backspin, either long or wide to the left. At the

Start of learning the backhand it is almost impossible to put the racket head down too low, or lift it up through the ball too steeply. Once the feel of rolling the ball forward is understood, then the swing can be flattened out to produce the best drive down the court. So at the start, use your left hand not only to take the racket back, but also to keep the racket head down before stroking forward.

Finally, make sure that your arm lies close across your body just before you stroke forward, not held out away from yourself. You need a sense of swinging the racket like a pendulum forward and up from your shoulder, and you don’t want any shifting elbows or bending wrists impairing a nice, clean swing with your whole arm. Again, that idea of leaving the racket back when you step forward will help, because you will, in effect, be pulling your arm tight across your body.

So let’s take a stroke at last. Having turned and stepped, you now will stroke forward, letting the racket swing forward out of your left hand as though it is coming out of a bracket. Or you might think of drawing a sword out of a scabbard. Don’t drop the left hand before you swing forward, and don’t try to

“throw” the racket with it, either. Just swing forward from your shoulder, moving your whole arm, hand and the racket as a single unit. The worst thing to do is to poke the elbow out ahead of your swing. This ruins the stroke and invites tennis elbow. You want the elbow and wrist behind the plane of the racket when it makes contact, not out ahead of the racket.

Swing from your shoulder, sweeping the racket head from low to high, brushing up past the net cord with a vertical racket face, and finish with your racket and arm comfortably extended, as they have been throughout the swing, pointing up above your head. Your body should still be edge-on toward where you are hitting, as though fighting a duel. On the backhand, since your arm is in front, you do not have to—and you do not want to—turn your body more than very slightly into the shot: the hips will turn forward just a bit, but little else moves from that edge-on stance.

Now, go back to the point where you made contact between your hand, the racket and the net. You will see that on this stroke too there must be a slight bend at your wrist if you are to take the ball out in front and still hit it squarely down

You do want to take the ball out in front of you, as on the forehand, but not excessively so. If you reach too far forward, your stroke will tend to become flat, rather than traveling from a low to high position. Often you will end up slapping the ball wide of the court in a crosscourt direction, as your racket

Strings stop facing forward while trying to reach forward. Do take the ball out in front, but not too far. If the ball doesn’t cooperate by coming to you, then you must learn to move to it so that it will be in the right position when you stroke through

It.

Try the topspin backhand stroke several times against the net, brushing up to that high finish above your head. Then move back, drop a ball for yourself, and try hitting it. Make sure that you put the ball out ahead of where you will be when you step, and far enough away from you to the side so that you can swing. Toss it up underhand, high enough to let it bounce twice while you prepare, then brush the ball up and over the net with topspin. Make sure that you stand sideways throughout the stroke, and try to do everything gently. It is a common error, at this point, to flail wildly at the ball.

You might try hitting a few shots while holding a ball between the inside of your arm and your side, just above the elbow. The ball will drop away as you finish the stroke, but it should remain pinned up until you have hit. Keep that elbow in for a good backhand.

If you should find yourself having difficulty getting the proper motion into your backhand stroke, try this simple experiment. Move your left hand down the handle until it is just touching your right hand. Make sure that your right hand has the backhand grip, and that your left hand shakes hands with the racket as it would in a left-handed forehand. Then swing with both hands. Don’t slap into the ball, but rather lift the racket forward and up through the ball with both hands and no wrist action. Because your left arm is now the radius of your swing, and your arm is rotating on your left shoulder, the racket face should climb more steeply through the ball. If it does, you are on the right track; usually the first problem with the backhand is that players don’t realize how steeply they want to lift the racket up through the ball.

Another way to get the proper lift is to think of balancing a coin on the edge of your racket on the backswing, then trying to throw that coin high up into the air with your swing through the ball.

Quite often, a player with a lackluster one-handed backhand will prove to have a brilliant two-handed backhand: the climb is steeper, producing a much crisper shot, and two wrists seem to stay more firm than one. | don’t go out of my way to recommend the two-handed backhand, however, as it does cut down your reach and consequently requires extra speed of foot from the player who uses it. But as an aid in showing the amount of climb required for topspin, it is excellent.

| believe topspin ground strokes are superior to their undercut counterparts. You can hit the topspin shots harder, with more accuracy and safety. And you can reach more of the court with topspin, due to its dipping characteristic.

However, while most players can produce consistent topspin on the forehand, there are times when they find it difficult or impossible to top the backhand. On service returns against hard serves, or on high or hard drives, they cannot swing the racket with enough authority to take command of the ball. Also, when coming to the net behind a backhand down your opponent’s forehand sideline, the shot should, ideally, stay low after the bounce. Underspin will help produce this low shot. Finally, on clay the value of the undercut backhand goes way up as an efficient way to keep the ball in play with a minimum of effort.

| hope that you devote most of your backhand learning effort to mastering topspin. This usually takes a bit more effort than underspin at first, but once learned it allows you to devel-

For the two-handed backhand, put both your hands tight together and as far down the racket as you can, your right hand ina backhand grip, your left hand in a left-handed forehand grip. When you swing, the racket head will climb up steeply through the hit, because you will now be rotating your swing on your left shoulder rather than your right, and this will promote excellent topspin.

For the undercut backhand you must start the racket high, swing under and through the ball on a shallow plane, and finish well out in front, while taking care not to turn forward too much.

op a more forceful, attacking stroke. If you find yourself hitting numerous balls with underspin, and you’re not playing on clay,

| hope you schedule more topspin practice time for yourself. But facing the reality that the backhand is not going to be hit with topspin every time by most people, and in the spirit of, “‘if you are going to hit underspin, hit it right,” let me describe the undercut backhand.

The difference between the topspin backhand and the undercut or backspin backhand is that the racket face passes under the ball instead of up its back. On the underspin backhand the racket begins the forward stroke from a point above the level where contact with the ball will be made, instead of from below. And on the backspin backhand, contact with the ball occurs further back toward one’s side than with topspin.

To hit with underspin on the backhand you turn and point your shoulder toward the approaching ball just as you do with the topspin stroke, but the racket is lifted up and back, and the face is laid open. The ball is allowed to come further back beside you (by about six inches to a foot). The racket then swings forward on a shallow downward slant, its face sliding directly under the ball and then carrying through and back up into a fairly high finish, although not as high as with topspin. On the underspin backhand, you finish the stroke with the racket pointing out more toward the top of your opponent’s back fence than straight up into the air, as with topspin. The racket face has to be laid open in order to get the ball up over the net, and the ball has to be hit more toward your side than in front so that you can slice the strings directly under the ball, producing exact backspin, rather than some sort of sloppy sidespin. Underspin backhands do share one important point with topspin ones:

you must stay turned throughout the stroke, finishing edge-on toward the court, rather than turning forward with the hit.

If you are going to use the undercut backhand, you will be hitting a slower shot than topspin would produce, so you must work to get the most out of your hit. Otherwise, you will be at the mercy of your opponents. Make sure that you take a long, full swing through the ball on the undercut backhand, and try to “‘squirt”’ the ball off the strings as forcefully as you can. And then go out and work on your topspin backhand.

With practice on that topspin backhand, you will be able to step into the shot and drive it with just as much authority as the forehand. You must work on your backhand and the ability to produce a forcing topspin shot with it, because you know that the majority of your opponents will attempt to attack your backhand. Sensible tennis involves attacking the supposedly weaker stroke, and most people’s games are grooved to that attack. If you can hit enough backhands in practice to turn that shot into a weapon, though, you leave your opponents in the difficult situation of having nowhere to go with their shots. They will have no place to hit where they don’t get back a forcing, offensive shot. People often sabotage their tennis games by avoiding the backhand out of fear that they might miss it, with the result that they are unable to hit it effectively when they must. Don’t make that mistake yourself. Work on that backhand, work to master topspin on it, and you will create a prearranged ambush for your opponents. There is no finer feeling in tennis than the joy you will experience at taking a heavy shot on your backhand side, stepping firmly forward with your shoulder well turned, and drilling the ball with ripping topspin past your thoroughly startled opponent.

Topspin allows you to hit both the forehand and backhand ground strokes with great power, but that power is worthless unless you can control the ball’s direction.

Control of the ball depends on several factors: where the ball

Strikes the racket strings; the angle of the racket face at contact;

the direction in which the strings travel during the hit (i.e., how much topspin you apply); how fast your racket moves during contact and where that contact occurs as the ball moves past you.

To hit a tennis ball well, you must hit it in the center of your racket, in its “Sweet spot.’’ When the ball collides with the racket at this point, the strings stretch and rebound uniformly, resulting in the greatest control possible. If you hit off-center on any stroke, the racket will wobble and turn in your hand. The rebound on such a hit will not be uniform, and the resulting shot may be far worse than your stroke warrants.

When you do hit off-center, you will feel a “‘clunk”’ between racket and ball. This should signal you that it is time to relax your grip and arm, watch the ball carefully to the point of contact, and strive to hit the ball with the exact center of your racket face. You don’t want to tighten your grip, as that will deaden the racket and your feel for the ball, and will do little to help you hit with the center of the strings.

On the ground strokes (and the volley), the angle of your racket face controls how high or low the ball will go after you hit it. An “open’’ racket face (strings are slanted upward) is going to cause the ball to go higher into the air than a “‘closed”’ racket face (strings facing down). In general, you will make most of your strokes with your racket face slightly open from the vertical, as your shots must climb up and over the net before dropping down again. You control this open or closed element with your wrist, by rotating it slightly one way or another. You do not control your racket face by changing your grip! To control the height of your shot over the net, turn your wrist the small amount needed, before you hit the ball. Once set, however, your wrist should not change through the stroke.

All of this may sound quite complicated, but it really isn’t once you get the idea by trying a few strokes with different face “‘settings.’’ Go ahead. Open your racket face way up and hit a ball too high. Then close it and hit the ball into the bottom of the net (using the correct stroke to do each). Experiment with opening and closing your racket face, so you can learn what sort of adjustments are needed for which particular shots. Just make sure you hit with topspin at the same time.

No single setting can be used for all strokes. You will need all sorts of settings, and the different shots that result, while playing. If your opponent is in the backcourt, you will drive your topspin ground strokes with a fairly open racket face, so that the ball will clear the net by perhaps four feet, carrying deep into your opponent’s court. (Depth is controlled more by racket face opening and the shape of the swing than by how hard you hit the ball.) If your opponent comes into net, you will close the racket face slightly from its previous setting, thus keeping the ball low over the net and forcing your opponent to volley up. The swing will stay the same, but the face setting will change. If you should desire to lob, you will open the face way up, and stroke up through the ball at a steeper angle.

There is a range of possibility here. You can close the racket face and just clear the net, or open it way up to hit the shot much higher and deeper. You must strive to gain control over the complete range, and make your control automatic through practice and play.

In the above, we talk about changing the flight of the ball by changing the angle of the racket face, while keeping the shape of the swing the same. It is important to realize that you can also change the flight of the ball by varying the amount of topspin you put on it. In this case, you keep the angle of the racket the same, but change the direction that it takes through the ball. On one side of the spectrum of possibility, you may lift a slightly open racket face so abruptly up the back of the ball that you put a tremendous amount of topspin on it, but it will hardly go forward over the net because you haven’t driven through it. The other end of this range is to hit through the ball with a nearly flat swing, causing the ball to bullet away with very little topspin on it at all. You haven’t changed the racket face, but you have radically changed the flight of the ball by driving that face through the ball in two different directions. (In the first example, the line of force imparted by the racket barely clips the ball, passing well above its center, while in the second, the force goes almost through the ball’s center.)

Proper topspin lies between these two extremes, with your racket brushing up the back of the ball to put topspin on your shot, but also hitting through the ball enough to drive your shot forward over the net. Just as there is no one setting for the racket face on your strokes, so there is no proper amount of topspin: you will use topspin to do many different things with the ball, and you must experiment to discover how much topspin is needed to produce different results.

Still another aspect of the stroke which must be under your control is how fast you swing the racket through the stroke. Invariably, in the interests of hitting harder, starting students swing the racket faster and faster, and then wonder why their shots have almost no control—and often, no speed—as a result. To exert control on the ball, the racket must remain in contact with the ball long enough for compression between the ball and the strings to take place, and then for both to rebound smoothly.

If you swing too fast, this compression doesn’t happen properly, and far worse shots—light, flighty ones—take place than if you had swung at a slower speed. It is also harder to judge the amount of topspin you are putting on the ball when swinging really fast. | To hit harder, you must concentrate on taking a long step forward, in order to get your weight solidly into the shot. You must hit the ball squarely in the middle of the strings, and you must employ a long, flowing swing rather than any sort of jerky, violent one in order to make proper contact with the ball. Once you are really secure in all this, you can begin trying faster swings for still more pace, but now you will know when the swing becomes too fast for control, and can keep it at a more manageable speed. If you wait until the ball is almost to you before you start your swing, you will have to swing very fast to make contact at all. If you feel you are doing this, concentrate

On starting your swing sooner, but go through it more slowly so that you still meet the ball correctly. You will “carry”’ the ball longer this way, and produce better shots.

With our discussion of the angle of the racket face, we described how control is exerted over the vertical direction the ball takes after the hit. To hit the ball accurately, you must also control the left and right direction.

The horizontal direction of your shots will be properly determined by where you take the ball as it passes by you. If you make contact with the ball early—out ahead of you, beyond the normal distance at which you want to hit it—you will tend to hit the ball crosscourt. As you reach forward, your racket face will stop “looking” down the court and begin to face off to the side more and more. If you take the ball further back than this, right at the point where the strings face directly down the court, you will hit your shot straight down the court. And if you take the ball still further back, you will tend to hit it wide.

Actually, to hit in different directions you want to swing at the ball with exactly the same swing all the time. You want to keep your wrist and arm constant throughout the swing. Don’t slap your wrist or poke out your elbow to change the direction of your shots. What does change is your stance in relation to the ball coming toward you, and where you hit that ball on its line of flight past you. Although under playing conditions you may find yourself forced to change your swing to change the direction of your shots, you would hit far more secure, solid shots if you changed your stance instead.

Select a line on the court and pretend that a ball is traveling directly down that line toward you. Take up your stance for stroking, already turned toward whichever side you wish, and put out your racket so that its strings face directly down the line. If you made contact with a ball exactly here, it would travel right back the way it came.

Now, to hit a crosscourt shot, don’t move your arm or racket at all, but instead move your back foot an inch or two closer to the line, your front foot an inch or two further away from it, turning your stance in the new direction you want the ball to travel. Keep your racket face positioned directly over the line along which our imaginary ball is coming, but note how it now intersects that line at an angle, at a point a few inches ahead of where it was placed to hit directly down the line. If you swing exactly as you normally would, but intercept the ball at this new point, you will hit the ball crosscourt.

To hit wide, toward the side opposite the crosscourt, you must move your front foot closer to the line, your back foot further away from it, again turning your body in the new direction. Now the racket will cross the line a bit further back than it did when you hit down the line, and the ball will be driven wide.

In practice, think of giving yourself more room from the ball to hit down the line or wide from the center of the court than you need on crosscourts. (Most novices hit crosscourt because they tend to get too close to the ball’s line of flight. If they were to try to hit straight down the court from this too-close stance, they would hit the ball on the throat of the racket, or even on their hands.) The important idea to grasp is that there is no need for any sort of poking or jerking with the racket in order to drive the ball in different directions. You want to use your normal stroke, and simply change your stance to allow that same stroke to drive your shots where you want them.

In effect, by changing your stance you are changing the point of contact between your strings and the ball. On the forehand, for example, you would want to hit the ball directly at

3. Wide to the right.

the back to drive it back down the court; slightly to the right of center to hit it crosscourt; and slightly to the left of center to send it wide to the right. With practice, this all becomes automatic. Obviously, you must watch the ball closely, right up to the point of impact, if you are to gain control over these small differences that control the direction of your shot.

With these details of horizontal control in mind, along with those on vertical control, you are now equipped to make very accurate evaluations of the shots you hit in practice. If you can’t accurately diagnose what you are doing wrong on a missed shot, it will be hard for you to make the necessary correction on the next one.

If you hit the ball into the net, for example, you should think about your racket face, and try to open it further on the next shot. If your shots are going wide to the right on the forehand or to the left on the backhand, you are hitting the ball late, taking it too far back beside your body, and you should try to swing a moment sooner. If you find yourself hitting solidly, but your shots are landing short in the opponent’s court despite your opening up your racket face, perhaps you are hitting with too much topspin. Swing on a flatter plane through the ball to carry it long. If your shots are going out over the baseline, use more topspin to bring them back down.

The most common mistakes that students make while learning a stroke are those of hitting off the center of the strings, hitting with too open or closed a racket face, putting too little or too much topspin on the ball, swinging too fast, or making contact with the ball too early or late as it passes by. The interesting thing is that all of these ailments have nothing to do with any sort of mistake in the shape of the stroke itself. Students may have perfect strokes and not know it because of the poor shots that result from these problems.

The hope is that you will realize just how few things can go wrong with a stroke, learn to identify the characteristics associated with each of these common mistakes, and then work to correct those mistakes. In each case the correction is easy if the problem is only properly identified.

If you are to hit well with topspin on the ground strokes, you must have a clear image of the sort of shot you are trying to make—an idea of its shape—as well as an understanding of the mechanics involved. With topspin, you should think of lifting the ball up and out toward the top of the fence behind your opponent, rather than of trying to hit it out toward the top of the net or in some sort of direct line toward a point in your opponent’s court.

Often, when novices struggle and fight to get topspin on their strokes, they have little success. Their minds tell them that they must hit out and through the ball toward some point in their opponent’s court in order to make the ball go there. They simply won’t believe what they are being told about brushing up the back of the ball. They are so certain—and terrified—that this will hit the ball out, that they are unable even to try swinging their rackets in a different manner, just as an experiment. If they would just lift their rackets up in a very vertical motion (at least 45 degrees away from what they are used to), they would discover that the ball will go over the net quite nicely, and also come back down into the opposite court as well. | spend much of my teaching time begging people, “‘lift the racket up the back of the ball, have the racket head c/imbing as you make contact.” The more steeply they lift the racket past the ball, the more certainly it will come down in the opponent’s court before going out, providing the racket face is correctly near the vertical.

An image that might help you put topspin on your strokes if you are having difficulty is the following: imagine you are holding a racket with wet red paint on its strings, or a racket with a brush dipped in red paint sticking out through the center of its strings. Surely with such a racket you could brush a line directly up the back of a tennis ball positioned out to your side, on either side. It is exactly this same brushing, “‘painting up the back of the ball’? motion that must be applied to the ball coming toward you. Paint ared arrowright up its back when you hit it, and you will produce topspin. And realize also that the spin on the ball never lies. The direction of the spin shows the direction your racket brushed by the ball and from this indicator you can alter your stroke whichever way it requires.

On your ground strokes, on both deep drives and shorter shots, your topspin strokes will not have a flat contour to their flights over the net, but rather quite a curved appearance from your racket into the far court. You can vary the degree of this curve (through racket face and the degree of topspin imparted), but you want some sort of curve to exist on your shots in order to bring them back down into the far court.

The stroke with the most curved appearance would be the lob. The lob is a simple shot to hit, much simpler than most people at first try to make it. And it works nicely when a bit— or a great deal—of topspin is added to the shot. To lob, all you have to do is open up your racket face, and swing your racket up through the ball on a steeper climb than you would use on the ground strokes. Many people try to poke the lob up into air with an abrupt, hurried jab, and that just doesn’t work.

The point of ball contact on the lob is down near its bottom, rather than at its back. By varying where you hit the ball, you vary the sort of lob produced. An offensive lob is low. It is usually hit with a lot of topspin, and is designed to clear your

Opponent’s upstretched arm and racket by only three or four feet when he is at net. The idea behind this lob is to get the ball over your opponent quickly, on a shallow plane, so that he cannot catch up with it in the backcourt. A defensive lob is much higher, and it is hit to give you time to get back into play from some sort of difficult position. Usually, the defensive lob is hit out of desperation, and it is thrown up into the air with any sort of swing you can manage, topspin or underspin.

The lob is a very important shot to have. It provides you with a whole new means of getting the ball past your opponent, and also a means to say “time out’’ whenever things get a bit difficult for you. (In play, you will want to lob over your opponent’s backhand side if possible: if he should reach it, he will have more trouble hitting it back effectively off the backhand.) Try to remember to lob offensively a time or two early ina match. If you are successful, your opponent will tend to stay further back from the net, and your passing shots will then have more room to get by him.

A very common problem on the ground strokes is that of taking the racket too far back behind the body on the forehand, and wrapping it too far around the body on the backhand. This occurs because players have the mistaken idea that such an enlarged swing will give them more power, or simply because they are unaware of either where their rackets are going or where they should go. In fact, to produce your best shots, especially in fast play, you want to employ a compact swing, with your elbows kept close to your body, and the racket well under control on the backswing.

There is an easy way to check how far the racket should go back on the backswing, and also where you should correctly finish. Stand with your back flat against a fence or wall, and

Swing as though you are hitting in line with that wall. On the backswing, place the end of the racket head back against the fence behind you. Then swing forward through the point of impact, and follow through until the barrier stops your swing in front of and above you. You have neatly defined the proper limits of your ground stroke.

(On your finish, you will note that on the forehand the racket will end up flush against the fence if you don’t change the angle between your wrist and the laid-back racket, with the racket slanting up across your chin. On the backhand finish, the racket will slant out away from the fence slightly if you don’t change your wrist.)

By swinging against a wall this way, you should realize how little your stroke curves around you during the swing, and how much it runs forward and up through the forward edge of an imaginary circle at your side.

The backswing and follow-through on your ground strokes should not travel very far beyond your body. It may help to imagine a wall preventing any excess of swing.

As you swing, you might imagine a giant clock painted on the wall at your back, framing you. On the forehand, your backswing should put the racket somewhere between 8:00 and

8:30, and your follow-through will put the racket up to a point between 12:00 and 1:00. On the backhand, your backswing is toward about 3:30, while your follow-through will be up toward 11:00 or higher. Swinging with these spots on the clockface in mind will quickly show you how steeply you must swing up through the ball if you are to impart proper topspin to it.

After learning to hit properly with topspin against balls at waist height, many novices still have great difficulty realizing that they can apply the same stroke to both lower and higher balls.

For low balls, you must bend your knees as well as step far forward to get your weight down, and then swing smoothly and bravely with a full swing from below the ball to above it. Obviously, you won’t be able to get the racket as far below a low ball before stroking up through it—the ground is in the way.

But you can still manage to have the strings rising as they hit the ball. Your swing will climb on a more shallow plane up through the ball, but you can still impart topspin to all but the lowest shots. The real trick is to force yourself to produce a full

Swing, instead of hacking under or poking at those low balls.

On balls that come high over the net and are obviously going to bounce high as they pass you, there are four possible responses. You can move back in your court, so that the ball will pass its high point after the bounce and drop down before you hit it. If you do this, make sure that you get turned and move back fast enough to give yourself time to step forward again, getting your weight properly into the shot. You will probably hit your most solid shots off high balls if you follow this pro-cedure properly, but this is the worst choice of the four. By moving back you will give up three or more yards of distance between you and your opponent, meaning that no matter how forceful a shot you hit, your opponent will have extra time to remain in command of the point by moving in on or cutting off your effort. After all, it takes extra time for the ball to cover that distance you have moved back, and it must cover it twice, going down the court and coming back.

If you stand your ground, the ball will be at your shoulders or higher as it passes you. Many people, seeing the ball at this higher level, feel that they must roll their racket over the top of the ball in order to hit with topspin and still keep the ball within the court. Doing this, they consistently hit the ball in the net. What they don’t realize is that a three-foot difference in height for the point of impact makes little difference in relation to a 78-foot-long tennis court. A proper topspin stroke will still work perfectly well on the higher ball, and will still bring the ball back down in fair territory.

To hit a higher ball, simply lift your entire stroke up. Start your swing as far back as normal, but one or two feet higher, and brush up the back of the ball as you stroke forward. Your stroke will be flatter than normal, and the topspin you impart will tend to slant rather than be exactly over the top of the ball. But you can certainly produce reasonable topspin strokes that will carry the ball deep and keep you in the point. (When doing this it is important to leave enough room between you and the ball so that you can take a full topspin swing. People often run themselves under a higher bouncing ball, and then

A second way to handle high balls when standing your ground is to undercut them with either a punching volley motion or a longer undercut swing. Again, you are usually just keeping the ball in play with this reaction, waiting for a better ball to attack.

The best way to deal with high balls is simply never to hit a high ball in the first place! Instead, as soon as you see a ball coming over the net that is obviously going to bounce high in your court, move forward, position yourself for a swing up near where the ball will bounce, and then drive firmly through the ball with topspin as it comes up. You must have your weight forward for this shot, and you must be firm about taking a full swing up and through the ball. You will obviously have to watch the ball very closely to make proper contact. And you will also have to learn not to let the ball bounce up too high before you hit it. Generally, you will want to take the ball at knee height or alittle higher.

Hitting a ball with a full topspin swing just after it has bounced is not the easiest act to perform. But this is by far the best way to handle high bouncing balls. By taking such balls on the rise, you nullify the high bounce, and create instant pressure on your opponents. This robs them of time instead of giving them the extra time they might expect off the high ball. One of the secrets of Jimmy Connors’ great success is the manner in which he attacks every ball. He takes every ball as it comes up off the bounce, and exerts relentless pressure on his opponents.

If you can learn to employ this idea of attacking every ball with your ground strokes, you will utterly destroy your tennis enemies.

While big, powerful serves usually get most of the attention in tennis, in terms of speed and power the world’s great serves must take a back seat to the world’s greatest service returns. When executed brilliantly, as by Jimmy Connors or Bjorn Borg, the poor server simply supplies the power for the return these players fire back. No matter how huge a serve they face, you will see these players, and all the other good ones, stepping forward to get their weight into the shot, then swinging cleanly through the ball for driving topspin returns.

The server in tennis is said to have the advantage because he controls the first hit of the point. He can try to fool or overpower his opponent with that first hit. He gets two chances at this planned assault, and he can advance to net as soon as he has hit his serve. The receiver, on the other hand, must wait for the serve to bounce before he can hit and attempt to advance to the net as well.

If you simply chip the ball back low at the server’s feet, i.e., punch the ball back with a short, downward, chopping motion, a competent server will consistently manage to hold serve against you. He will routinely play a good enough shot off your return to remain in command of each point. In order to win against the server you must take the advantage away from him. You must learn to hit out on your returns. You must—you guessed it—learn to hit your service returns with topspin! Anything less will not put enough pressure on a good player to produce errors.

The service return should employ a much more compact swing than that used on a normal ground stroke: things are happening too fast for you to do anything more. On normal ground strokes, you will see players looping their rackets for timing. On the service return, however, most players dispense with the loop and simply take the racket back in a direct line to a point below the level where the ball will be hit.

Speed on your preparation for service return is of primary importance: the faster you can get ready, the more time you will have to get set and really drive the return. You should be turned to the side the ball is coming to by the time the ball passes over the net. (You can check to see if you are reacting properly every time your opponent smacks a serve into the net. Is your racket back?)

You can increase your speed of preparation in two ways. The first is by watching the ball as the opponent tosses it up— watch just the ball, not the player. The second way is by pivoting with your elbow tucked in tightly against your side.

If you watch just the ball before and throughout your opponent’s serve, you will see where your opponent has hit it far faster than if you focus on the whole opponent as he produces the serve, because then you must search for the ball as it streaks toward you. And if you keep your elbow tucked in, resting just forward of your lower ribs (particularly on the forehand return), your racket will then go partially back as soon as you turn your shoulders, and the rest of the way back as you step into your shot. You will be ready almost instantly, and you will have also cut out any unnecessary loops with your arm.

To get the feel of the return, stand in front of a mirror or reflective window. Picture yourself facing your opponent. Get into a slightly lower crouch, with your feet wider apart, than you would assume in the ready position for a ground stroke.

You must set your feet several inches further apart on service return—on a particularly hard or well-angled serve you must pivot directly off your feet in order to reach such a serve. By setting your feet wider apart, you increase your reach on the pivot.

Hold your racket in the way you would for a ground stroke, but try to press the back of your upper arm against the forward edge of your rib cage. Now, take your racket back on the forehand as quickly as you can. Your racket and lower arm should rotate on the point where your elbow is pressing against you as you turn your shoulders and hips to help get the racket back.

Notice in the service return photos how the elbow stays tucked in against the body.

See how really fast this motion can be? And from this position, without even moving your feet, you can hit a perfectly good driving, offensive, topspin return.

On the backhand the idea is exactly the same, with the added advantage that now you have your left hand to help you get the racket back. (I hesitate to say that you will ‘‘yank”’ or ‘‘jerk”’ the racket back with the left hand, as such violent sounding words may disrupt your smooth preparation if put into practice too fully. However, you do in fact yank or jerk the racket back with that left hand on service return.) Again, keep your elbow into your side, and see how quickly you can get the racket head back and down from the ready position, turning your shoulders and hips to help manage the motion.

Of course, you will want to move your feet as well, in order to get your weight into the service return. As the server is winding up to deliver, you will want to be bobbing up and down on your toes in the ready position, just as you do on the ground strokes. As the server serves, you must try to turn that bobbing motion into small forward steps if you can, so that your weight is actually moving forward to meet the serve, rather than merely waiting for it. Everything about the service return, if it is to be effective, must be of a forward, aggressive nature. You will be surprised at how much having your weight moving forward will help on the service return. At first, you will probably miss a lot of your attempts: things will be happening too quickly. But once your timing becomes sharpened, you will be surprised and pleased at how aggressive a return you can produce off of heavy serves, especially when you keep your stroke as compact. as possible, using: just a small swing to bring the racket up from below the ball and through it.

One result of moving forward, besides getting your weight behind your return, is that you will be able to take the serve

For service return you want the tightest, most compact and completely controlled swing possible, and a tucked-in elbow will help you produce such a swing.

closer to the ground than if you stayed back. This is especially important when your opponent tries any sort of hopping, “American Twist’? type of serve. (The American Twist is characterized by an excessive backbend by the server, and while the ball will curve toward you from left to right, it will hop back to your left off the bounce.) These types of serves are absolutely wonderful to hit off of, unless you stay back and let them bounce high above your waist before you hit them. If you do stay back, you will have a much tougher time, and you will be giving your opponent extra time to come to the net if he wishes. If you move in on the serve, however—particularly on weak, hopping, second serves—you will be able to hit a more forceful return, and deprive your opponent of time. If your opponent decides to stay back after you have passed him a time or two, you can take the net yourself on service returns, putting further pressure on him.

On the return of serve, then, you will use a very compact backswing to get the racket back quickly, you will move forward to meet the ball as it rises off the bounce, you will watch the ball minutely, and then you will bring the racket abruptly up through the ball to drive it back across the net with heavy topspin. Because so much power is delivered toward you on the serve, you must not let your racket arm wave about on either side. Rather, you want to have a feeling of your shoulder, arm and racket driving up into the ball as a unit, providing a solid mass to power the ball where you want it to go.

There are a number of good places to hit your return. You can drive it by your opponent, making it difficult, if not impossible, for him to reach it. Or, you can hit the ball right at him:

down at his feet so that he must volley up, or directly at him so that he has difficulty producing a full volley. One benefit of the topspin return, besides its being the most penetrating shot you can hit on service return, is that it tends to dip once it crosses the net. This forces your opponent to volley up, rather than down.

You must learn to hit equally well off either side on your return, in order to force your opponent to guess where your return is going. Your ability to pass an opponent coming to net will be reduced almost to zero if he is able to take an extra step one way or another to wait for your consistent reply. So you must learn to vary the direction of your return, hitting with equal confidence crosscourt, then down the line, then right at your opponent, off both the forehand and backhand. If your opponent stays back, you won’t have to hit as low over the net, but you will still want to vary your return to keep him off balance.

The real test of your return will come when your opponent places hard serves into the corners of your court, or when he powers the ball deep and right at you. On the wide balls, you must react as quickly as possible to the direction the ball takes, so that you can get to it with enough time for a full topspin swing. If you are slow, or the serve is very fast and well placed, you will only have time for a desperate effort to get your racket in the way of the ball, perhaps with a short punching volley motion to help get the ball back over the net. This is not going to produce a very forceful return, however, and the best you can hope for is an error from your opponent. Certainly, get the ball back over the net any way you can. But if possible, drive it back with a full, proper swing, so that you unsettle the server’s advantage.

To cut off wide balls, move at right angles to their lines of flight, rather than parallel to the baseline.

Against balls hit directly at you, you must learn to move Smoothly and immediately out of the way. You do not want to retreat. Instead, move to the side as you move forward and turn for the stroke. Watch the pros play and you will see them skitter into position on serve, taking rapid, tiny skipping steps before they get set to hit. On any shot coming toward you, you will have the best chance of producing a forceful stroke if you take the ball out in front. If the ball gets in close, you will have almost no chance to produce a stroke at all. Also, if you are playing a right-handed player, remember that their serve will tend to curve in toward you from left to right, as you see it. If your Opponent serves at your left hip, you must step to your left and take it on your forehand. If you step to the right, trying for a backhand, the curving serve will just follow after you.

You should think about how you want to return before your opponent serves. Decide clearly where you are going to try to hit the ball, whichever side it comes to. This will result in cleaner, more definite responses on each return. Also, you might try to think about how to change your return from time to time. Hit consistently to one side for two or three returns, in order to , open up your Opponent’s court on the opposite side. Then hit

On return of serve, you must watch only the ball as your opponent hits it, not the entire opponent. If you watch all the opponent, the serve will seem to leap at you out of nowhere, and you will do a poor job of returning it.

there. Try changing the pace of your return, and perhaps even the height. If your opponent is a very fast net rusher, stand back a bit further than normal on your return, and at the last moment throw an offensive lob up over him. This type of return may make your opponent a bit wary on his next approach to net.

There is a wide variation in how close to the net players stand for service return. | found that my best results came when | began by standing inside my baseline an inch or two, and moved forward into the court to attack the serve from there. Many very good players stand even further in, or considerably further back. Rafael Osuna won Forest Hills over Frank Froehling in

1963 by standing back six to eight yards behind the court and throwing up towering lobs off Froehling’s huge but unvarying serve. You must experiment to discover where you can best start the return, but bear in mind that you want to move forward to meet the ball no matter where you start, and that the closer in you meet the ball, the less time you give your opponent to get in to the net.

Finally, make sure that you watch just the ball when you are returning, from before your opponent hits the serve to after your own response. Ignore whatever your opponent is doing.

You will be aware of whether or not your opponent is coming in or staying back in any case, and beyond that the only thing that concerns you on the service return is the moving ball. Keep your eyes on it.

You must learn to hit a first-rate, aggressive return, or else you will be doomed to hoping that your opponent will drop serve, rather than making him do so.

All you have to do to win a set of tennis is break your opponent’s serve once, and hold your own serve throughout the set.

Practice the topspin return of serve at least as much as you practice your serve or any other stroke. Your return begins your effort to break your opponent’s serve, and very often his entire game along with it.

This chapter has suggested how to break serve. The next chapter will tell you how to hold it.

With a full, looping backswing of your arm, throw a tennis ball from behind your baseline, overhand, like a pitcher (but with your feet on the ground). Throw it down the length of the court. Now grasp another ball and instead of throwing it forward, throw it up at an angle into the air, so that it passes high over the net as it travels down the court.

With this second throw you have come close to duplicating the proper motion for a forceful, dependable serve.

If you threw the balls with a full pitching motion, you dropped your throwing hand down past your side, then back toward the back fence. At this point you bent your arm at the elbow and cocked your wrist so the ball was two or three inches behind your right ear. You then brought your elbow whipping around and extended it and your arm as you turned your shoulders, snapping your wrist forward and throwing the ball. If you replace the ball with your tennis racket and perform roughly the same action, you will have a good service motion.

The serve uses the snap of your wrist and the extension of your elbow to accelerate an already moving racket head up through the ball, which you have carefully placed in its path.

How hard your serve is depends on how fast you are able to accelerate your racket head, as well as on the usual elements of timing and how accurately you hit the ball in the middle of the strings. How well you direct your serve depends on how well you control your racket face, and also on how well you impart a variation of topspin to the ball.

As on the ground strokes, you must learn to hit up past the back of the ball if you are to have any sort of consistent, hard service. Because of the overhand nature of the serve and the design of the human body, you will not be able to put absolutely vertical topspin on the ball. But you can learn to send the racket up past the ball, the racket striking the back of the ball before traveling off the ball’s upper, right-hand ‘‘corner.” Getting the ball to spin this way will improve your serve more than any other spin, because you are commanding the ball to come back down toward the court after it clears the net.

Every single good server in tennis today, man or woman, hits toward the upper right-hand area of the ball on their serve (or toward the upper left-hand corner if they are left-handed). These players may look as though they are hammering the ball down toward their opponent’s court, but this is an illusion. If the top players were to let go of their rackets just as they made contact with the ball, those rackets would not fly down toward the court. They would go sailing up into the air and off down the court toward the right-hand fence. What makes it look as though the server is pounding the ball down toward the court? He reaches full extension of his arm just after hitting up through the ball, and at that point centrifugal motion takes over, pulling the arm and the server’s body forward and down.

The impact on the serve is up past the ball, however, and not down toward the court. As on the ground strokes, the angle the racket takes on its drive up and forward through the ball may vary from shallow to steep, but in every good serve the racket is climbing. Even the “cannon ball’’ serve is not flat—it would go into the court so seldom as to be useless. Instead, it has enough forward spin on it to give it the characteristic topspin curve down into the service court. A good second serve has much more spin on it because it is hit with less forward motion through the ball, with much more brushing up by the ball—and this allows a far greater clearance and margin for error over the net.

But it too is hit according to the same principle, with the racket face snapping up past the back of the ball and off toward the upper right-hand area.

The heart of the serve is this wrist action, which snaps the racket head trom behind the back, up through the ball.

The face of the racket turns forward as it swings up, so that the ball is driven down the court.

The difference between a first or second serve, then, is the angle that the racket’s line of impact takes through the ball. A second serve involves a steeper climb up through the ball with less forward thrust, while on a flatter, harder first serve, the racket moves forward through the ball on a much flatter plane.

But even here the line of impact travels from the back of the ball through a point above its center, so that the ball spins forline of impact, second “‘spin”’ serve line of impact, first flat’ serve.

Ball on serve viewed from the side.

Ball on serve viewed from the back.

The only difference between a serve and a ground stroke is that on the serve the topspin is tilted at an angle. This is due to the different motion used to hit the ball. The ball will dip toward the court due to its topspin, but it will do so at an angle, its curve from the opponent’s left to right depending on the direction the racket strings take by the ball.

As is the case with the ground strokes, the flight of the racket head through the ball on the serve is a simple motion. You hit the ball on the back, but the racket moves toward the ball’s high hopping ball with little curve.

lower hop with lots of curve if hit with lots of spin.

line the racket face takes past the ball during the hit.

Ball on serve viewed from the back.

upper right-hand corner, as well as forward, through the contact.

Often people will talk about “slicing around the side of the ball”’ or “‘coming over the top.” Neither of these descriptions are accurate, however, because if you actually did what the words say, you would hit the ball toward the side fence and straight down into your side of the court, respectively. People who use these descriptions are confusing the actual hit with the motion the arm and racket must make just after the hit, when they reach the end of the upward swing and start back down toward your left side.

The opposite of the correct serve, which many people mistakenly perform because of the “Shit down”’ appearance of the serve, is a down-the-back-of-the-ball motion with the arm and a locked wrist pulling the racket face down past the ball, probably with a “frying pan” grip used to hold the racket. Unfortunately, this motion will be successful at first, as long as you don’t hit the ball too hard. It is a simple serve, few motions are involved and the racket face points out toward the court throughout the hitting action. Gravity will pull the gently hit ball down into the court for you. As you gain confidence, however, and try to hit harder, you will be forced to hit the ball closer and closer to the net, as the backspin on the ball causes it to try to climb up out of the court. Finally, you will find yourself consistently hitting your serve into the net or long. Very simply, you will have reached the limits of what this “second best’? way of serving can do. The few serves that do manage to go in, just clearing the net and nicking the service line, will be great, but your opponent can grin and bear those few because of the vast majority of hard serves you will miss.

If you can learn to hit up at the ball, on the other hand, the only limits to how hard you can learn to serve will lie with your strength, size and ability to snap the racket head up through the ball. No matter how hard you hit, the forward spin on the ball will bring it down in time.

You may have noticed that there is no mention made here of the American Twist serve. The twist serve is produced when the server arches his or her back to an exaggerated degree, and hits up at the ball in such a way that the ball curves over the net, but then bounces or hops in the opposite direction from that

At the start of the serve, botharms $4 work in unison. PAS curve. This serve can startle opponents, at least at first, but it is difficult to produce, the motion needed to produce it gives it away, it requires a great deal of effort, and it is very easy to return if the opponent simply watches it closely and moves in.

For these reasons | suggest that you try to gain command of the serve discussed here, and leave the twist for others to waste their time and energy over.

Let’s be more specific about the mechanics of serving. Stand at the baseline, two to three feet to the right of the center mark, without touching any part of the baseline or court. (If you do touch it, you are footfaulting—which is cheating. However, you may swing one foot or both feet out over the court as long as you don’t touch down before you hit the ball.)

Set your feet as though you are going to throw something. Your feet should be comfortably apart, the tips of your toes touching an imaginary line running toward the backhand side of your opponent’s service court. Neither foot points in that direction, however, they just touch a line that points there. If it will help, imagine an arrow pointing toward the court. Stand on the arrow with your back foot in line with the feathers, your front foot in line with the point.

You need to use all of the available racket length whenever you serve, to create as long a lever as possible. You don’t want (or need) a hammer grip way up on the handle of the racket. You want to whip the racket through the ball with your wrist, not muscle it. On the serve, then, try holding the racket with the butt of the handle at least even with the lower edge of your palm. And keep your grip loose—similar to the way you would shake your grandmother’s hand.

| The most important aspect of the serve j to understand is that you are not trying to hit down toward the court, but instead are trying to send the face of your racket up the back of the ball, as well as through it. This sends the ball spinning forward, so that it can go up iw over the net and then curve down into “9 the service court. Every top server in ig the world hits with this up-the-back- P| of-the-ball motion.

Use at least a forehand, shake-hands grip, or over even further, toward the backhand. | usually serve with a forehand grip, but | am tall (6’3’’), and the further you go toward the backhand the more spin you will get. Do not hold the racket with any sort of “frying pan”’ grip.

Hold the racket very gently, so your wrist is loose and flexible, able to snap the racket into the ball. A hard serve does not come from taut, tense muscles, but from loose, whippy ones.

(Try tightening up all the muscles in your arm, and then throw a ball. It won’t go anywhere.) To loosen up your arm before serving you might try relaxing every muscle in it, and then shaking it a bit. You’ve got to be /oose on the serve.

Start with the racket comfortably up in front of you, so that you can look—or glare balefully, if you wish—over its top toward your opponent. Your left hand, holding at least one tennis ball in the tips of your fingers—if you use two, be sure to roll the second one forward to your fingertips before using it— will support the racket at its throat.

Now, simply let both hands drop, letting gravity take them down. Once moving, carry the racket back in a smooth arc up behind you, using just enough muscular energy to keep the whole motion moving. Let the length of your arm, rather than muscles, define the shape of your serve: muscles tire and change with exercise, but your arm length will never vary. So use a sweeping motion, with your arm extended, to get the racket through the first part of the swing. Since you are going to want the forehand side of your racket flat toward your back, rotate the palm of your hand, and thus the racket face, toward your right as you take the racket back. (A look at the service photos should make this clear.)

When the top of your racket is pointing toward the back fence—when your upper arm is roughly parallel to the ground— bend your elbow just as you would when throwing a ball. The racket head should continue its arc, but now its radius is from your elbow rather than your shoulder. As the racket loops around behind you, cock your wrist. This will drop the racket head far down behind your back, with the racket’s forehand face now flat to your back. On a good serve, the racket head dips down to the server’s waist, or below, before whipping back up into the ball. But make sure your racket hand does not get directly behind your head, or else it will be difficult to unwind into the hit. The hand should stay several inches back from your head, above your shoulder.

From this point, with the racket far down behind your back, you turn into the hit, just as though you intended to throw the racket up into the air. Your shoulder turns forward and lifts up, your arm and elbow swing forward and extend upward at the

Same time, and then the wrist snaps the racket head up through the ball. Then you follow through. This will pretty much take care of itself if you are relaxed, with your arm and racket coming down across your body toward your left side.

The serve is like a game of crack-the-whip, where the inner parts move fairly slowly, but the person on the end of the whip

—or in this case, the racket head—undergoes great acceleration as a result. On the serve, your turning shoulders combine with your extending arm and in concert, these combine with your

Snapping wrist to whip the racket at great speed through the ball.

At first, when people try the proper grip on the serve, instead of the frying pan grip, they feel sure that they will hit the ball with the forward edge of the racket instead of the strings. And they wi// hit the ball with the racket’s edge, or slice the bali wide into the left fence, if they don’t turn their hand and racket face forward as they snap the racket face up toward the ball. This forward rotating, snapping motion is part of the acceleration of the racket head which allows a hard serve, as well as part of the motion that lets you hit up the back of the ball as you hit forward through it. You hold the racket this way, and turn your wrist, in order to get the fullest possible wrist snap. This important motion is not possible with the frying pan grip, and consequently people who use that grip will not be able to serve as hard and effectively as they should.

A good image for a correct serve would be that of sticking a hand axe into a tree as high as you can reach above your head, except at the last moment you decide to slap the tree with the flat of the axe, turning the blade to the right instead of burying it into the tree.

If you still aren’t clear about the snapping motion, try this:

hold your racket above you, with a grip between the forehand and backhand. But open up your fingers until the racket is held only in the “V’’ between your thumb and index finger, with only your little finger keeping it from tumbling to the ground.

Now, pull down with your little finger and push up with the V of your hand. You will find the racket head snapping up like the long arm of a lever, which it is. Do this motion a time or

The serving motion should be smooth and continuous—without a

“hitch” in the swing.

two, then turn your wrist forward as you lever the racket head up. You are now performing the proper wrist snapping motion for the serve. Of course, in play you will have your hand closed on the racket.

At the same time as you are accelerating the racket head through its swing with your right arm, you must be positioning the ball to be hit in the air above you. Your left hand rides along with the racket during the initial downward drop of the arms. Then, as your racket follows through its full arc behind you, your left hand, with the ball, puts the ball up into the air. Try not to think of “tossing” the ball up, despite this motion being called the “‘toss.’’ Instead, think of “‘putting” the ball up just where you want it, keeping your arm extended after the start of the toss, so that it will act like an elevator carrying the ball up into the air. Be careful not to flip your hand. Just keep everything the same throughout your toss, with no elbow bends or wrist flips, and then simply open your fingers when your arm has gone up as high as you can reach. You want to drape yourself under the ball on the toss, as though the ball is pulling you up into the air.

Also, you must realize just how short a toss is needed. Hold your racket up as high as you can reach, then hold up your hand with the ball. The difference in height between the ball and the center of your racket face is roughly the height your toss should travel.

Picture a shelf floating at the point you reach with the center of your racket at full extension. Now try to put the ball up on that shelf, without bouncing it.

The toss on serve is your one chance in tennis to “tee” the ball up for yourself, and you want to make it good. Practice the toss until you can consistently put the ball up into the correct position—you can do this anywhere—and check your practice by letting it drop clear to the ground. It should bounce just to the right, and a little ahead of your left, forward foot. Don’t toss the ball too far forward. You can begin doing that only after you have completely mastered the proper motion on the serve. Imagine that you have a long-handled hammer, and that you must drive a nail into an overhead beam just within your reach. You would position yourself so the nail is just to your right, above you, and slightly forward of your body an inch or two. To serve properly, you want to strike the ball in this same spot.

Having said all of the above about the toss, let me add that if a student is having trouble getting the proper feel of hitting up at the ball, | will often ask him to purposely toss the ball to a point directly above their heads, so that it would bounce down on top of them if they let it drop. This would be several inches from where the ball should be tossed. But by putting it up directly overhead, the student is almost forced into hitting up at it, if he is to hit it at all.

At the start of the serve, keep your hands in unison as they drop down and travel back up. Then, as your left arm continues up for the toss, your right elbow begins to bend, dropping the racket down behind your back.

A good service also requires a transfer of weight from your back foot to your front during the hit. To understand this transfer, throw a ball down the court while keeping your feet still, but put your body weight behind the throw. Then duplicate what you have done while holding the racket. Your weight should begin on the back foot, or at least move back onto the back foot before the toss and then forward.

One of the best ways to visualize the proper weight transfer on the serve is to reverse your racket, hold !t at the throat, and pretend that it is a javelin. Now, ‘‘throw”’ this javelin down the court, as though you wanted to clear the far fence. Note how you lean back with your shoulders and body before the throw, then bring them forward with your arm as you throw. You want to do exactly the same thing on the serve.

Now try the entire service motion in slow motion in front of a mirror or reflecting window so you can see what you are doing. Then swing faster, snapping your wrist and swishing the racket through the air at the top of the swing. Then, if you have any questions, or think that the service motion doesn’t look right, check back with the book and see if you can’t find a suggestion or description that helps. There are a lot of words here, but they are needed if you are to understand exactly what you are trying to do. Just remember that you are simply trying to throw the racket head up through the ball.

Many people build all sorts of unnecessary and inefficient foot movements into their serves. It is fine to step forward with your back foot after you’ve hit. And most servers bring their back foot up toward their front foot as they reach up for the ball with the racket on the hit. What you want to avoid is moving your left foot at all—you want to be firmly anchored so that you can pivot your body into the hit over that leg. You don’t want to step way forward or far to the side, either. Such a step turns your hips forward too soon; they should help you turn into the hit just before contact. This misstep also puts you in an awkward position for throwing anything. While playing, you may very well step forward with the back foot after the hit, but you certainly should be able to produce a solid serve while

Standing perfectly stationary, only transfering your weight from the back to the front foot. If you can’t serve while standing still, you are almost undoubtedly throwing the ball too far forward.

You must step to catch up with it.

To continue with the learning process on the serve, go through the whole service motion, including that of tossing a ball, but keep the ball in your hand. Do the motion slowly at first, then faster, feeling how it would be if you were actually trying to throw the racket head up through where the ball will be. Then turn your attention to the toss, and practice it. Use your arm like a lever to put the ball up just where you want it, draping your body under the ball as you reach to put it up.

When you can consistently put the ball up correctly, it is time to combine the two motions and begin hitting the ball.

It will be best if we sneak up on the hit at first. Instead of taking a full swing, put the racket down behind your back, your elbow bent and your wrist cocked and ready to snap up into the ball. Put the ball up into the correct spot, and try, very gently, to hit up at it, to brush up its back, making contact with the ball when it is still, at the top of your toss. Send the racket up through the ball to a point just above and beyond it. At this time it doesn’t matter if you don’t hit the ball into the court. What does matter is that you get that forward rolling spin. There are other, easier ways to pop the ball into the court at this early stage, but these will limit how well you eventually serve. So keep working at hitting up by the back of the ball. To learn, you need a bucket of balls, the chance to practice several times a week, and patience. It will come.

Another way of sneaking up on the serve is to skip the proper form for a moment. Hold the racket in that usually forbidden

“frying pan’’ grip, put the ball up in front of you at about eyebrow height, and poke the racket directly up the back of the ball, just thrust the racket straight up past the ball, brushing it on the way. The ball will dribble down in front of you, but it will have the right spin.

Now, take a proper service grip, put the ball up higher above your head, and put a little wrist into your effort. Don’t try to serve—just use your wrist to swing the racket face up the back of the ball. Again, the ball will fall on your side of the net. But you should be able to make it roll forward.

Finally, drop the racket down behind your back, and try a fuller swing. But keep that up-the-back-of-the-ball feel you had on your previous hits. It has been said that the service motion is similar to that of a shot-putter, or to someone doing the Nazi salute. When you combine these two motions with a wristy throwing one, you have the serve: extension of the arm, and then a snap of the wrist, combined with the shoulder turn of a throwing motion.

Now, having performed all these different motions, put the whole action together, using the full swing while still working to hit up at the ball. With practice, the entire motion will be smooth, certain and automatic.

The reason for the emphasis on spin is a very obvious fact which many players try to ignore while serving: the net is in your way. You have to hit up over that net in order to get the ball in. Forward spin helps you accomplish this.

To get the presence of the net fixed in your mind, try serving a few while resting your right knee on the ground. Hit gently, being sure to brush the racket up the back of the ball. Down there, you will see how you must hit up to get the ball over the net at all. Then stand up, and realize that the situation has not changed very much: you still have to hit up, have to put that forward spin on the ball, to get it up over the net and back down into your opponent’s court consistently at any kind of speed. You will get some aid from gravity on your serve, but it is nice to be able to power the ball into the service square rather than having to ask gravity to do it for you.

The source of power on the serve is the action your wrist makes as it snaps the racket up from behind your back, at the same time turning the strings forward to direct the serve down the court. This wrist snap provides the essential acceleration needed to give you the popping impact you want. Once you understand it, a good way to develop this central part of the serve is to stand with your arm raised straight up above your head, the racket slanting back toward the ground from your wrist.

Snap your wrist upward fast enough to make the racket swish through the air as it climbs up toward the high point of your swing. (Many players make their rackets swish as they come down, but here the speed is useless. Your racket must accelerate

Try hitting some balls using only your wrist, keeping your arm raised above your head throughout the swing. Pop the ball as sharply as you can off the strings. At first you produce weak, feeble serves this way, but keep at it. As you get better timing and control, you will definitely upgrade your entire serve. Don’t try this exercise for more than about 10 balls at a time, however. Your wrist might fall off.

At times, you may feel that you are serving perfectly well, and putting the right spin on the ball. But your serves are still going long out of the court or into the net. The problem, if you are serving correctly, probably lies with the tilt of your racket on contact with the ball. The racket must be moving up when it strikes the ball, but at the same time it needs to be tilted slightly forward. This tilt functions on the serve as your open or closed racket face does on the ground strokes: it can vary the height of your serves over the net. If you serve is going long despite its spin, your racket is tilted back too far at contact. If the serve goes in the net, your tilt is too far forward. Make sure, though, that you have enough forward spin on the ball. More spin gives you a Sharper up-and-down trajectory into the court.

A very important part of the serve is to keep your eye on the ball throughout the hit. You will not actually see your racket hit the ball—that happens too quickly. But you must continue to look at the ball right up to the hit not only to know where it is, but also to keep your head up as you serve. There is a very common tendency, especially on hard serves, to pull your head down for “‘extra power.” But this usually ruins the serve—so keep your head up and your eyes on the ball.

Serving is similar to pitching in baseball, in that you want to get the ball to the target but never give the opposition anything that they can hit well against. Serving hard to the wrong place can be just as bad as pitching hard right over the plate. All of the foregoing discussion of spin on the serve is not offered because it will upset your opponent, although the curve and hop of the ball may, in fact, bother him. Rather, spin adds control and power to your serve, both of which certainly will bother your opponent.

You must practice the serve until you have control of the motion, and then you must practice it some more, until you have complete control over where you place it in your opponent’s court. Just as your wrist gives you vertical control on the ground strokes, by opening and closing the racket face, so does your wrist (by turning the racket face) give you left-to-right control on the serve. To serve to one corner of your opponent’s court you do not change your stance, nor do you place the toss in a different spot. You simply turn your wrist one way or the other, slightly, as it snaps the racket head up into the ball. With practice this will become automatic, so that you can think where you want the ball to go and your body will automatically direct it there.

When you practice your serve, set up targets on the court. Your primary target in the forehand court is located in the backhand corner. You must be able to serve consistently to your opponent’s backhand. Being able to serve there, rather than to his forehand, will improve your serve by at least 50 per cent.

Your secondary targets in the forehand court are ones placed on the sideline, short of the service line, and just to the right of center on the service line. You must be able to serve wide to keep your opponent honest, to prevent him from crowding his backhand side. Also, you occasionally want to serve at your opponent’s left hip so that your ball will curve into him, jamming him and preventing a proper swing.

In the backhand court, your primary target is a point just inside the sideline, two or three feet in from the intersection of the service line and sideline. If you can serve the ball here, you

will pull your opponent wide out of the court. Your secondary

targets are a point near the service line, two or three feet in from the sideline—this will put the ball into your opponent’s body—and a point just inside the service line-center line intersection. A ball served here will go wide past your opponent’s forehand.

If you draw lines bracketing these targets back toward the point where the server stands, you can shade out areas of the court where you should try to direct your serve, and leave

blank those where it is dangerous to serve. If you hit one of the

blank areas, you allow your opponent to take his most solid swing at the ball, without having to move to reach it or having it curve in on him. He may not knock every one of these off, but then again, he may, so why give him the opportunity to do so? If you can hit one of the shaded areas, on the other hand, especially if you direct your serve close to the sideline or deep on the service line, you are asking him to deal with the most difficult serve you can deliver, and you will draw many more errors and weak returns as a result. Again, serving is like pitch-

The shaded areas are your prime targets for serving. Most serves should go to your opponent’s backhand, but occasional serves wide to the forehand and into the body will keep the receiver off balance. Server Server ing. Put the ball where you want it, varying the placement and pace, and your opponent will not get a solid swing at the ball.

Be sure to direct most of your serves—at least 80 per cent of them—toward your opponent’s backhand, unless by some quirk it is much stronger than his forehand. You do want to serve to the forehand, and into the body, to keep your opponent wondering as to just where the next ball is going to go, but your bread-and-butter serve must go to the backhand.

In connection with making your opponent guess about where you are going to serve, make sure you execute every service exactly the same way, or else you will telegraph your intentions. The only difference between one serve and the next should be the way your wrist turns the racket face into the hit, and nothing else. Don’t change position, don’t change the toss.

Now it is time to play. If you are playing before you have fully mastered the up-at-the-ball serve, don’t be a martyr. When you are playing a match that is important to you, try to serve correctly on the first serve. But if it doesn’t go in, don’t pout and miss the next serve as well. In such a situation, it is better to tap the ball in, or hit it in underhand, or kick it in—anything

—rather than double fault. Of course, | would ask you to rush back to the practice court after the match to try to master the proper serve. But it is just too painful not to get the ball into play in a playing situation, and when you are learning | would prefer that you get the second serve into play any way you can, rather than double fault and be miserable.

If you do have to tap the ball in, be sure that you tap It toward the backhand. If you have to serve underhand—a perfectly legal serve, as long as the ball doesn’t bounce before you hit it—realize that you can hit quite good serves, even with some spin and pace.

But let’s assume that you have gained at least some command of the serve and find yourself in a playing situation. Experiment and see how much it helps you to serve to your opponent’s backhand instead of his forehand. Try serving a game where you direct every ball to his forehand, and another where you hit everything to the backhand side. The difference in the returns that you will have to deal with should become evident quickly.

Of course, in some instances your opponent may be left-handed, or may have a better backhand than forehand. The rule about serving to the backhand is not written on tablets of stone, but it should guide you until a specific opponent comes along who requires a change in that plan.

If you are a left-handed player, you will benefit even more than most players from the serve-to-the-backhand rule. The left-handed serve toward a right-handed backhand will curve away from your opponent, instead of into him. This forces him to reach even further for a well-placed ball than he would ordinarily. A good left-handed server will curve the ball wide away from his opponent four or five times on the backhand side, serve an ace wide to the forehand to keep him honest, then go back to pounding the backhand. It is madness for a lefty to serve the majority of his serves anywhere but wide to the backhand.

When you are playing, you must not try to clobber the ball on serve before you have learned control to handle it. There is nothing sillier than seeing powerful men or women blast their first serves consistently out of the court or in the net, then use a little patty-cake shot to get the second ball into play. If this is the case with you, take some of the steam off your first serve and strive for control, and then add a little of that steam to your second serve so it isn’t a powder puff. As somebody once said, you are only as good as your second serve. So work on it.

Most good players exert just as much energy and swing the racket just as fast on the second serve as they do on the first.

But they brush up by the ball much more on the second serve, hitting through it far less. This puts much more spin on the ball, so it clears the net by a safer margin while still falling into play.

Good servers also make sure the second serve lands deep in the court, to keep their opponent back as much as possible. And of course, the second serve should go to the backhand.

Although you may only be as good as your second serve, it is better to never use it, getting the first serve in instead. As soon as you miss your first serve, you may notice your opponent breathing a sigh of relief as he steps forward to clobber your second serve. To avoid his increase in confidence and aggression you must get your first serve in, and you might consider hitting a second serve, first, to do this. If you are not putting 70 per cent of your first serves in, you are not serving properly and you should do something about it—such as getting the first serve in no matter how slowly you have to hit it.

When serving, and as an aid to getting your first serve in, do not try to always hit the ball as hard as you can. You will miss too many serves, and you will tire just as your opponent begins to get used to the consistent fast speed. Good players serve quite firmly, but they always keep a little of their service speed in reserve. This enables them to change the pace, and to blow the ball by their opponent when they need to.

You can also disrupt your opponent by serving at a slower speed. If you have been serving consistently hard to your opponent’s backhand through the first part of a match, and are up several points, you might try just popping a soft first serve fairly deep to your opponent’s forehand. Most opponents will whoop with joy at the unexpected setup, swing three times before the ball reaches them, and end up hitting it into the fence. Don’t overdo it—probably once or twice a set is a good amount. Not only do you win the point, but you may completely upset your opponent's timing as well. If your opponent appears hopeless in dealing with this ploy, by all means increase the number of times you use it.

Finally, practice the serve as much as you possibly can, even when it seems to be going well. Your goal is to groove it so solidly that you can hit it smoothly and accurately not only when you are loose and relaxed, but also when you are tight and it is match point. When you get tight, your serve will go off faster than any other stroke, and the only means you have to prevent that from happening is practice. A powerful, accurate serve continually under your control will be one of your most valuable assets, but you will have to work to establish that control.

For most persons, serve is the linchpin of their attack, affecting not only their actual play, but their psychological outlook as well. So work on the serve until it is great, then work on it some more. Get a bucket of balls, and serve at least a hundred serves a day. The serve is a major weapon in your arsenal, the heavy artillery with which you attack your opponent. You want to keep it polished and functional at all times.

The overhead is directly related to the serve. It borrows a portion of the service motion to deal with balls that your opponent lobs over your head. Presumably, you are in the ready position when your opponent hits such a shot. If you are at net, turn sideways and skip back several steps, still sideways. At the same time, lift both arms up into the air and drop the racket down behind your back. The reason for both arms going up is to give you good balance, and to get your attention up toward the ball that is dropping down on you. You can even point at the ball with your left hand if you want. Again, picture someone throwing a javelin up at the ball—this is the ready stance for the lob.

The actual motion of the hit is identical to the practice serve where you did not include the first downward motion of the racket. Simply put the racket.down behind your back, wait for the ball to reach you, then hit it. The secret to a good overhead is position: you must move until the ball drops through the area where you would toss the ball on the serve. In this way you will be able to hit the ball as solidly as possible, exactly as though you were serving from very close to the net. Because of this, overheads are wonderful shots to hit. You get to serve a second time, even after the point is underway.

Since you are usually much closer to the net than on serve, you can hit down toward the court. You don’t want to hit too steeply down toward the court, however, unless you mean to bounce the ball clear over the back fence. If you do hit down steeply, you come dangerously close to the net, and if you don’t hit the ball over the back fence your opponent may be able to hit an overhead back at you. Instead, try to angle your overhead off toward the corners, or deep into the backcourt. You have such a positional advantage that you should have no trouble winning the point through placement, and you must refrain from over-hitting. Far too many overheads are missed because of a great mania that grips almost everyone; they try to pulverize the shot.

If the lob should catch you in the backcourt, or force you there, you must change your plans somewhat. From here the net is just as dangerous as on the serve, and you are not in control of the toss. Instead of blasting the ball, or even expecting to win the point outright, you should try to hit the ball well over the net and deep to your opponent’s backcourt, simply playing it back firmly instead of trying to blast it. If your opponent comes in to the net, however, you may as well blast, because if you don’t he will volley your weak shot away for a winner. Again, don’t absolutely demolish the ball—that will lose you the point—but do hit it as hard as you would on serve, either right at your opponent or past him. If the lob takes you clear behind the court, and your opponent comes up to the net, you might consider dispensing with the overhead and trying a lob. If you are inside the baseline, however, always try to hit an overhead.

On any overhead, make sure that you keep your eyes up and on the ball throughout the hit. The most common mistake on the overhead is to make a tremendous effort, snapping your body and jerking your head and eyes down, so that the ball is missed entirely or mishit off the frame of the racket. Keep

On the overhead get both arms up in the air, then snap the racket head through the ball just as you would while serving.

your eye on the ball, be calm, and sock it firmly but carefully off to a corner, away from your opponent.

Consider yourself in position back at the net again. There are two types of lobs that may be thrown at you: offensive and defensive. A defensive lob, thrown high up into the air to give the player a chance to get back into position, will drop straight down into your court. It is wise to let this sort of lob bounce before you hit it, because nothing is gained by trying to take it in the air, and after the bounce you have an easier ball to deal with, with more time to get ready to hit it. On these shots you want to scramble into position, get your racket ready, position yourself within a yard of where the ball will bounce, move in as It goes up into the air again, and then smack it.

An offensive lob, on the other hand, is low, designed to just go over you and reach the back fence faster than you can chase it down. On these lobs you must backpedal as soon as you see them coming off your opponent’s racket. Many times you will even have to leap up and back, in order to hit them before they pass over you. Otherwise, they will be beyond you. On these overheads, you may often be in trouble, unable to hit a good enough shot to win the point. On such occasions be sure to direct your hit to your opponent’s backhand, forcing him to deal with your reply off his weaker side.

To increase your speed on going back for the overhead, stand sideways at the net and then slide sideways back into the court while keeping your eyes on an imaginary lob. Keep your upper body ready to hit it with the racket down behind your back.

You can even try running backwards. while keeping your upper body turned, ready to hit. Your feet won’t quite be running directly back from the net, but rather will produce an angled scramble that can get you quickly back to reach deeper balls.

Be sure to backpedal a few paces as soon as you see your Opponent about to lob, rather than waiting to see what sort of a lob he produces. It is much easier to come back forward for a short ball than it is to move back at the last moment.

An opponent will lob so he can get back into position, or to try to pry you loose from your dominant position at net. So after you hit your overhead, follow it directly back to the net if you can. In this way, you remain in control of the point.

Finally, if you find yourself bothered by lobs, analyze for a moment the shots from which your opponents are lobbing so successfully. It is very difficult for your opponents to hit deep, accurate lobs when they are running from side to side in the backcourt, dealing with balls hit deep and away from them or deep and right at them. It is much easier to hit lobs off of balls that bounce nicely in the center of the court. If your opponent is producing great lobs, there is a good chance that you are the source of their excellence; you are setting them up with weak approach shots or weak volleys, giving them lots of time to lob accurately. Force yourself to hit your shots, particularly approach shots, toward the corners, or deep and right at your opponents. Then see how well they lob back to you.

You must practice your overhead (so what else is new?) to develop confidence in it. The greatest block to aggressive play among both adults and juniors is often the devastating effect the lob has when they attempt to approach the net. With a good overhead, though, the lob becomes a gift rather than a curse.

The volley is the karate chop of tennis; the short, explosive punch that finishes a well-played point. It is the shortest and most compact of all tennis strokes, yet one of the most powerful strokes when properly timed and executed. It is employed best when you are close to the net, taking advantage of that commanding position. And the stroke is hit with backspin, the opposite of our beloved topspin.

There are three reasons for this. The first is that you can produce backspin (for control), with a short, quick, downward punching motion with the racket, making contact with the ball well out in front of you. Second, the underspin shot will shoot off your strings and stay low in your opponent’s court, tending to skid and forcing him to hit up to you if he gets to the ball at all. (Topspin, which is hard to hit with control against a fly ball, tends to cause the ball to bounce higher, and you don’t want that when you are in at net. Your opponent has a better chance of passing you when he hits off a high bounce.) Finally, if you punch the racket face forward and down the back or slightly under the ball, you can hit forceful shots back over the net from below your side of the net, allowing you to cope with the best dipping shots your opponent can produce.

| think it is a good idea to use the same grips on the volley as you do on the ground strokes: ready position and forehand volley with the shake-hands forehand grip, backhand volley with the knuckle shifted to the left and thumb slanting up the back. The reasons for changing grips on the ground strokes are equally valid here. Because you do not turn as far to the side on the volley as on the ground strokes, though, and reach further forward in front of you toward the ball,your wrists will be laid back further on the forehand side and bent back further on the backhand than is the case with the ground strokes. And often, in the heat of a fast exchange, the amount you change grips will

Punch the ball for crisp volleys, then return to the ready position as soon as possible.

be smaller than on the ground strokes. But try to build the change of grip into your volley; you will be more secure on each side as a result.

The most common failing on the volley is that of taking too big a swing. Assume the ready position two or three paces back from the net, and get in a slightly lower crouch than you would use for the ground stroke ready position. Lay your wrist and racket back, and reach forward, out ahead of your body, to hit. You don’t turn sideways for the volley as you do on the ground strokes. You must reach out to meet every ball coming at you.

From this forward position you punch the racket face forward and down, through perhaps two feet of swing, stopping the racket as soon as you punch down underneath the ball. You volley with an open racket face, and you hit the ball not on the back but slightly underneath, undercutting it. Make contact with the ball at the end of your punching motion, rather than at the beginning, because the latter produces a shoving, throwing effect instead of the desired sharp, spanking impact. The motion of the volley is the same as if you were hammering a nail at an angle with the edge of the racket, but trying at the

Same time to keep your wrist and elbow relatively still through the swing. Your racket, arm and shoulder should move as a unit on the volley, with no slapping wrists or straightening elbows involved. Unlike the ground strokes, you do not want to carry the ball on the strings for any length of time on the volley, but instead want to hit it sharply so that it squirts off the strings.

At the same time as you reach forward toward the oncoming

Volleys right at you are problems until you learn how to get your body out of the way.

ball, you must also step forward to get your weight into the shot before your hit. For a forehand volley you step out with your left foot, for the backhand you step with your right. On low balls, your weight must be forward and down, as far down as you can possibly get.

You must train yourself to move the correct foot only once on the volley. If the ball comes just right, slightly toward your side, step directly forward before hitting. If it is wide and away from you, step across your body, but still slightly forward. And if the ball comes right at you, step only once with the proper foot, but this time forward and wide to the side you are not hitting on. If you get used to doing any other motions with your feet, especially that of picking up your pivot foot a bit before moving the correct foot, then you will not have enough time. Even on easy volleys, where you have plenty of time, you want to prepare as correctly as possible, so you will know what to do when the action is quicker. To become smooth and sure on the volley footwork you should practice at home, as you would learn a dance step, so that your body will know what you are asking it to do.

One of the basic steps on the volley is the crossover step, and for many players it is a less than obvious response to balls that are going to pass you quite wide to either side. Suppose a shot is heading wide past you on your forehand side. The quickest way to cover the ground is to step wide across your pivot foot, the foot nearest the ball, with your other foot—in this case, the left. To cover the maximum distance you must start this maneuver with your feet apart in the proper ready stance, allowing you to pivot. For balls wide to your left, on the backhand side, step across with your right foot, reaching as far as you can first with your step, then with your racket. You will be surprised at how much court you can cover this way, how much more court you can cover than if you step toward the ball with the foot nearest the ball. ; é For the forehand volley, then, on a ball coming slightly toward your side, you will step forward with your left foot, reach forward with your arm and racket, and lay your wrist back so that the racket strings will face down the court. Then,

with your swing starting out in front, you will punch forward

and down with the racket through about two feet of swing, making contact with the ball at the end of that swing, spanking it sharply back toward your opponent’s court.

The backhand volley is much the same as the forehand, only here your left hand can help you prepare. As the ball comes toward you, your weight will be forward on your right foot.

You will reach out with your racket, your left hand still holding it at the throat, and then you will punch forward and down out of your left hand, as though that hand were a bracket for the racket to come out of. You can even try pulling against your left hand with the racket before you punch forward: this will help you accelerate the racket into the shot. However, you want to maintain that short, compact swing. A big swing has no place in the volley.

To get the idea of the backhand volley, hold your hand out to your side, picture paint on your knuckles, and then picture yourself sliding those knuckles and painting a line down under the back of the ball. Then, when you put your racket back in your hand, produce the same motion with your hand and you will find the racket face making a similar downward motion past the ball. On the backhand especially, you do not want to use a Snapping wrist or straightening elbow to help hit the ball.

You don’t have enough strength. Instead, swing your whole arm and racket as a unit from the shoulder, and you will have much better results.

If you have trouble keeping the swing small enough, go stand in a gateway. With the fence to your side, you can’t take the racket back behind your body on the backswing. Swing that way a time or two at balls that your partner gently throws underhand. Then step back, so that you can’t even get your racket back beside your body, but are forced to execute the stroke starting from a point well out ahead of yourself. Once you get the feel for this abrupt, ‘“‘karate-chop”’ shot, you will find that you can hit very hard, with excellent control.

One important thing to keep in mind on the volley is that your racket strings should face out toward where you are hitting, throughout the stroke, without any sort of follow-through. The top of your racket should not point down the court at the

end of your swing. Too often that follow-through results in balls

being carried on the strings, rather than being punched away from them. Players who volley this way often are unable to really spank the ball when they need speed. Nothing is gained

For balls away from you, you use the crossover step, taking a single step across your body with the foot furthest away from the ball.

by turning the strings away from where you are hitting—in fact, to do so you must use too long a swing—so try to keep them facing forward through the short length of your proper volley motion.

Use the volley to hit balls that haven’t bounced, from anywhere in the court. Even if you are away from the net, and for some reason you find yourself hitting a fly ball, hit it with the volley motion. Never try to take a full, topspin swing at a ball that hasn’t bounced if you really want the point. That shot may work for the superstars, but it won’t work consistently for normal men and women.

While you never use a ground stroke swing at a fly ball, there are times when you will use the volley motion on balls that have bounced. The most common instance is when you are approaching the net and your opponent hits a return that bounces in front of you. Such a ball, if hit hard, will be low when you hit it. It is quite hard to use topspin against this shot, especially when you are close to the net. Instead, you want to get your weight forward and down, and punch the ball back over the net with the volley.

Against a player who likes to stay in the backcourt, it is a good idea every now and then to take a ball that you could hit with a topspin ground stroke and hit it with the vo//ey motion instead, even though it bounces. Because of its backspin, the

On either side of the volley is a short, punching motion, with the racket face remaining at the same angle throughout the swing. The swing should stop as soon as the ball is hit, causing the ball to squirt off the strings.

ball will not land deep in your opponent’s court, and with practice you can learn to ease the ball just over the net. This shot will force your adversary into the forecourt. Although he will probably reach the ball, see how well he deals next with your lob or your passing shot. Many who play well in the backcourt, or even well at net when they arrive there by their own decision, will play quite badly at net when jerked up by a ball that you hit short. This is a particularly important shot for both women and younger juniors to master, because many of their opponents will not prove fast enough to attack the short ball. Also note that this short ball will force your opponent to run further than any other shot you can hit from the backcourt.

To learn the short volley shot from the backcourt, have your practice partner throw and then hit some balls to you in the backcourt. Don’t aim at the top of the net, but at some point a foot or two above it. The ball should sail forward toward this point, then drop down and die. And you may as well aim the shot toward the backhand side of your opponent’s forecourt, where they may have a bit more difficulty dealing with the shot if they reach it.

The prime goal of the volley, whenever it is used, is to do something with the ball. You want to hit the ball: deep into your opponent’s court, right at him; deep and wide, away from him in the backcourt or along the sidelines; or else very short and angled at the net. On every volley, make sure that you make it difficult for your opponent to hit his next shot. Whenever you just play the volley back somewhere near the center of the court, giving your opponent a chance to attack the ball, you risk loss of the point.

You must also learn to control the lower volleys, ones hit from below the level of the net. These shots should be hit over the net and deep toward or away from your opponent, or else very short on the other side of the net. It is amazing how a fluttering little volley can still be tough for an opponent to handle, if the ball happens to flutter well away from the dangerous center of the court.

You should spend most of your time learning how to hit the low volley deep. Hitting deep allows you more time to get set for the next volley, and gives you more time to react to your opponent’s hit. It also gives your opponent a great deal of difficulty in hitting your deep, skidding volley back at all. On balls that are low below the net, you are not trying for any sort of screeching winner—they usually can’t be hit from there. But you do want a deep shot which will keep you in control of the point.

don’t volley into the white areas. This would be like say-

On some volleys, you might try turning the racket face open just as you make contact with the ball. This is how you hit a drop shot off the volley, taking the ball coming at you and robbing it of almost all impact against your racket. It barely pops back over the net to die just on the other side. Again, practice is needed, but this is a nice shot to have. Use it, however, only when you have a lead, and your opponent is clearly far out of position back in the backcourt. The drop shot is a ‘“‘grandstand”’ 140 play; it looks very good but can backfire in a crucial situation.

Use it to aggravate your opponent, and to make him run. But don’t use it when you really need the point.

When students first try the volley, punching down and under the ball, they often pop the ball up into the air, or else hit it with so much spin that it hardly goes over the net. As on the ground strokes, your wrist controls how the racket face is angled when it makes contact with the ball, and you must learn to choose the correct angle for each shot. A hard, firm volley, meant to go deep into the court, requires a more vertical racket face than does a shot hit from below the net. As usual, there is a range of possibility here, and you must learn to choose the correct wrist ‘‘setting’’ for different shots.

The changes you must make in the angle of your racket face are much like the different angles that exist in the faces of golf clubs. For higher balls your racket face is only slightly open, like a two- or three-iron. This setting powers the ball firmly toward your opponent’s baseline. For lower balls, you must open the racket face so that you can volley up from below the net. In this case, the racket face is open like an eight- or a nine-iron. Your racket face setting is quite independent from the swing you make with your racket, however. The swing remains roughly the same—a short, downward punching motion—for whatever volley you are hitting. What varies is the racket face.

On high balls, you want to be sure that you don’t close the racket face and try to hit down at the court. Even on high balls you want to reach up slightly above the ball, with an open racket face, and then undercut it, just as you would a lower volley. If you do hit down at the court, you will tend to hita too-high bouncing ball, which your opponent may be able to get to and volley or drive past you easily.

Left and right directions on the volley are controlled by how you align your body, and also by how far back you lay your wrist on the forehand, how far you bend it back on the backhand. Unfortunately, on the volley you do not always have time to get your body positioned so that you can change the direction of your shot while keeping the same stroke. Instead, you have to change the racket face by changing the relationship between your arm, wrist and the racket. At times, this may result in awkward volleys, but because of the speed of the balls and lack of time, you sometimes must give up elegance for the ability to punch the ball anywhere into your opponent’s court, as need be.

If all your volleys should go wide crosscourt at first, as they often do with beginning students, your racket face is not pointing down the court when you make contact with the ball. You are reaching out ahead not only with your arm but also with your racket head. The strings are pointing off to the side of the court before you make contact. You must reach out for the volley, but only with your arm. Your racket face has to be

“looking”? down the court when you hit, if you are going to hit the volley into the court. So, your arm should reach forward for the volley, but your wrist should bend or lay the racket back, roughly perpendicular to the line of flight of the ball.

But even before you volley, you must approach the net. To do this, you need a well-placed ground stroke or serve.

Let us first discuss the ground stroke approach to net. You must get to net behind a forceful, offensive approach shot, or else your coming to net will simply give the point to your opponent. You must do something with your approach shot that will cause your opponent to hit weakly back to you, allowing you to hit your volley away for a winner. If your opponent mangaes to hit a good shot back, one that comes over the net and dips, you must learn to take it easy and volley that ball back carefully. But you will hit it deep, right at your opponent or wide away from him, then take the middle of his possible angles at the net. If he doesn’t hit a second excellent shot, then you volley away a winner. Beginning students are always too eager to try to hit winners on all volleys, instead of ‘‘working’’ the point until they get the “‘sitter’”’ they can hammer away.

But back to the approach shot. A cardinal rule on coming to net is that you cannot possibly hit a shot in the backcourt, wait to see how good the shot is, and then try to follow it in to net.

You will never get in far enough to cover the court. Instead, you must seize on a short ball that your opponent hits, know in your mind that you are going to follow the shot into net before you ever hit it, then move up to the ball and hit that aggressive approach shot.

There are two basic rules to follow on where to hit approach shots, but they are somewhat contradictory:

1. Attack the backhand. 2. Hit all your approach shots down the line. Most players’ backhands are not quite as penetrating as their forehands, not as forceful and not as accurate. This is important when you are playing the net, because there the amount of time you have to reach a ball is crucial. So, it is nice to approach the net behind a shot you have hit deep to your opponent’s backhand.

However, if you have to hit your approach shot off a short ball on your backhand sideline, somewhere up by your service line, the geometry of the court suggests that you might do well to hit down the line; even though you are hitting into your opponent’s strength, their forehand. If you hit the ball crosscourt from close in on your sideline, you have to hit a winner.

angles from down angles from the line. crosscourt.

short ball hit here.

But if you don’t, your opponent has the whole court to hit into. Or, if you manage to move across fast enough, he can just as easily hit the ball behind you. If you hit that short ball down the line, on the other hand, and hit it well, you will be in position at net. After only a couple of steps, you will be in the middle of your opponent’s possible angles. This forces your opponent to thread the needle in order to pass you.

You can hit to your opponent’s forehand safely /f you get the ball deep and very near the sideline. This shot is safer than hitting the ball crosscourt, as it puts your opponent in trouble faster—the ball has a shorter distance to travel—and at the same time you can get into a commanding position at net faster. The crosscourt, however, is safer than missing your shot down the line and hitting to your opponent’s forehand somewhere near the middle of the court: that shot is the worst one you can possibly hit, other than missing the ball entirely. So, you have to learn to hit the ball accurately down the line when you are dealing with a short backhand near your sideline—any where from about your service line on in to the net. But if you can’t hit this accurately, hit the ball crosscourt to your opponent’s backhand and hope that they do not have an accurate enough stroke to take advantage of the open court.

Normally, you would play all of your forehand approach shots down the line, toward your opponent’s backhand. Any backhands that come short but toward the middle of your court should be hit to there as well. Of course, you will occasionally want to hit to the other side of the court, in order to keep your opponent guessing. In general, though, approach to the backhand, except when you are hitting from close to your own backhand sideline, especially on short balls. These shots you will usually want to hit down the line.

To make matters more complicated still, one in every six of your opponents is going to be a left-hander, in which case you must reverse all of these patterns. Of course, against anyone, any winner that you hit is by definition the “right” shot. If your opponent gets himself out of position, hit the ball where he isn’t, no matter what any rules say to do.

As to how to hit the approach shots, the key points are to get up to the ball, take it as it is coming up off the bounce (robbing your opponent of time) and drive it firmly and deeply into a corner or right at your opponent. | would expect you to drive with topspin on any ball that sits up, but on short backhands it might be more effective to undercut the ball with either a punching volley motion or the longer, undercut backhand. The undercut backhand lets you get up closer beside the ball than does topspin, you can lean forward into the shot, getting yourself that much further in toward the net, and the undercut backhand will stay lower in your opponent’s court. This last point is especially important if you want to hit your approach down the line, forcing your opponent to hit up. However, there Is little value in undercutting the forehand approach down the line, because you will lose too much firepower by doing so (in comparison to a proper topspin drive). You might try undercutting the forehand as an experiment in practice, however, to see which shot gives better results. If you are really scrambling forward for the ball you may not be able to hit with proper topspin, and here the shorter volley or undercut motion will serve to get the ball back.

The prime consideration in hitting approach shots is getting yourself up close enough to the bounce of the ball so you can take it on the rise. Jump on those short balls, getting forward to take them as they come up off the bounce, instead of waiting for them to come to you. If you wait, you give your opponent time to get set.

Moving in on the bounce of the ball brings us to the subject of the half volley. This stroke is badly misnamed, as it is not a volley at all, but rather a very abbreviated ground stroke. The half volley is used to hit the ball just after it bounces, when the idea of taking the ball on the rise is carried to an extreme. It is normally used on your way to net, when your opponent hits a ball that lands too far in front of you to volley, yet is too close for you to swing normally.

To produce a half volley, you must get your weight down as close to the ground as possible, keep your eyes glued to the ball and swing with a flat or only slightly rising stroke, two or three feet in length. You should hit the ball just after it bounces, using a firm wrist and your short swing to hit it back deep into your opponent’s court. The shot demands care, since you are below the net and fairly close to it. You cannot hit too hard, as you must not only get the ball up to clear the net, but also back down into the opposite court. So your goal is to get a difficult shot back over the net and deep into your opponent’s court.

To learn the half volley, try standing at midcourt, turning, and then getting your weight forward and down with a step and a deep bend of the knees. Drop a ball, and try to hit it just after it bounces, only an inch or two off the ground. Here the ball is not moving briskly toward you, but it can give you some idea of the sort of brief ground stroke that will enable you to get such a ball back into play. Then have your practice partner either throw or hit balls so that they bounce almost beside you, and try to duplicate your effort.

In topflight tennis, the serve-and-volley sequence is even more common than the important ground stroke approach and volley sequence. In the serve-and-volley game, the player begins his attack with his most carefully prepared and powerful stroke, then dashes to the net in order to take maximum advantage of that aggressive serve. If you can’t or won’t follow your serve to net, at least some of the time, you remove a great deal of pressure that you might apply to your opponent’s game, and as ina.

a result you may never discover the weaknesses that he has. The serve-and-volley is the essence of the big game as played throughout the world today, by champions of every age.

To serve-and-volley well you must begin with a good serve. Your serve doesn’t have to be brutally powerful, but it must be accurate, and it must be under your control. As on the approach shot, you must decide that you are going in to the net behind your serve before you ever hit it, not after. You cannot possibly serve, wait to see if it is good enough, and then get far enough in to net to make an effective volley. Instead, you must know that you are going to go to net before you serve, you must be able to place the serve hard and deep to protect your approach to net, and then you must get to the net in a way that will allow you to cut off your opponent’s return and hit a good volley.

On the serve-and-volley you will allow your follow-through on the serve to carry you forward into the court. As your serve passes over the net you will be sprinting forward as fast as you can, your racket in the ready position in front of you. You are trying to cover as much ground as possible, running down the line that divides your opponent’s possible angles of return off

The half volley requires that you = get your body down to the ball. | And it should stay down through-

% out the shot.

the serve you’ve hit. (Those angles of return change radically between a backhand and forehand return, of course, which is why you must know where your serve is going if you are to serve-and-volley.

The key element in your move to the net comes just as your

Opponent is about to hit his return. As his racket begins to come forward to meet your serve, you must change your forward motion to an instant of pause. As your opponent hits, you must stop running, set your weight down with your feet spread apart, and assume a quick ready position. This is sometimes called the “‘split-step,’”’ and it is absolutely essential if you are to hit your next shot well. You do not stop completely, but rather flow through this point with your feet apart, like a child playing hopscotch. You’ve got to get your feet apart in order to be able to pivot to reach wide returns.

As soon as your opponent hits and you can see where his shot is going, your weight will transfer from your momentary pause over both feet onto the foot nearest the flight of the ball, and your other foot will then step to get you in position and ready for the volley. As soon as you hit your shot, you will run forward again, taking up your position close to the net in the middle of the possible return angles. You have to move forward, to cut down the amount of space open to your opponent for a passing shot. The further you move forward, the more susceptible to a lob you will be, but you counteract this by hitting deep, forcing first volleys, so that your opponent cannot lob accurately over you, and also by perfecting both the ability to scramble backwards quickly for the lob, and the ability to smash the lob away for the winner.

As to the position of your pause before your first volley, on the approach to net, it is not a matter of where you pause, but when. You will want to use all the time available to move forward, from the moment you serve to the moment your

opponent is about to hit, and that length of time will vary de-

pending on how hard you serve and where your opponent stands to receive. If your opponent is returning very well off the hard serves that you hit, part of his excellent return may be the lack of time you have asa result of hitting the hard serve in the first place. Try hitting a spin second serve, making sure that you get it deep in the service square to the backhand, and you will find yourself able to get much further forward for a more effective first volley.

You must practice all the elements of the serve-and-volley game—the accurate, forcing serve, the controlled first volley or half-volley, the decisive final volley from close to the net, and the overhead. And then you must practice the entire sequence as a whole.

Once you are in at the net, you must learn to differentiate between those balls you can hit winners off of, and those you must play back deep or wide, to keep control of the point. At times, you may find your opponent as close in to the net as you are. When this happens, you must keep the ball low and wait for him toyhit a high shot which you can then pound past him or down at his feet. In fast exchanges close to the net, try to hit your volleys at your opponent’s right hip, or else down at his feet, as these are the toughest spots to volley from effectively. In such a situation the paramount concern is to watch the ball: you don’t have time to watch anything else. Also, you must snap back into the ready position after each volley, so that you will be ready to go instantly in either direction for the next ball. Don’t try to guess—be ready! Far too many novices don’t get back to a good neutral ready position, but wait for the next shot slightly favoring the side from which they have just hit. This is a disaster in any sort of quick exchange.

The only way to learn the proper speed of reaction and readiness on the volley is to stand in with someone else and volley back and forth over the net as quickly as you both possibly can. Keep the ball going, and force yourself to hit and get ready faster and faster.

A very useful shot in head-to-head confrontations at the net, or when you have brought your opponent in to the net witha drop shot, is the lob volley. This shot is produced with the short, punching volley motion, but you open the racket face way up, to pop the ball up into the air over your opponent’s head. This forces him to turn and run back for the shot, leaving you in command at the net. The lob volley is a wonderful shot—except when you hit it too low, setting up your now-smiling opponent with a killing overhead. The lob volley, like the drop shot, is a grandstand shot, one that is a great deal of fun to get away with, but also one that you don’t want to try on a crucial point unless you have total confidence in your ability to hit it.

It is a shot that you need to practice before you try it out on your local tennis enemies.

Finally, some tennis players experience a great deal of fear when they find themselves close to the net, facing their opponent’s attack. The easiest way to overcome such fear is to practice your volley, and the proper way to deal with balls that come right at you. If you watch the oncoming ball continuously, you will be able to protect yourself with the racket. With practice, your reaction time will improve, and you will be able to volley that dangerous ball back effectively. However, you must remember that the key word here is practice.

To learn tennis, you must set up a regular practice schedule for yourself. This practice time should be separate from your playing time, and you should go out onto the court in quite a different frame of mind from when you play.

In practice, your goal is to repeat the correct stroke in the correct direction enough times so that it will become natural and automatic. Any stroke, no matter how bad, will feel “natural” if you hit it enough times. So you must make sure that you are practicing the correct strokes. In practice, you will use your conscious mind to form and control the strokes you hit. After sufficient practice, you will be able to relax mentally and produce the same strokes, simply and automatically, when you play. Practice has to be a regular, repetitive effort, because it is only through such repetition of the correct movements that those movements become grooved into your mind.

Any sort of arrangement where you hit a lot of balls a lot of times will prove helpful: dropping the balls and hitting them,

Speer.

hitting against a backboard or return net or wall, having someone throw to you, hitting with someone, even swinging your racket in front of a mirror—all of these will help you progress in gaining command over the strokes.

If you were one of my students, however, | would be a bit more specific. For ground stroke practice, | would ask you to warm up carefully with a practice partner, and then attempt to keep forehands going to backhands on each side, forehands crosscourt, and backhands crosscourt, for 5-10 minutes in each direction. | would want you to go through this drill each time you came out to practice. You would try to hit as firmly as possible while maintaining consistency. If you should find yourself missing, you would slow down the pace of your shots until you regain consistency. Then you would increase the pace again. At first, you would find this drill quite difficult to do, but very quickly, if you kept at it, you would gain excellent control over the strokes involved.

After the ground stroke series, | would have you both come up to net, in order to practice volleying for quickness. Both of you would strive to keep the ball in the air, hitting first for control, then for more power. | Next, | would have each of you hit 20-30 overheads in turn, while the other player threw up lobs. About halfway through, | would ask the person doing the lobbing to alternate lobs with low drives, forcing the player at net to practice dealing with both shots, since aggressive backcourt players will use these shots in play.

Then | would ask both players to practice the serve and service return. One player would aim 20-30 serves at one of the three targets we mentioned in the service section (backhand corner, into the receiver’s body, wide beyond the receiver’s forehand), while the other worked at returning—first down the line, then crosscourt. In this drill, the server would ignore the returns, so that he could concentrate on developing the grooves his mind must have to produce those serves accurately in competition.

Picking up the pace, | would ask each player to serve 10 balls to the forehand court and then 10 to the backhand, while attempting to come in and volley behind each serve. Of course, in this drill the server would practice placing the serve to his opponent’s backhand, controlling the first volley deep to the baseline, then putting away the next volley.

Then | would ask our two practicers to play a friendly set or two. In this play | would want both players to forget all about the work they had just completed and instead simply play, trying to win the points but not think about the details of stroke production. The one artificial suggestion | would hope they might follow would be that of alternating one pattern of play for another each time they lost a point. That is, very often a player will be reluctant to use a technique they have mastered in practice, because they are not used to utilizing it in the playing situation. They prefer to fall back on what they are familiar with. If this were the case, then to ease in to using a new, more effective pattern of play, they should alternate that pattern with their older habits. They should serve and volley, for example, until they lose a point, revert to serving and staying back until they lose a point, and then go back to serving and volleying. In this way, a student can practice a new pattern of play but still work to win the match they are playing.

When you play, you may discover a certain shot that you don’t like having to deal with, or find difficult to handle. Be

Sure to arrange to hit lots and lots of exactly those shots in practice. They will not go away if you ignore them, but their difficulty will disappear or diminish if you practice dealing with them.

Also, whenever you play a practice match—or a real one— force yourself to try to reach every ball, no matter how far away or difficult to reach. You will surprise yourself with how many of these balls you will get to, and you will build your strength and speed even on the ones you don’t reach. This sort of hustling will teach you how to scramble after a ball, an art you will never learn if you never try.

With thought, you can work out practice routines that are best for you. Some people relish three and four hours of drilling a day, while others would die on such a regimen. Whatever you do, you want to have a balanced routine, covering all the shots each time you practice, emphasizing work on the ones you need to improve. Certainly, you would want to do extra work on your own, outside of these practice sessions, such as serving a hundred balls a day toward targets, practicing lobs to get an idea of the length of the court, stroking and volleying against a backboard etc., etc. The idea is to do whatever is necessary to develop your game, and then a bit more to develop it faster.

And again, recall what was said in the third chapter on how we learn. In tennis, your development will not be a smooth upward climb, but instead will take the form of aseries of plateaus.

Because of this you must practice diligently, and not give too much critical attention to how much the practice is improving you. That improvement is taking place, and will show itself if you just keep at it...

If you want to make some progress at tennis, you really must schedule the sort of practice session I’ve outlined into your life, at least three times a week. Anybody intent on improving rapidly will certainly work out every day, as much as they can and still feel fresh and eager. (A day off every other week as a

“breather” is not a bad idea, either.) Schedule six months of this sort of practice into your life, and by the end you will have a firm grasp on how to produce correct tennis strokes.

However, correct tennis strokes do not automatically make you a good tennis player. They give you the means to become one. Armed with your good strokes, you must seek out the best possible play you can find, so that you can learn to use those strokes in effective patterns of play. There are many levels to the game of tennis, and just as you feel you’ve got the last one licked, the next looms ahead. But that is a large part of the fascination of tennis, the discovery of each level of the game and becoming equal to it. : Realize too that you can find excellent play among people who are weaker than you in competition. There is no need, ever, to sit around just because the players available are below you in ability. If you are asked to play by a lesser player, accept gladly, give them the joy of playing against you, and on your part practice as intently as you can against their less pressing attack. To get the best possible competition, you and your opponent may want to set up a handicap system, where you give him points in each game.

Proper tennis practice, however, goes beyond hitting tennis balls with a racket. Good tennis requires a body able to meet the demands of play. If you are to play well, you will want to devote some time to getting your body into condition.

Most good players run two or three miles several times a week, to build endurance. They will also drill for speed on the court. One good exercise consists of running a race against your practice partner. Each of you starts opposite one another,

Standing on the baselines of the court, halfway between the center mark and the sidelines. Holding your rackets, you each run from your starting point in toward the center strap, touch the net with your racket, then backpedal along the other side of a giant ‘‘V”’ back to the baseline. Repeat the entire ‘“V”’ 10 times, see who wins, and then collapse. If you do this exercise

Once or twice a day, working as hard as you can for speed, you will soon find yourself in excellent shape.

It really doesn’t matter what sorts of drills you think up, as long as you do them. To improve your conditioning, you have to work to exhaustion, and then work a little more. It is that

“little more’ beyond exhaustion that makes you stronger.

Sit-ups are important, to give your torso the strength to twist and reach and bend throughout a long match. Kangaroo jumps—knees coming up to your chest as you jump in place— aid in building leg strength and leaping ability. Do them in units of 10-20 at a time, several times a day. A prolonged series of crossover steps, where you stretch as wide as you can to one side, then recover without moving your pivot foot if you can, then go wide to the other side, help you with your speed and reach at the net. Jumping rope improves your agility and ability to take the quick little steps that are needed for proper positioning in tennis.

In any of these sorts of exercises, it is better to do lots of small units of them throughout the day or week, rather than putting in one huge workout that kills you. And be sure to do your distance running and jumping exercises on tracks or grass or other soft surfaces. Tennis players take enough pounding from the court when playing, so there is no need to subject yourself to the pounding of a hard street or sidewalk when exercising as well.

Many people find that a mild routine of weight lifting and exercising is beneficial. Use a 10- or 15-pound weight, preferably one in each hand, and do three sets of 10 motions once or twice a day. Your motions could include your arms up curling toward you, thrusting them up over your head, lifting from behind your shoulder as in the serve, lifting your arms out to the sides, etc. The idea is to exercise your body in a general way with light weights, doing series of repetitions. This will increase your shoulder, arm and wrist strength, keep your muscles in general tone, but avoid the bulking of muscle that is common when major efforts are put into lifting truly heavy weights.

Some therapists believe that regular lifting of light weights will aid in preventing or reducing the effects of tennis elbow by conditioning the whole arm to the impact of the strokes.

Whenever you practice, play or exercise, do a complete series of stretching exercises first. Be sure to warm up slowly, and always wear a track suit at the start and finish of your activities on cold days. Don’t ever be so foolish as to attempt full-scale play without such a warm-up period. Your body may punish you severely if you ask it to work while it is still cold. (One pet peeve of mine is the way so many people will try to show their heroic stature by blasting that first serve of the day as hard as they can, and of course missing it badly in the process. Why in the world wouldn’t you start serving as gently as you can, but making sure that each ball goes in the court? That way you would get warmed up, and also have positive feedback about how well your serve is going in. No touring pro would ever start serving as hard as most hackers do.)

In its fullest sense, the word ‘‘conditioning”’ also applies to what you must do with your mind to play tennis. You must train your mind to expect to win, to insist on winning. It is said of Billie Jean King that throughout the year before she won her first Wimbledon she spent five minutes every night repeating “| can win Wimbledon!”’ Through much of your tennis career you will find yourself in competition not only with your opponent, but with your own mind. All too often a player’s strokes, his tennis game, will carry him to the brink of victory over a better player, and then his mind will say, in effect, “Hey, | really shouldn’t be doing this,” and suddenly he loses, for no good

reason at all. This has happened to everyone who plays tennis,

but those players who become better learn to overcome their minds, learn to expect to win and then go on to win. Most tennis matches are “‘lost’”’ rather than “won,” and most of the losers are beaten by themselves far more often than by any opponent across the net: they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

In connection with training your mind, there is an interesting book available in paperback called Psycho-Cybernetics, by Dr.

Maxwell Maltz. It is not involved with tennis, but with the idea of positive feedback, and what it can do for any human endeavor. It also has much to say about negative feedback, and how common and crippling that human activity can be. The book is written in tones of the hard sell, but buy a copy anyway, and see if it doesn’t give you some ideas to pursue for your own mental conditioning.

The point of Psycho-Cybernetics, and of Billie Jean King’s five-minute drill is the development of confidence in your own abilities. In effect, Billie Jean was self-hypnotized into the state of confidence necessary to win Wimbledon. All your practice of stroke production and your work at conditioning not only helps you develop those strokes and your body, but it also improves your confidence in each. You’ve got to have that confidence if you are going to get the most out of your tennis game, and you must work to build that confidence, through positive thinking, instead of tearing it down by giving way to the negative thoughts that prey on us all.

A great stroke, or a great tennis game, is great in part because the possessor of that stroke or tennis game is totally confident about his abilities: he Rnows that he can come through time after time after time, because he recognizes the evidence that he has done so in the past, and believes firmly that he will continue to come through with great shots when needed in the future. A less able player, who may possess roughly the same stroke, will still worry about whether or not he will have that stroke tomorrow or the next day, will wonder if it will work as it should, and as a result, barely has the stroke in question today.

Many people in the world could play far better tennis than they do, with exactly the same equipment they currently have, if they were just confident in their abilities. Lack of confidence produces timid, tentative shots in situations where the player has the equipment to produce first-rate shots. Lack of confidence produces a losing outlook in situations where the player should be able to win.

If you are wondering if this process of self-hypnosis is actually found among the top players, read the following quotes from three of the best players in the world (January, 1976 issue of Tennis I/lustrated), about how they prepare for a match.

“| tell myself that I’m going to win. But | do more than that. | believe it ... On and off the courts, | remind myself that I’ve got the shots, the know-how, and that I’m good enough to win... 1 also do a lot of thinking about how | plan to win. | talk to myself about what shots to use, and what the

“Hours before | go out to play, | perform a mental dress rehearsal. of what the match will entail. | run through in my

‘mind every possible thing that will or could happen on the court... 1 actually play part of the match in my mind, developing situations from the first serve and how the point will

“Here’s how | talk myself into the right attitude: | sit down and think about what I’m going to do, and who | am going to play, and how I’m going to play them. Thinking about the play that is coming up—what | can do, what my opponent can

do—stimulates me ... Thinking about winning makes me want

to win. Most top players have that same attitude—they want to

You’ve studied the preceding chapters, worked on your strokes and perfected topspin on the ground strokes. You are hitting up on the serve, punching down the back of the ball on the volley and you know where the middle of your opponent’s possible angles are. Now you would like to play. Not only that, you would like to win. Good. Join me for a couple of games, and listen in on the thoughts, actions and reactions that can go on during a match.

Let us imagine that | am to play against a stranger. If this were a tournament, | would try to watch him play an earlier round, to see the sort of game he has, what weaknesses or tendencies his game might have. Even a well-hit shot is less effective if you can anticipate it in some situations.

The evening before our play, if it was obvious that | would have a tough match, | would spend some time ‘“‘psyching up,” going through my personal routine of mind conditioning for the match ahead. Over years of tournament play, I’ve found that the 160 best results came if | sat quietly for five minutes or so, repeating

the phrase “I can, | must, | will win,” trying as hard as | could

to picture my opponent and his game, and why each of these statements was true.

After a few minutes of repeating this phrase, | would spend some time picturing each of my strokes working as | wanted them to: first serves going in deep to the backhand, topspin ground strokes working to all corners of the court, successfully passing my opponent at net, volleys being punched deep to the lines. Then | would add in any commands that seemed pertinent: “You will keep quiet throughout the match.” (Ever notice how easy it is to begin talking or yelling to yourself when you miss, but also how such talk seems so often to go hand in hand with a losing effort?) ‘““You will hold serve.” ‘You will concentrate throughout the match.” “Nothing is going to disturb you.” “You will reach every passing shot your opponent hits,” etc. | would spend about 10 minutes going over these commands, | would try to work out a plan of attack for this particular match, and then | would put the whole matter out of my mind. It is easy to overdo such psyching-up, with the result that your play becomes nervous and flighty. Everyone has to work out their own systems for the best results.

The next morning, before the match, | would get a friend to warm me up, rallying all the shots back and forth for 15-20 minutes. | wouldn’t try to hit hard at first, but instead attempt to hit the ball firmly in the middle of the strings, trying to get each stroke to make solid contact with the ball, and also working to establish a good rhythm. | would practice serves as well, serving the first six or eight very gently, but making sure that they land in the backhand corner of the service court, then picking up the pace. At the end, we probably would play a game or two, and | might spend a final few minutes hitting my favorite shot, to get it fully warmed up and grooved. (For me, this happens to be the backhand crosscourt, hit very sharply from my end of the court toward my opponent’s side line, inside the service line.) After this | would change shirts if I’ve worked up a sweat, and put on a track suit.

Just before the match, | would try to get off by myself for five minutes and sit quietly. | would also repeat most of the commands from the night before, only in a briefer edition. | would also go over my plan of attack for this match, reviewing all my ideas on how to play this particular opponent effectively.

(It is very important to get your mind fully onto the match before you, with everything else tuned out. The worst mistake of all before a match Is to sit watching another match—especially if it is a poorly played one—or sit and chatter with friends. This can drain you of your energy and fine edge quicker than almost anything else, and should be avoided at all costs. You need all your concentration and energy to achieve good tennis, and you must begin your concentration before play begins.)

Fianlly, it is time to play. My opponnet and | introduce ourselves over a handshake, then spin a racket to see who gets choice of serve or side. My opponent wins the spin, and chooses to serve first. | check where the sun is, and decide to take the court with it in my eyes to receive, so that | can begin serving on the opposite side with the sun at my back. (The opposite would be to have my opponent start serving into the sun, If | thought that it would affect him more than me, and allow an early break.)

We take as long a warmup as allowed—usually five minutes— each hitting ground strokes, volleys, and a few overheads. As we hit, | am trying to learn anything more that | can about my opponent’s game, whether or not he seems to be weaker on one side or the other, where he tends to hit his overhead, how he volleys off each side, etc. But he has no glaring weaknesses, and looks pretty good, in fact. | don’t worry about that yet, though, because so often people look like world-beaters while rallying but can’t play worth a damn.

After we each warm up our serves at the same time, my opponent indicates that he is ready by holding up the balls. | nod that | am also ready, and play begins. | stand at about the baseline, feet well apart, positioned in the middle of the possible angles my opponent can hit on the serve. | am facing him, in a fairly low crouch. My weight is forward on my toes, heels are slightly up off the ground, and | fix my eyes on the ball in my opponent’s hand before he begins his toss. As the ball goes up into the air, my body moves a few inches from side to side, rocking, and my feet come just off the court, getting my body into motion before the ball is hit. As my opponent hits his serve

| am going to take small steps forward, instead of just lifting my feet in place, as | want to play aggressively, especially on these first few points, and to do that | must have my weight forward for the return. | must attack the ball.

My opponent hits a very good first serve, powering it deep toward the backhand corner of my service court.

As | have watched just the ball on my opponent’s toss, | see as early as possible where he has hit the ball. As he swung up into the hit | was taking those small steps forward, and as soon as | see where the ball is going | take several more steps forward and toward the backhand side, at the same time getting my shoulders turned and my racket back. | do not do any sort of a loop with the racket—there isn’t time—but just snap it back and down. As the ball bounces | am set, weight out over my front foot, racket back and down, eyes still glued to the ball. As the ball comes up off the court, | am swinging the racket forward, to take it as it is coming up off the bounce.

| am aware of my opponent following his serve in to net, even though | am watching only the ball, and automatically my body reacts to this information. | catch the serve as it comes up, at about waist height, and experience the wonderful feeling of solid impact. My racket, moving forward and up through the ball, makes contact well out in front of me and takes command of the ball with heavy topspin.

With the opponent coming in | take the ball far enough out in front that my racket strings face my opponent’s backhand side at contact, and | close the racket face slightly, so that the return will not only go to his backhand, but will also just skim over the net. The ball then dips, forcing my opponent to volley up if he reaches the shot.

There is no conscious instruction going on as | adjust to return serve. At most, my conscious mind has only a shadowy feeling that a low, dipping return to the backhand might work out well in the developing situation. My body is responding to the situation at hand, its decisions based on the results learned from facing similar situations hundreds if not thousands of times before. It is all quite automatic.

Everything works out quite well. My opponent is not in as far forward as he would like to be—by moving in, | have deprived him of the extra time he would have had if | stayed back—and he is forced to stretch far to his backhand side to reach the ball, just inside the service line. He volleys up from below the level of the net.

Following my return, which I hit well inside the baseline,

| have moved forward. | know that it was a good return, and | can see how far my opponent will have to stretch to reach the ball. From there he can only hit a weak reply, and | move forward aggressively. My opponent tries to guide the volley back down the line toward my forehand, hoping that he can get back into position and knowing that this shot will require the least number of steps to do that. But | am on top of the ball by this time, volley it away crosscourt before he has a chance to move back at all. Love-15.

My opponent, trying too hard in the face of my unexpectedly strong topspin return on the first point, belts his next serve long. He then hits his second serve with a great deal of spin, for safety, and it clears the net by a wide margin. But it does not come particularly deep into my court. I’ve moved forward a foot or two to take up my ready position, as | would against any second serve, and as the ball comes toward me | have a sudden intense vision of how | am going to annihilate the return.

Wrapped up in this thought | fail to move forward properly, the ball kicks quite high off the bounce, and my mighty return turns into a pip-squeak shove against a shoulder-high backhand ball. All this time my opponent is getting tight in on the net, and it is his turn for an easy volley winner. Fifteen-all.

On the next point, back in the forehand court, my opponent elects to serve wide to my forehand. It is a good serve—he changes nothing but the racket face at impact—but again, because of watching just the ball, | see it early and manage to reach it. | have a choice now: | can try to hit a winner down the line, or hit a safer forehand back crosscourt. The down-the-line had better be a winner, because if my opponent reaches it close in toward the net, he will have all the court to my left to volley the ball into, and | may not be able to catch up with it. The crosscourt is safer, because it gives me a moment longer to get back into court from where his serve has pulled me—the crosscourt will cover more distance before my opponent gets a chance to hit it—and he cannot hit the ball as far away from me because his forehand volley is more limited by my backhand sideline than his backhand volley would be.

The situation extracts a crosscourt from me. | hit the ball with topspin, firmly but not excessively hard, so that | can keep control of it and make it dip low over the net. I’m in trouble on this point, as | am almost out of the court when | hit, and | have to hit a good, low return to stay in the point. My opponent is quick, and he does get to the ball. But again he is forced to volley up from below the net. I’ve been scrambling sideways back toward the middle of my opponent’s possible angles as my shot traveled away from me, and by the time he hits | am able to pause, ready to go either way for his shot. Because | hit crosscourt, | did not have to scramble as far to get to the middle of his angles as | would have if | had hit down the line. My opponent chooses to hit the ball down my backhand sideline. He hits his volley close to the sideline, but not as deep toward the baseline as it might have been. | get to the ball, and because of its short length, have time to get set for my favorite shot, the topspin backhand crosscourt. | feel lucky to still be in the point, considering how it started, and | decide to take advantage of my opponent’s short volley by really belting my next shot, by ‘‘going for it.” | drive the ball easily past my opponent at net, who didn’t quite position himself far enough toward the middle of the court, as though he expected me to go back down the line. The crosscourt is my preferred shot, and | will continue to hit it consistently until my opponent appears to be waiting for it. Then I’ll make a point of going down the line several times, trying to catch him going the wrong way, forcing him to guess rather than know what | am going to do. And in the middle of switching back and forth for passing shots, | will also try to remember to throw up several offensive lobs, to keep him guessing even more. Fifteen-30.

This is the most important point of the game, statistically. If

| can win this point, | will have two chances to win the game, while my opponent must win both the next two points just to get back to even. If | lose this point, on the other hand, things will be even at 30-all, and we have an equal race for the game.

My opponent serves to my backhand, and elects to stay back.

| hit the return firmly, but highly over the net, so that it will carry deep. | hit the ball crosscourt, to his backhand, and he returns the ball deep crosscourt to my backhand. | hit the ball back the same way, and then, happily, my opponent commits one of the basic mistakes of tennis. Instead of hitting the ball back crosscourt, or else firmly and accurately down the line, he hits it vaguely toward the center of the court, so that it actually comes toward my forehand. And worse for him, having done this, my opponent prepares for my return by getting ready back in the same spot—slightly to the left of center in his court—as he did when | was hitting a backhand. The angles available to me have changed drastically with my opponent hitting to my forehand in the center of the court, but he doesn’t seem to be responding to this.

| pounce on my opponent’s mistake, moving forward, taking his shot on the rise after the bounce, and driving the ball crosscourt as firmly as | can with control. | hit the ball as wide as | can, so that it will cross his sideline after the bounce rather than his baseline, forcing him to have to run as far as possible from his incorrect ready position. And | follow my shot in toward the net. I’ve got my opponent in difficulty now, and | want to take advantage of it, not just wait in the backcourt to see what happens.

My opponent, because of being a step or two out of position to start with, gets to my shot on the run, and wisely decides to throw up a lob, to give him time to get back into position for my next shot. As he reached the ball | stopped my forward run, pausing instead in the split-step position, and as soon as | see him lifting the ball up into the air | turn sideways, cock the racket back behind me, and dance back several paces. Then as the ball climbs to its peak and begins to drop down | continue to dance, moving myself into position, so that when the ball finally gets to me | will be set to hit it as though | had tossed it up for a serve.

My opponent has thrown up quite a high lob, but it is not as deep as he would want. Instead of hitting the ball in the air

| let it bounce, since it is coming straight down and my opponent has had plenty of time to get back into position. But from the service line my angles on the overhead are too severe for him to cover, and | angle the ball wide off the backhand side of his court. Fifteen-40.

“Well,” | say to myself, ‘I’ve only got to win one of the next two points to take the game.”’ Error, error, error! As soon as you notice yourself thinking something like “‘Gee, I’ve only got to win one of the next three points,” or “‘All I’ve got to do is win one of the next four games and I’ve got this set,” you must realize that you are on the verge of trouble. You are in competition with your own mind as much as with your opponent at moments like this, and if you think of getting only one of the next several points or games, you are unwittingly cutting your effort into thirds or fourths. Your opponent, on the other hand, is thinking ‘‘Damn, I’ve got to get each of these next points just to stay in this bloody game.’’ And he probably will get those points, unless you are fully determined to get this game, this point, right now.

Realizing my error, | banish all thoughts of having a comfortable lead, watch my opponent’s ball on the toss, and get ready to handle it, no matter where it may go. It is again a good serve to the backhand, and | decide, with a sense of having a good feel for the ball today, to try something different. | don’t step as close as | normally would to the ball, and | let it get a little further back beside me than normal. Then | hit it with a full topspin swing, but | drive it back past my opponent’s forehand side, rather than toward his backhand. Reasonably, since I’ve hit all those other shots to his backhand, my opponent hedges toward that side as he comes to net, and | get the point on my return. It is a fairly lucky shot, but it works. And I’m careful not to indicate that it is anything out of the ordinary for me: might as well put as many nails in the coffin of my opponent’s confidence as possible.

We switch sides, and it is my turn to serve. I’ve got the break, but now I’ve got to hold my own serve to confirm and maintain my lead. All too often, players break their opponent’s serve, and then are so happy over this feat that they fail to hold their own serve in the next game. At this point, I’ve actually won the set by breaking, but I’ve got to hold my own serve for the rest of the set to claim it.

| make a point of keeping my eyes on the ball on the toss, so that my head stays up, and | stretch up after the ball for the hit. This is a first serve, so | drive the racket on a flatter plane through the ball than | would on a second serve, sending the racket face forward as well as up through the ball, to drive it down the court with speed while still putting enough forward spin on the ball to bring it back down into the service court. | hit a good serve, solid and deep to the backhand corner of my opponent’s service court. My weight, leaning into the serve, follows through and carries me forward toward the net. Just as my opponent begins to swing his racket into the return, | switch from running forward to a momentary ready position, my feet splitting apart, my knees bent.

My opponent hits a good return off his backhand, sending the ball low across the net toward my backhand corner. As soon as | see the direction the ball takes off his racket | continue moving, but now I pivot on my left foot and leg, and swing my right foot across and forward so that | can reach the ball. My foot is firmly back on the ground as the ball passes the net, | reach forward slightly with the racket, and then I punch forward and down. | hit a good volley, the ball snapping off my racket, deep to my opponent’s backhand corner.

My volley, like my split-step before, has involved only a pause in my rush forward, and as soon as the ball is hit | continue toward the net as fast as | can, to take up the ready position in the middle of me opponent’s possible angles before he hits the ball. Just as | had to cut left to reach his return, | now have to swing back to the right, to get to the middle of his angles, slightly to the right of the middle of the court. | get in as close to the net as | can, in order to cut down how far | have to reach to cut off a ball sent down one or the other of the angles open to my opponent.

My opponent, scrambling to get to my deep volley, decides not to try a passing shot. Instead, he throws up a good lob, low and offensive. My weight is moving forward and down into my ready position at net, and the shot is easily over me. This is the risk you must accept when getting in close to the net, and my only defense in this case would have been to hit a still deeper or more sharply angled approach shot. | don’t even try to hit the ball as it sails out of reach over my head, but instead turn and run back into my backcourt as hard as | can. The ball goes crosscourt, nicely hit from my opponent’s backhand corner to mine, and | take it with my own backhand after it bounces, where | catch up with it well behind my baseline.

Whenever a player is successful at lobbing over his opponent’s head at net, and pries that opponent loose from the net, he must immediately take advantage of this good play by moving in to the net himself. Otherwise he has wasted a good chance to win the point. | now assume my opponent knows this, so | counter with a high, defensive lob.

As | turn and get back toward the center of my own court, just back of the baseline, | see that my opponent has indeed come in to the net. And | also see that my lob isn’t going to go deep enough to be effective: it is going to bounce somewhere just behind my opponent’s service line. | am virtually out of the point, as his angles from there are too good.

Since | am out of the point, | decide to create asmall ambush. As my opponent moves back for the overhead, | make a show of getting ready at the center of my court, then | ostentatiously skip to my right, as though I’m guessing he will hit the ball there. My movement catches my opponent’s eye for a moment, then as he actually hits the ball, | sprint to the left. Bingo! My opponent hits his overhead into my formerly open backhand court, and | hit a winner down the line.

Such trickery is very much a part of tennis, an accepted element of the game. The head fake in one direction just before your opponent hits a “‘sitter”’ followed by your real move to the other side, can often save a “‘lost’’ point for you.

Filled with glee at my success, | forget all about how to serve properly, jerk my head down as | try to hit too hard, and smack my first serve into the tape. Then, still sloppy, | hit my second serve toward my opponent’s backhand, but | hit it short.

He moves in on the ball, as he should, and hits it neatly down the line as | come in. | don’t reach it. (You’ve got to serve that second serve deep to keep the receiver back.) Fifteen-all.

| decide to make sure of my first serve, and hit it at fourfifths speed, deep to my opponent’s backhand. | move in behind it, but my opponent makes a good return low over the net toward my forehand side, and | find | have to get down and half volley the ball to get it back at all. | don’t swing as crisply as | should, however. The ball goes toward my opponent’s backhand side, but it lands short, just behind his service line.

On such a short ball, and one that ‘“‘sits up” besides, | am again in trouble. I’ve got to get in tight on the net, to cut down my opponent’s passing angles, but there is always the chance that he may lob, as he did on my deeper volley two points before. | make the mistake of thinking about this, which keeps me a foot or two further back than | really should be, tentative in the face of my opponent closing in on my short half volley. | should simply get as close in on the net as possible, to cut down the angles for passing shots, and trust my ability to backpedal to get any lobs. Otherwise, my opponent will never have to lob, since his passing angles will be wide open and easy to hit. Because | am further back than | should be, my opponent has plenty of room for a firm backhand down my forehand sideline, and despite lunging after it | only toe the ball away with the end of my racket. | am now down 15-30. Fifteen-30. Up goes the toss, ‘‘Gee, I’d really better blast this one,’ down comes the head, and the first serve is a fault in the net. /diot! Fifteen-30 is the most important point of the game, and you don’t miss your first serve on it. I’m still making foolish and unnecessary mistakes.

Pancho Segura once suggested an excellent plan to follow for the 15-30 points: serve your first serve at a speed you know you can get in, right at your opponent, and get in to net. This is a simple but very effective plan, because it gives you a very specific task to perform in this crisis, and it will tend to cut down on just how well your opponent will manage to hit his return. If you save the serve into the body for these moments, it will come as a surprise to your Opponent, and the ball will jam him so that he won’t be able to take his normal full swing. All of this went out of my mind on the first serve, but luckily | remember it for the second. | make sure that my head stays up, eyes on the ball, and | hit a good second serve deep in my opponent’s service court, and just to the left of his body so that it curves into him.

As a second serve, with plenty of spin and good depth, my serve gives me plenty of time to get in close to the net, and my opponent helps by hitting a poor, cramped return toward my forehand. | volley the ball firmly crosscourt with a short, concise swing, move in closer to the net and into the middle of his possible angles off the ball which he is now running hard for.

| punch a backhand volley away to the other side of the court, out of his reach, off the forehand my opponent tries to hit down the line.

Thirty-all. Well, | think, why not try the same thing again? Concentrating on getting my first serve in, | hit it firmly, again aiming for a spot just to the left of my opponent’s left side.

Again the ball curves into him, this time more toward the center of his body, as | follow it in to the net. My opponent demonstrates why one shouldn’t try this serve too often, however, by recognizing this serve the second time he sees it, and moving nicely to give himself room to hit. He dances to his left, so that the ball curves past and away from him, allowing him a free swing on his forehand side.

As he moves and gets set to hit, my playing mind—without any really conscious thought—recognizes that my serve is getting past my opponent while he gets ready to hit. From that position, my mind tells me my opponent will hit down the line. So instead of taking up a neutral ready position at the moment my opponent swings, | position myself to the left. My opponent hits where | thought he would, and | am there waiting.

His shot is a good one, right down the line and low. | have to hit the ball back down the line, because | fear that a volley crosscourt will open up too much of my court. | manage to hit a good volley back, deep and close to the sideline. My opponent is ready early for it, but again, he takes too much notice of me. | move forward from where | was when | hit the volley, but | stay closer to the sideline than | would normally. This leaves all the court to my right open, my opponent finally decides that he has to hit there—he can’t very well try to drive the ball back through me down the line—and at the last moment, just as my opponent starts his stroke, | move to my right to cut off that invitingly open court. By pausing for that moment, | have forced the direction of my opponent’s response. | am correct in my strategy and have an easy volley to the open court.

On the ad point, | shake my arm (to loosen it) before serving, make a point of lining up toward and looking at my opponent’s backhand corner, and serve a satisfying ace down the center line. Your standard serve should be to the backhand, but every now and then you will want to take advantage of your opponent moving over, and go for the ace past his forehand. While you will usually serve to the backhand, you will reap most of your aces wide to the forehand. Just be sure not to overdo it, or you will find yourself serving into your opponent’s big weapon, the forehand return.

As for the rest of the match, a tournament-tough player, after winning two games and putting himself up a break, would go right ahead and attack as forcefully as he could on every additional game of the set. This is so because he risks losing as soon as he stops attacking.

Doubles is combat conducted on a team basis. The great joy of doubles arises from the successful combination of two players, through astute generalship, into a winning team. It often takes years for a doubles team to reach its full potential, as each player learns what to expect from the other, and also learns how to play in such a way as to mesh his abilities with those of his partner.

Let’s begin by talking about court position. In the forehand court, the proper place from which to serve is only slightly further out from the center of the court than you would serve in singles, a matter of three or four additional feet. Serving from this position rather than from far out by the sideline, gives you a better shot at your opponent’s backhand corner. You also collapse the angles of return open to your opponent, allowing your partner at net to stand safely out toward the middle of his half of the court. From his position your partner can pick off your opponent’s attempts at returning the ball back to you. If you serve properly to the backhand corner of the forehand court, your partner at net can safely stand as far out as midway between the center line and the singles sideline and still cover the alley. (He can cover the alley by just stepping over with his right foot and sticking out his racket.) At the same time, by standing out so prominently, your partner at net gives the opponents something to think about, especially since he can also cover most of the middle of the court by just stepping across the other way.

Your netman thus becomes a real threat. Too many netmen stand carefully with one foot on the singles sideline, and for all the good they do there, they might as well go sit down and watch. If you serve from wide on the forehand, however, you will tend to serve to your opponent’s forehand, and your partner will be pinned to the alley. So don’t do it.

As for serving to the backhand court, the rule about standing in close to your center is a little less strict. You probably will have to stand out two or three additional feet—so that you are midway between the center mark and the singles sideline—in order to get your serve past your partner at net and still wide to your opponent’s backhand. You don’t want to stand too far wide here either, as again you offer your opponent easier angles of return by your netman.

By serving from closer in toward the center mark than many people normally do, you collapse the angles that are open to your opponents, and their returns must now come closer to your partner at net. The whole point of doubles is to hit your shots in such a way that your opponents’ replies will end up going to you or your partner at net.

After your serve, though, you must remember to run forward on a line more toward the net person than toward the receiver, in order to cut off the open area of your court. In other words, you serve and then move in toward the middle of the receiver’s possible angles into your half of the court, so that you can easily reach whatever he returns.

For good doubles, you must get your first serve in, and you must serve it to your opponents’ backhands. At times, of course, you may vary the serve wide to a forehand, in order to keep the opposition honest about where they stand to receive, but your standard serve for doubles must be to the backhand.

In doubles, a fairly hard first serve placed carefully in the backhand corner is a far better delivery than a slugger’s blast, which may not be as accurate. A serve of slower pace allows you to get further in toward the net if you come in behind your serve, the careful placement to the backhand allows you to control the point, and because of that placement you will know what sort of a return to expect. If your serve should accidently slip off to the forehand, you will suddenly be facing quite different angles of return, and may find yourself quickly in trouble.

Please let me stress this. If you serve to the forehand in doubles, or miss your first serve consistently, you are being stupid! You are yelling to the world that you haven’t a clue about how to play winning doubles. Serve to the backhand consistently, on the other hand, and get your first serve in all the time, and you will be known as a doubles hero. You will win.

The serves don’t even have to be particularly hard, they just have to be directed to the backhand.

The first serve is essential in doubles because at this point, the advantage is truly on your side. As soon as you miss your first, and have to serve a second serve, your opponents will breath a sigh of relief, relax, take a step closer for the ready position, and crunch your more cautious second serve for a winner or force a weak reply. You’ve got to get that first serve in, even if you have to take some of the steam out of it todoso.

Experiment to learn what is the hardest serve you can hit consistently and accurately, and then use that as your primary first serve. You can hit harder or softer on the first serve at times, but your average first serve for doubles should be firm, consistent, and deep to your opponent’s backhand side.

You want to serve this way because it is very hard in doubles to catch up after you’ve played a weak shot. If your serve lacks depth, the receiver will be able to move in on it, while you will not get quite so far in toward the net before he hits his return. This may very well mean that you will have to volley up, from below the level of the net, and that is exactly what the opposing team is hoping for. You’ve got to keep the shots low, so that in time the opposition will finally pop one up for your team to crunch.

In doubles, the team that holds the net generally controls the point. For this reason, you’ve got to train yourself not only to follow your serve in, but also your return of serve. We are discussing a dynamic form of doubles, where the server moves toward the net behind his serve, where the receiver will also probably move forward, and where the netman is active around the net, cutting off and volleying as many shots for winners as he can.

If you don’t follow your serve to net in doubles, you remove almost all the pressure from your opponents on return: they can simply stroke the ball past your netman, back to you, take the net themselves, and engage you in singles play or belt your shots through your partner standing at net like a clay pigeon. If you never move out to cut off shots while at net, your team will never get the quick and easy points you must have to win consistently. You must learn to serve and volley, and you must learn to move and poach at net. The server has got to help the netman by coming in to join him, and the netman has got to help the server hold serve by moving at net, not only to win points, but also to distract the opponents, to force them to think about him as well as their shots. When you also develop the ability to move out and poach on your partner’s service return (your partner returns, the opponent tries to hit it back the same way, and you cut their shot off) then you will really have a winning doubles combination.

The secret to success at the net lies in beginning to move out to cut off a ball—such as a service return—before your opponent has actually hit the ball. That is, if you wait to see what sort of shot your opponent hits, you will almost always be too late to react effectively, unless it is very close to you.

If, however, you move out into the court just as your opponent swings his racket forward toward the ball, you will find yourself able to volley shots for winners at a point far away from where you started. Once he has begun to swing, your opponent cannot alter his stroke to hit the ball behind you, and you are perfectly safe taking this head start. (As long as you have correctly deduced that your opponent intends to hit crosscourt.) Your movement makes you a threat at net, rather than just a fixture.

To play well at net, you must analyze how your opponents hit their returns, and where they hit them. If an opponent, in the first few points of returning, consistently hits back toward your partner the server, then you can assume that he will continue to hit that way until something forces him to change. Tell your partner, or signal him with a prearranged signal, that you are going to go on the next first serve to the opponent’s backhand. As your opponent’s racket is swinging forward to hit that first serve—make sure that his preparation looks roughly the same as on the previous points—run out toward the middle of the court, and punch the opponent’s return away for a winner, hitting it down at the opposing net man’s feet, or behind him, or straight at him.

The next time the serve is to go to the opponent whose return you knocked off, you might again talk with your partner or else appear to signal him. But this time, make your move out into the court a moment earlier, giving your opponent plenty of time to see you shift. As he hits, move back the other way, to cover the shot down the line which he will almost invariably try, and knock that off as well.

The next time the serve goes to this opponent, wiggle your head and smile at him. The return may very well hit the back fence on the fly.

The idea of all this is not only to pick up points around the net by poaching, but also to get your opponents thinking about you at net, instead of concentrating carefully, as they should, on simply hitting clean returns. You must make moves at net, even if you lose the particular point when you do: the fact of making your opponents think about the possibility of your moving again is worth it. Don’t feel badly if you try to cross and miss. Both you and your partner will understand that such a move, even if unsuccessful, will have its effect in under-mining the opponents’ concentration.

As a “mover” at net, you will be passed once or twice down the line. But this won’t happen as often as you might expect.

You can cut down on the risks involved if, when you tell your partner that you are going to cross, he then crosses over behind you, either in the backcourt or as he comes in to net, in order to cover the half of the court you are vacating. When you do this, however, realize that you must now get the crosscourt return, no matter where it is hit: there is no one behind you to retrieve the balls you don’t reach. | The key element in successful poaching is timing. You will have to practice, and experiment in play, to develop your sense of the right instant to make your move. You must also train your eye to see where the opponent plans to hit before he strokes. There may be a great deal of tension involved in your first efforts at running across the court and getting in the way of play between the opponents and your partner, but you have got to do it if your team wants to win. Simply choose a point, tell your partner what you are going to do, and then force yourself to run across and poach, no matter what. You may be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is, and how unnerving it is for your opponents.

You might try talking about your plans with your partner

One point before the time you actually intend to poach. Thus, you would go back and converse with him just before he serves to the ad court, but you would be talking about poaching on the deuce court. This covers your intentions. (The only possible flaw with this is that in the excitement of play, it may be hard

The “Australian formation” is a kind of non-moving poach.

In this arrangement, the netman stands on the same half of the court as the server, close to the center line, in the middle of the receiver's possible angles. After the serve, the server can move over to cover the open half of the court, or the netman can dart across. The value in all this is that it confronts the receivers with a quite different formation than they may be used to or grooved for. It is a good practice with which to throw the other team off, as long as you are experienced enough with it so that you are not thrown off as well.

What if you are on the receiving end of these sorts of tactics? Against Australian doubles, you may find it easiest to hit the standard crosscourt return that you are used to, driving it right at the netman in his new position. The whole idea behind this formation is to force you to try a different return than you are used to, and, at least the first time, your opponents will not expect you to do such a “‘silly”’ thing as drive your best shot right

— ee ate Sere ee a - : Fan Pane = en at the netman. If you respond in this way successfully, they may reconsider the whole idea. Usually the Australian formation is used by right-handed players toward the backhand opponent, forcing the difficult return down the line off the backhand. The server moves forward and across to cut this shot off, so a lob hit deep crosscourt can also be an effective defense.

As for the moving netman in normal doubles, you must try to fire a ball down the line off service return every now and then, even when the netman isn’t moving. This makes him think about the possibilities of your going down the line, just as he is trying to make you think about his poaching. It is also a very good idea to lob offensively over the netman once in a while, especially down the alley from the forehand court against right-handers. This lob disrupts the geometry of your opponents’ court, because one or the other of them must chase it down. Also, if they are both right-handed, they each have to deal with your lob on their backhand side. A well-hit, offensive lob can be avery aggressive shot, especially in doubles—where passing shots are harder to produce because there are two players to pass.

If you get your lob over the netman, either driving him back into the backcourt or forcing his partner to cross over to get it, you must advance to net to take advantage of your good fortune.

If it is your team that is lobbed, and the man at net can’t immediately hit the shot as an overhead, have the person not at net retrieve the ball. The netman immediately crosses to the other side of the court, to make sure both sides are still covered.

You will find it easier for the server, even if he is coming to the net, to go get the lob, because he is in motion, and not quite so far forward. The netman should smash any lob he can reach by backpedaling, but he should cross and let the other player get the ball if it is clearly over him. In this situation, the lobbed ball should be lobbed back, the netman staying at net long enough to see if the reply is a good deep one, the lobber coming back to net if his lob is deep. If it isn’t, the netman should backpedal while the ball is coming down, to be ready in the backcourt to defend against the overhead.

When your partner is serving, you want to take up a position at net well out from the sideline and no more than five or six feet away from the net. This will place you about in the middle of the service square.

As soon as most doubles teams receive serve, however, a very strange shift occurs. The receiver stands in the normal ready position to await serve, but the netman moves back to stand on the service line, in the exact middle of what is called ‘‘no man’s land.” Players usuallly give four reasons to explain their change of position: “I can call the serve for my partner;” “‘l have more time to get the volleys the netman may hit at me;” “I can move forward if my partner makes a good return, or back if he hits a poor one;” “By standing further back, | prevent the lob.”

| believe these reasons do not justify the netman taking up this position when his partner is receiving.

You partner can call his own serves, and in any case you can help while standing closer to the net, by just turning your head and watching the ball as it bounces. (But you had better get your head turned back, before your partner hits, so that you can watch what the opposing netman is doing, or else you may end up eating the ball when he sneaks over to smack the return.

You can tell what sort of return your partner is making by watching what the opponent at net is doing, and you will be better prepared to deal with whatever shot he may make.)

If you are playing against a netman worthy of the name, he will volley the ball for a winner down at your feet when you stand back, or kill your necessarily weak reply: I’ve seldom seen anyone successfully defend against a volley from the service line.

Most players who stand on the service line at the start of a point continue to stand there throughout the point. The exceptions would be the pros who play this way—yes, | admit you will see pros doing this—but then they have the talent to move from this hopeless position. Most people don’t, and therefore put themselves at a disadvantage from the start of the point.

Even if you are mobile enough to move up or back according to how your partner returns, | don’t think you want to be moving up or back at this point in play, the pros notwithstanding. If my partner makes a good return, low to the server’s feet as he comes in, so that he has to volley up, | want to be close to the net so that | can move across, rather than up, and volley away the resulting weak return for the point. If my partner is hitting consistently weak returns, | want to move clear back into the backcourt, so that all pressure will be off him to thread the needle past the netman, and so that we can deal with whatever shots our opponents hit, replying with a mixture of ground strokes and lobs until we take the net ourselves.

If you are really intent on preventing the lob, as reason

No. 4 suggests, you will have to maintain your service line stance throughout the point. But in this case the opponents will simply hit the ball at your feet. The real defense against the lob is to learn to backpedal as soon as you realize your opponents are going to lob, and developing a secure overhead to deal with those lobs. | After watching a few doubles matches, you will realize that there is a wide range of opinion over where to play the net on service return. For the reasons given above, however, | suggest that you move back only a step or so from your normal position. You also should turn slightly toward the opposing netman, as he may be hitting your partner’s return. In general, the better your partner’s return, the closer in you will stand; the weaker the return, the further back. If you knew your partner was going to return to the server without the netman’s interfering, you would have no reason to change your position at net at all.

If your partner’s returns are only fairly good, you would move back, but at most only six or eight feet.

Your intent at net is to move sideways, along it, rather than forward and back. If you find yourself having severe difficulties at net, due to weak returns from your partner to the netman, even though you are back within six or eight feet of the service line, then move clear back in the court, to stand two or three feet inside your baseline, ready to move in on any short balls that the opposing netman may dribble over the net, but back so you can take as ground strokes his more forcing volleys. By moving back you take a great deal of pressure off your partner’s return—he can return crosscourt, hit at the netman, or lob with near impunity—because you won’t be near the net to get zapped as a result of any weakness on his return.

When you are playing in the backcourt, your goal is not to drive the ball through your opponents. This can’t be done against a competent team. Instead, alternate lobs and low, topspin ground strokes, and try to pry one or both of your oppoback from the net. When you accomplish this, you and your partner will immediately take the net yourselves, and hopefully end the point with forcing volleys.

Once you and your partner are at net, you must learn to move as a unit. If your side hits a volley wide to one side of your opponents’ court, the two of you will have to shift over together to properly cover your court. Often, one player will have to have his foot almost on the singles sideline, and his partner will have one foot on the center line, in order to cover properly. This appears to leave almost a third of the court open, but again, by looking at the angles possible to the opposing team, you will see that the court is, in fact, covered.

Whenever you lob successfully over your opponents from the backcourt, you will move forward to net as a team. If you are lobbed over while at net, one player will go get the ball, and the other stays at net, or crosses from one side to the other if the chaser is having to cross into the backcourt. The netman will wait to see if his partner throws a good, deep lob back, and the lobber will return to net if that is the case; or the netman will back up into the backcourt as soon as he sees the lob is going to be short.

Because doubles involves having the court divided in halves, you must be even more accurate with your shots than in singles.

As was stressed, you must be able to place your serve exactly where you want it: into the receiver’s backhand side, wide, or curving into the body. To gain command at the net, where you can hit down at your opponents, you must be able to follow your serve in, and your return as well. To do this, you must develop a very good, accurate first volley, so that you can takea low ball at or just inside your service line, and volley it back to the receiver, keeping it low and away from the netman. To produce such a volley, you must learn to get your body as low and as forward as possible, so that you can reach out for that first volley.

As a receiver, you must gain control over your return, so that you can hit the ball hard, but also low and away from the netman, back toward the server. You will also want to get to the net after returning, so you must learn to take the serve on the rise and move in right behind it. If you can learn to hit a topspin return with consistency and control, it is by far the most forcing shot possible. But it also requires that you take up more of a set stance to hit, and you may find it useful to occasionally reach out and simply volley the serve back—hit it with an abrupt, downward, under-cutting punch, as you move forward toward the net. (You can take the ball more at your side with this stroke and be closer in toward the net when you hit.)

The hardest return of all is the backhand crosscourt from the forehand court. The serve will tend to curve into you, yet you must get it back crosscourt to keep it away from the netman. | think it is quite easy to return with topspin off the forehand in either court, and off the backhand in the backhand court, but this return is tougher. Here you might consider chipping the ball regularly—that short, punching volley motion—or else realize that you must move very well to get far enough away from the curving ball to hit it back crosscourt with topspin. There is a tradition in doubles that the better player blithely assigns the forehand court to the weaker player, but if you want to do well as a team, you had better work to upgrade that weaker'player’s ability on this difficult return, through practice.

The game of doubles is won at the net. You and your partner should spend a lot of time volleying for quickness, both of you standing within the service line and keeping the ball going, snapping yourselves back to the ready position between shots, moving forward for even faster volleying as your ability improves. You must work to keep all your volleys /ow over the net, so that in play the opposition will be forced to volley up to you. You and your partner can also practice starting in the backcourt and working your way to net, volleying aggressively as you advance. To make such a drill more realistic, come in on a diagonal, just as you would in actual play.

The lob volley can be very useful for getting your team out of a jam at net. The idea is to take a volley from your opponents, and instead of punching it back at them, open up your racket face while punching under the ball, thus pitching the ball up over them. The lob volley depends on surprise for its success, and great accuracy on your part in judging just how high to get it up to clear your opponents. It can be a very good shot, except when it doesn’t work, in which case it often is very bad: you will have a tennis ball for lunch.

The change-of-pace shot, usually a serve hit at a much slower speed than normal, can be very effective in doubles. This slow serve allows the server to get in much closer to the net, it gives the server and netman time to switch sides if they so choose. And the slower serve usually proves very difficult to hit: the receiver must adjust his timing radically to hit the ball, yet he must manage a more accurate shot than usual to keep the ball away from two netmen and still in the court. Such a change-of-pace shot can have devastating effects on your opponents, not only because it tends to throw off their timing, but also because it gives them still one more thing to worry about.

Some of the prime ingredients in good doubles, then, are consistency of shot off all strokes, the ability to serve accurately to the backhand, an equal ability to keep the ball low over the net, the timing and willingness to poach, and inventiveness in giving your opponents problems to worry about. Beyond these points, however, lie one or two less obvious but still important facets of the game of doubles.

To play good, winning doubles, you and your partner must be able to talk over whatever problems come up. For example, if you are serving too often to the forehand or not keeping the ball low enough on volleys, or standing in an incorrect position on service return, your partner must be able to let you know about it, and know that his telling you won’t throw off your game, or make you angry at him. You must even be able to suggest to one another that as a team you change your entire style of play, if what you are doing isn’t winning the match. If your opponents are just too strong for you to overpower them at serve-and-volley, then you must try standing back, as a team. If they seem to thrive on hard hitting, you must switch to soft shots. If staying back or hitting in various ways isn’t working, you’ve got to be able to work out a plan to try something else. Non-communicative doubles teams, teams where each player isn’t certain that his partner is firmly on his side no matter what is happening, are usually non-winning teams.

Perhaps the most important element in playing good doubles is this, that you remember that you are playing doubles. Your partner is your partner, not an enemy to be abused when he misses a shot. He is going to miss shots—as are you—and you mustn’t suddenly turn on him, to let him know that the lost point and possibly soon-to-be-lost match are all his fault. Such behavior is stupid in the extreme—but all too common, especially in the juniors—because instead of being supportive, you are acting in just such a way as to cause your partner to miss more shots. The old saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face certainly applies here.

The name of the game is doub/es, and in this form of tennis you face the common enemy with your partner. It goes without saying that each of you is going to try as hard as you can to play as well as you can. When you walk out on the court to play doubles, you do so as a team, and you must accept whatever happens on the court as a team.

In tennis, points combine to make games, the games collect into sets, sets form matches, and enough matches make a tournament. There is usually an ebb and flow in the course of a good tennis match, first one player and then the other taking command. In tennis, a player doesn’t have to win all the points or games in order to emerge the victor. In fact, he can win less than half of them. But almost invariably the winner of a close match will have a better understanding or “feel” for the rhythm of the ongoing game than his opponent.

If you are to win at tennis, singles or doubles, you must develop this feel for the course of your matches. In this way, you will be able to ride the changes of momentum without despair, and seize the final victory. You must learn which strokes need to be hit hard for winners and which need to be carefully controlled; you must learn which points are the most valuable, demanding your greatest effort during each game; you must learn to recognize which games you have to have; and you must gain experience in sensing when to fight without quarter to hold a set and when to let one go in order to fight harder in the next.

All of these involve rhythm, the sense of what to do when, and while you can be made aware of these aspects of tennis through being told, you will absorb this knowledge only through constant play, and through thinking about that play. “‘Learn from your mistakes” is a thundering cliche, but that does not lessen the truth of the phrase.

A tennis point is very much like an extended dance between you and your opponent, or a complex fight with the blows delivered through the moving tennis ball. You have something you should be doing every moment that the point is underway: pre-

paring to receive or deliver a shot, hitting that shot, moving into

proper position to await the next shot, etc. And if you are to win the point you must do all these things better than your opponent.

As you gain experience, you will become more and more aware of the shape of the court, the dynamics of the game, and what shots you can (and cannot) hit with safety. For example, a down-the-line shot may be a great winner, unless your opponent gets to it. If he does, he has a much better chance of volleying a winner crosscourt against you than if you had hit your first shot crosscourt. If you hit the crosscourt, he will be forced to hit much more parallel to your opposite sideline if he chooses to hit in that direction. You have to move a shorter distance to reach your opponent’s best possible shot if you force him to volley off a crosscourt, so therefore that shot is safer. By all means hit winners down the line, but realize that if you don’t hit a winner, you’re in trouble.

In the course of play, you will also identify the worst possible shot that you can make, other than not getting the ball into the court, and you will work very hard to avoid that shot. This worst possible shot is the ground stroke that you hit from wide off one side or the other from your backcourt toward your opponent’s stroke on the same side. In other words, you hit from wide on your forehand toward his backhand in the center of the court, or from wide on your backhand side toward his forehand in the center of the court. Whenever you hit this shot you are begging your opponent to hit a crosscourt winner:

The worst possible shot is to hit from wide on your court in toward the center of your opponent’s court (left diagram). This gives him an easy crosscourt winner. The best alternative is to hit sharply crosscourt. Even if your opponent is at the net (right diagram), and gets your shot, you have a better chance off the crosscourt.

they don’t have to move, they have plenty of time to think about their shot and get set for it, the crosscourt is the easiest shot available and you have the furthest possible way to go to get the ball. Whenever you are forced to run wide you must hit either a near-winner down the line, or more preferably, work extra hard to hit your next shot back crosscourt. This shot neutralizes your Opponent as much as possible: you have a much shorter distance to move to get ready for their next ball, and you can more easily get to anything they hit. This allows you to get back into the point.

Ever notice how, whenever a good player plays a lesser player, the lesser player’s court seems suddenly to be much bigger, the lesser player forced to run from corner to corner to corner? Watch again, and you will see the player with less ability hitting what I’ve termed the “worst possible shot’’ over and over and over again. Hit the ball crosscourt after a run, and you won't have to run so hard in the immediate future.

If you are to be successful at tennis, you must follow a two-headed course of action: you must not make a monster out of your Opponent, and you must always do the worst possible things imaginable to that opponent.

Taking the negative side first, you must not make a monster out of your opponent. You must not serve to their forehands, you must not hit back toward the middle when you are running wide, you must not throw up short lobs. You must not allow backcourt players to stay in the backcourt or net lovers to camp out at net, you must not stand back on slow, high-bouncing serves, and above all else, you must not encourage your opponent by showing temper or discouragement. In sum, you must not help your opponent to win in any way; you must not sabotage yourself into a loss. All of this seems perfectly obvious, but in nine matches out of 10 the players ignore this advice. The cure against making your opponent a monster is to think during a match. Between points, which you will play automatically, you’ve got to think about what is going on, how you are playing, why your opponent is making those marvelous shots and what sort of shots you hit previously to set your opponent up. All too often, players submerge themselves so much in their matches that they have no idea what is going on, and hours later may wake up to wonder ‘“‘Why in the world didn’t | lob once to keep him off the net?” “‘Hey, did | hit all my serves to his forehand?” or something equally dreadful.

The positive side of the competitive situation in tennis might be summed up by saying you must always do the worst possible things imaginable to your opponent every time you hit the ball.

And just hitting the ball back into your opponent’s court is not a bad start. If you can hit the ball deep to his backhand, that will be even more horrible. And then follow that with a drop shot, and then a lob, and then perhaps a topspin drive to the other side, and you will really make your opponent feel awful.

And that is the idea. From the first ball you hit in a match, you want to do something to make your opponent wish you would stop. (But remember, hitting the ball 200 miles an hour— but out—is not something that will bother any opponent.)

Remember the last time you saw a good player competing against a lesser opponent? You may have noticed how every time the good player hit the ball, he did something with it. The better player never ‘‘just aims for the court.’’ Instead, he exerts control over the ball, gained through practice and endless play, to hit shots which will force his opponent to work hard to return the ball. In any match, the superior player is superior exactly because he is able to produce more difficulty for his opponent than his opponent can produce for him.

Tennis is very similar to the game of chess. In both, you must think in terms of position and the geometry of the playing area, you must mount well-prepared attacks, you must keep an overall view of how the entire game is progressing, and you must think in order to defeat the changing plans of your opponent. And in both games it is utterly disastrous to make a move or hit a stroke that does nothing for you, that invites your opponent to launch an attack of his own rather than be forced to defend against yours.

A good way to plan an attack for yourself in general, without seeing any particular opponent, is to think of every shot you enjoy receiving, and then resolve never to hit such shots to your Opponents, think of every shot you hate receiving, and dish out plenty of those. Having some sort of plan when you go out to play is almost always better than having no plan at all, even if your plan is wrong. A strategy gives your body a clear course of action to follow, as well as improving your attention to the match. Your game will often be much sharper as a result.

Once on the court, you must mold your battle plan to your particular opponent. He may, for example, be left-handed. To hit to this player’s backhand, you will have to hit toward his forehand corner. You will have to serve wide to the forehand, and so on.

Even with right-handers you will want to examine each player you come up against, both when he is playing other players and during your own warmup. At this time you should try to answer various questions: does your opponent run well from side to side? Up and back? If not, force them to do what they are weak at doing. Is their volley penetrating, or does it fall short? If short, bring them to net, give them lots of volleys to hit, and pass or lob them off their short responses. Is one or the other of their ground strokes faulty? If so, pound that stroke, and lob them at net so they must stay back and take that pounding. Are they very consistent? Break their rhythm by varying the length, direction and pace of your shots.

One can go on and on with these questions, but the idea behind them is to think about your opponent during the course of your warmup and match, and figure out what you can do to him that will be effective.

The goal of all your thinking—and all your play—is to find means of encouraging your opponent to miss while not doing so yourself. By far the greater number of points in tennis are lost by somebody missing than are won by somebody hitting a brilliant winner.

Unfortunately, that method will not bring much success once you have moved up a few notches. Against better players, you must not miss. But you also must hit an offensive enough shot that your opponent cannot take command of the point with an attacking shot of his own. In order to win, you must learn to attack your opponent, through shots that are forceful, wide away from him, deep right at him, or very short at net, and if he manages to deal with these, then you must attack some more. Don’t miss, but as soon as you decide to “play safe,” or to “protect your lead,’ you are well along the way to the loss of a set or an entire match. You must learn to attack behind forceful and consistent shots. If your shots have one of these characteristics but not the other, then go back to the practice court.

Your attack must be a balanced one, combining consistency, accuracy and even delicate touch with raw power. A well-timed drop shot or accurate lob can be just as devastating as the blistering passing shot. An ideal goal to strive for is the ability to hit the ball so hard and so accurately that no opponent can return it. But before you get to that ideal state, you are going to have to at least pass through more normal realms of performance, where you will be forced to deal with your opponent rather than simply smack balls past or through him. For this reason, you must strive to master every aspect of the game in order to jerk and yank and tug your opponent from one point to another, from one mistake to the next.

Your attack in tennis can take many forms. Just as efficient play in tennis is almost a model of Zen paradox—you’ve got to try like the devil, but remain relaxed at all times—so too must the nature of your attack remain relaxed and flexible. Physically, you cannot play efficiently by tightening every muscle in your body, or by hitting every ball at full power. And mentally, too, you must remain relaxed and flexible, able to vary your game plan rather than seize on one system no matter what happens. Of course, if the system you seize on wins for you, and continues to win, stick with it. But if you begin to lose, you must give up one system of attack for another, willing to do whatever is necessary—within the confines of proper tennis—to grab victory from your opponent.

You must play enough to gain a sense of what shot Is appropriate for what situation. If you can win a point with a ground stroke hit at a certain pace, use that pace, and don’t try to hit it harder than necessary. On the overhead, hit it just as hard as you need to win the point, not harder in order to impress the gallery. That also increases your risk of missing. Keep your hardest shots in reserve, for when you really need them, and in that way surprise your opponent with them. Any winner is by definition the correct shot for that situation, but often the delicate soft shot is a more infuriating—and safer—shot than the blasted one.

(To illustrate this idea of using the appropriate shot, | can’t help but think of an important match | saw in the 1965 US Intercollegiates. One player, with match point against him, ran for a ball, hit a short lob, then slipped, fell, and skidded under a bench at the side of the court. His opponent, standing very close to the net, took a full windup, hit the ball as hard as he could at the open court, missed his shot by an inch, and went on to lose the entire match.)

In a tennis point, talking of the ‘‘appropriate shot”’ is just another way of saying that you must develop “rhythm.” You must gain a sense of the right shot for every situation, and use it, rejecting any other sort of shot, or pace that doesn’t fit the situation. Often, people will stroke two or three balls up and down the middle of the court during a point, then suddenly bash the ball away, attempting a winner. They miss, of course, because they haven’t followed the proper rhythm that every tennis point demands. Winning a tennis point is an act similar to that of landing a fish. Only here the line that brings in your quary is one made of time, and your prize is the point. If you play well, utilize all the area of the court and do something with the ball each time you hit it, you remove time from your opponent little by little. Finally, he is unable to get properly set to hit the next shot accurately—and you put away the result—or else he is not able to reach your shot at all.

In tennis, everything during the course of a point will tend to either add up for you, or else add up against you. That is, if you serve deep rather than short to your opponent’s backhand, you give yourself a bit more time to move toward the net, while asking your opponent to deal with a more difficult shot on his

(probably) weaker side. Having moved a bit further in toward the net, you will be able to volley his weaker reply a little bit higher in the air, a little bit closer to the net. This allows you a better, more angled, shot than if you were hitting from further back and lower down. And such a shot will land further away from your opponent, travel by him at a faster pace and allow him less time to get ready. He will have to run harder over a longer distance to reach your shot, and probably will not hit quite as good a shot as he would have off a nearer one. This gives you a still easier ball to deal with, and by then you'can hit a shot that takes away his time entirely: he won’t be able to get it, and you have reeled in your fish.

Pressure in tennis is what you apply to your opponent when, point after point, you force him to deal with a difficult shot every time you hit the ball. To produce pressure, you cannot play hard and well on some of the points. You must play hard and well on all of them. Do this enough, play all the points accurately and hard enough, and you will discover that almost every Opponent you face will eventually crack. Pressure can build for your opponent not only through the severity of your attack, but also through your manner: if you just attend to business, always, carry yourself as a winner would, and never get angry or in some other way distract yourself from the work at hand, your opponent will never see any hopeful signs that you may be on the verge of cracking. And he will be that much closer to doing so himself.

Pressure is a cumulative thing. It will add up through a match, wearing an opponent down, often turning a 6-0 first set winner into a third set loser. Above all else, you must learn never to give up On a match, no matter how poorly you are playing. Time after time, especially among the juniors, you will see players decide that they are not playing up to their personal expectations, and then obviously “tank” a match, when in fact they could win if they just gave their best, and applied as much pressure as possible despite playing at less than their best.

Accepting defeat before your opponent has forced it on you is stupid. It is insulting to your opponent, who should have to earn his win. But far more importantly, it is insulting to the tennis game you have labored to create. You will have off days, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be losing days as well.

Don’t waste a match just because you think you are playing poorly. Stick in there, give your game a chance, put as much pressure On your opponent as you possibly can, and make the effort to see if your less-than-perfect play might not still be good enough to win. Often, you will win through such effort, but you will never discover this unless you play as hard as you can, no matter how your game is performing, right up to the final point.

If your Opponent should win under such conditions, when you have tried as hard as you can, then fine. Congratulate him.

You know that you gave it your best, you have the satisfaction of knowing that you didn’t give up under trying conditions, your game is stronger for the workout against adversity, and you will play better next time. For goodness sake, don’t play badly and give your opponent the match on a platter besides.

Make him earn the match, make him prove he can beat your game even on an off day. It may turn out that your opponent can’t beat you, and that he will crack under the pressure you produce simply by not giving up. For that matter, by trying as hard as you can, your game will many times come back into focus, and begin functioning properly again, making the win that much easier. But this will never happen if you give up before play is ended. Who is to lose and who is to win in a tennis match is never decided for certain until the last point has been played and finished.

Attitude can decide if any particular player is to become a winner or loser at tennis. The moment negative thoughts creep into your mind, even on particular points—‘‘God, | hope | don’t double fault,” “‘l hope | don’t miss this return”—you have moved a good distance toward the loss you want to avoid. It is as though your playing mind, only half listening to your conscious mind, picks up the words ‘‘double fault” or ‘“‘miss this return,” takes them for command, and produces the horrid event.

On the other hand, positive thoughts such as, “This first serve is going in” or “I’m going to belt this return down the line no matter where he puts the ball,” can work miracles for your tennis game.

The most aggravating form of negative thinking for a tennis pro, or for anyone watching someone play whom they want to do well, is negative body posture, an ailment distressingly common among juniors. The slumped shoulders, the hanging head, the racket head smacked down into the court as a player walks back toward the baseline after losing a point, all of these do your opponent almost as much good as eight consecutive service aces. You are on the court to play, not to perform an exercise of self-sabotage. Fake the upright carriage, the quick walk back to get ready to win the next point, if you must. You may discover yourself much more positive about the point to come. As an added benefit, you have increased the pressure on your opponent, because he will begin to worry that you don’t get upset when he wins a point. Your goal whenever you go onto the tennis court is to play the best tennis you can, not to produce an impromptu performance out of a Greek tragedy.

Tiny variations in skill separate most winners from most losers, and separate touring pros from those players just below them. The actual differences may be small, but they can represent years of difference in training and dedication, and very decisive differences in scores between better and lesser players. There are many levels of tennis, and each aspiring player must attend to his homework faithfully in each of those levels if he hopes to graduate on to the next. And no player ever graduates without confidence and a positive attitude.

It is very important, however, that you don’t try to vault up several levels of play when you find yourself confronted with an opponent considered better than you. Many players try for such brilliant winners in these cases that they miss shot after shot, and never find out just how good their opponent actually is.

You must try to get the most out of your game, of course, but remember that you aren’t going to serve like a Tanner or return like a Connors until you have put in the years of effort they have. Until that time, simply serve and return and play the way you can, and ask your opponent to prove that he can deal with that level of play—the best you can actually produce—rather than any far higher level of play that you are not capable of sustaining. |

An important concept to understand—no matter what your level of play—is that of ‘“‘“momentum” in a tennis match. Time and time again, in everyone’s career, there will be matches where you win the first set easily, only to drop the second as though you had never held a racket before. The culprit here is not your play, but your inability to hold onto momentum.

When you have dominated a set against a player of comparable ability, and won it easily, you must realize that you stand at a point of potential weakness. You have reached the goal that you've been striving for, and it is all too easy for your mind to say, with a sigh of relief, ‘Well, I’ve got it at last, that’s done.”

With these words it is you who may be done! Your opponent has gained nothing—he is well along the way to being shoved out of the match entirely—while you have gained everything, as far as the set is concerned. So your opponent is going to begin to fight with everything he has to stay alive in the next set, at the very moment you begin to let up. The result is often one of those strange 6-0, 0-6 reversals.

If you are aware of how all this can happen, however, you will harden yourself to fight for those first few games at the start of any second set after you’ve won the first, as though it is you who were down. By doing this, you present as firm a barrier to your opponent’s progress as ever.

If your opponent should win the second set, it is now his turn to be at a point of potential trouble: He has now reached a goal, the second set, and it is now A/s mind which may sabotage him with thoughts of success. It would be easier to avoid these difficulties by insisting that you play your best, firmest, most consistent and unforgiving tennis during those first two or three opening games of the second set, after you’ve won the first set, to make sure that you take the second as well. But if that second set should slip away, do wake up, realize that the momentum will shift back to you if you just force it to, and make your counterattack at the start of the third. Often the momentum will swing back, and you will redeem your lapse in the second set by still winning the third, decisive set.

Another way of saying all this is: never let a beaten opponent back into a match through the mistake of slackening your attack. Why risk losing? And realize that you can slacken your attack before a match is even begun, by underestimating your opponent, or by foolishly listening to nice people who tell you “Oh, you won't have any problem with that player, you’re a cinch to win.” | Whatever you do, always keep in mind that any opponent can always get back into a match until the last point is played.

You must also learn that on important points you absolutely must not hope that your opponent will lose them, you must insist on winning them yourself. If you do not attack purposely on important points—serve into the body and come to net, for example—your opponent may not lose them to you, and you may never win.

(Twice, in the second and third sets of a tournament match against the Mexican Davis Cup doubles team of the time, a team we would have dearly loved to beat, my doubles partner served for the match. Each time, before serving, he informed me,

“Well, the pressure’s on them.” The pressure was on them, | agreed. We played tentatively, and they knocked off every ball.

The pressure was on them, and they responded to it as a good team will. You’ve got to win those pivotal points.)

You must train yourself to have as your goal the winning of all the sets of a match, not just the winning of “‘a set,’’ or even worse, just the desire to ‘‘make a good showing.” Unless you really decide that you want to win, unless you insist that you will win, you probably won’t. On the other hand, if you decide

—and get your body and mind and tennis game to really understand that you insist—on winning all the points, all the games, and all the sets you play, then you will stand a very good chance of winning all the matches you are involved in.

If you have read this far—through the mysteries of topspin, the intricacies of the serve and volley, and the various suggestions | have made for improving your game—you are obviously interested in pursuing tennis excellence. Something about the game has captured your attention, and held it beyond the initial stages of purchasing a racket and some balls and seeing what the sport is all about. You have discovered that it isn’t quite as easy as it looks, yet something keeps you involved.

Even though you play tennis against an opponent across the net, you are also involved in a very intense confrontation with yourself. First, you must train yourself to play, and then you must gain control of your physical and emotional self in order to play the best tennis you can.

Pogo said in his famous line, ‘‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’’ Nowhere is this more true than in tennis. But what joy if you can meet this enemy and overcome him. How splendid it is to discover that you can concentrate for a whole match, or that you can exert yourself successfully; that you can keep from getting angry, or tight, or scared on crucial points, and instead actually respond effectively and aggressively at these moments. If you do gain a degree of control over your enemy self—and you surely will, with any involvement in the sport— you will reap many of the same returns of self-awareness and self-expansion that are offered as reward to pursuers of more exotic disciplines, such as Yoga or meditation.

But beyond these rewards lie the still greater ones held in that single word so often frowned upon while violently pursued in our society: winning! It is enormous fun to compete with someone, and through the exertion of your abilities and self-taught talents, beat them. There is no question within a tennis match what each player is trying to do: each is trying to win. And each player accepts the aggressiveness of the other, because he is trying to return that same aggressiveness.

Tennis is so rewarding, however, that you may even lose a match and still feel that you have won. If you play up to your limits, and perhaps forge beyond them for a short time, there is no shame in losing to a better player. In short, tennis is rewarding for anyone who plays it (no matter what their level of play), as long as they give their best, and strive to explore their potential in the game.

If, after reading this book, you have any questions, | would like to hear from you. | regret that mail volume may keep me from answering every letter individually, as | would like to do. But if the questions are interesting enough, and indicate broad areas of concern among students of the game, | would like to write a book of answers, In response.

Send your questions to P.O. Box 3296, San Rafael, Calif., 94902. Receipt of your letter will imply permission for the publication of the questions included, identified by the initials of the sender. And thank you for reading this book with enough interest and enthusiasm to feel moved to write me about it.