Florence. He found himself living modestly in the countryside with no available tennis court. Quickly focusing his analytical and creative mind on this lack, he created a new version of the game, one needing only a net across a floor with painted lines, which he implemented on a section of flat lawn in a convenient meadow.
Alas, the nearby villagers and peasants sharing his own middle age were not susceptible to his importunings that they adjust their lifestyles to accommodate tennis. He accordingly assembled and trained a coterie of youthful players. They picked up the game quickly but, being a generation younger, were more energetic and speedier than Machiavelli and attained greater accuracy and power in their strokes. Thus it became necessary for Machiavelli to develop the technique of outfoxing his physically more adept opponents and, further, to introduce the game of doubles so as to diminish the court area which he himself would have to defend.
Machiavelli's remarkable Prince, II covers every aspect of the modern game of tennis—serving, return of serve, ground stroke placement, volleys, lobs, net play, poaching, getting along with a partner, and the employment of ruses and covert influences on the play of the opponent, from warm-up through to the calling of close shots. Even the sly injection of conversation during the game to impair the play of rivals was brilliantly conceived and presented by the master.
ings he took with him included a few regulation-size rackets. These he generously assigned to his opponents. For himself he fashioned a new racket that, mainly because of its increased size, he knew others would judge crude and clumsy. Machiavelli explained that it had been easier for him to fabricate it than a racket of smaller, conventional dimensions. He referred to his racket as “The Prince,” using this affectionate nickname in what his playing companions regarded as a good-natured and witty belittling of his racket’s power by mischievously misapplying to it the title of a powerful head of state. Actually, as he well knew, the larger racket gave him an advantage.
In this translation I have sought a literal conversion to English. Although in places Machiavelli words have been expressed in Americanese for easy clarity, his meaning has been strictly preserved. *
*A few charming peculiarities of language turned up. For instance, I discovered that in scoring tennis in Florence it was customary to use, in place of the words “zero” or “nothing,” the word “amore.”
re you, dear reader, like the author, a tennis player Aes athletic prowess is ordinary? If so, let us agree at the outset that the size of the tennis court has been chosen, as has the height of the net, so as to accommodate the play of extraordinary players. The combination permits a wide variety of exciting tennis strokes, from short cross-courts to deep back-court placements, from lobs over opponents’ heads, useful when they have moved too close to the net, to point-scoring overhead slams. In simple words, the basic dimensions of a tennis court are beautifully balanced. They are in perfect harmony with the physical characteristics of players who are well above average in speed, strength, and timing.
But if the court area is just right for outstanding tennis athletes, then it follows that it is too spacious for players who, by reason of lesser athletic talents and, perhaps, deterioration of abilities with age, are lacking in energy, fast court coverage, quick body reaction, and powerful strokes. Tennis players, as they slow down, must smart up.
Doubles, not singles, is then the proper game. Even though to maximize the pleasures of doubles, narrow alleys have been added to each side of the singles court, a doubles player has less territory to defend. Equally important, one’s doubles partner is expected to assume responsibility for about one-half of all the returns of the opponents offerings. While the partner is thus engaged in holding open the possibility of winning the point, one has the time to assess the situation, move to what appears the most likely site for responding well to the probable next ball, and even consider where to place the return should the opportunity present itself. Moreover, during the moments when the partner is covering for the side, one can catch one’s breath, snatch a few seconds of rest, and so manage to remain vigorous throughout the match.
That doubles is to be preferred for all players except those especially skillful and speedy is made evident when singles play is observed between two mediocre competitors. Owing to their constant need to run with maximum expenditure of available energy to reach useful return positions, and their usually failing to arrive there until the last possible moment, their strokes are most often executed poorly. They rarely capture enough time to position their bodies and legs properly and bring their rackets back fully. The ball is accordingly struck in a somewhat haphazard manner. Assuming it surmounts the net, it may land unpredictably almost anywhere in the opposite court or out of it. In view of the awkwardness of their motions, the stances and swings of such players as they connect with the balls are seldom worth noting by opponents seeking to predict where the ball’s likely trajectory will take it. Accordingly, these opponents have precisely the same difficulty I have just described and are equally hard put to arrive at ready positions from which satisfactory returns can be effected.
Net play, one of the most fascinating and potentially exciting aspects of tennis, is a weak dimension of any singles match between average players. To play net, you have to be there first. But in singles, either to serve or to receive a serve you must be positioned in the back court. You are, accordingly, in exactly the wrong part of the court for performing any type of strategy or stroke at the net. You must go through the extra step of shifting locations. Even if the opponents send you soft balls, easily returned well by you to bad locations for them, you still have to hurry to be properly in place for your anticipated smash from the net of the expected, smashable next ball from the other side.
At best you have a run to perform. At worst you need to combine that run with arranging yourself at its end for a successful net shot. In doubles, in contrast, two of the players can start from net positions even as the ball is served to commence the game. Net play is an active, strong ingredient of doubles from the very first, even in a match among ordinary players.
Admittedly, a tennis match between two ordinary singles players may on occasion display some laudatory exchanges. On the whole, however, it is not inspiring to watch. It provides both players with substantial exercise but only modest satisfaction, a poorly balanced mixture for what is intended as sport, in contrast with work or domestic quarrels.
Doubles, not singles, is especially the sensible choice of game for players who are average physically but possess above average reasoning ability and knowledge of human nature. Doubles offers them more opportunity for the injection of strategy and psychology. The moves during a doubles match, altering as they do the relative geometry of location of four players, are much more amenable to the employment of trickery and deception than the moves between only two players. Sending balls so they will land between the doubles partners and favoring the weaker of the two are but two of many ploys that can be used to confound, confuse, and roughen the workings of the players on the other side of the net. Another example is to lob over the opposing net player's head. This will cause his or her partner to have to decide whether to shift over from the other half of their court to get behind the net player and try to handle the lob. The net player meanwhile must decide whether to attempt a quick retreat from the net so as to intercept that lob or else rush to the other half of the net to cover the open area abandoned by the partner, who is perhaps also seeking to make the return.
Doubles partners must cooperate and be compatible. Oftentimes their chance of success in attaining that happy situation is marginal. It then becomes possible for a crafty opponent to place returns so as to magnify such weaknesses in teamwork as may exist. For instance, it is common for players to possess bad habits that lead to frequent loss of points but to be totally unaware of their undesirable patterns of play. Equally commonly, their partners may judge the cause of the penalizing errors to be very evident and believe that a ready cure exists in simply abandoning the bad habit, a cure the error-prone player refuses to consider, making for a potentially nasty difference between partners that the other team can build upon.
Thus consider the team of Ostinata and her sister Testarta. Ostinata loves to station herself halfway between the net and the back baseline and to try to play all balls coming to her side of the court from that center point of her area.
She has seen an outstanding player do just that with winning results, and she insists on emulating that performance. As explained in a later chapter, this middle region is difficult to play, usually leading to disaster, unless the player is extraordinarily quick and has nearly perfect timing and form. As points are lost by Ostinata, Testarta tries without success to get her sister either to move up to the net or back, but Ostinata stays committed to the middle.
If their opponents direct almost all their shots at Ostinatas feet, two things will happen. These opponents will usually make the point, and they will also frustrate Testarta, making her more furious with each shot. When a ball goes to Testarta, she will overdrive it because of her emotional disturbance.
Or consider the case of Lodovico Boccaccio and his son Giambattista. They are both excellent athletes and exceptional singles players in tennis. The son is just beginning to defeat the father in singles. As a doubles combination they do not do enough thinking about how to cooperate and share so as to form a good team. Send a ball between them, each one a fast and aggressive player, and Lodovico will go for the ball, feeling that his senior position makes the responsibility his, while Giambattista will move in for the return, confident his hit will be stronger. They sometimes collide or strike each other. They always interfere with one another so neither can return well.
As a final example, we take note of my friend Castiglione, who is perhaps the fastest moving tennis player I know. He does well in singles because of his speed, but he is completely oblivious to the possibility of incorporating strategy. He has a powerful forehand and a relatively powerless backhand. In singles he runs around his backhand and takes most balls on the forehand. With his quickness, he gets by in singles.
But Castiglione is an annoying doubles partner. When he avoids using his backhand and favors his forehand, he has to move too often into his partner’s territory, crowding the partner and leaving an open area on his other side. Crafty doubles opponents will exploit this pattern.
Analytical tenniseers, those with the ability to add a mental component of the play to the physical, will have an advantage in doubles over players whose interests and aptitudes lie entirely with the physical side of the game.
For the cerebral player, doubles should be dominant. But this forces us at the outset to discuss a basic problem peculiar to doubles, namely, the selection of partners. Let us next consider this key issue. *
*In the day-to-day arranging of tennis games, it is not always feasible to bring four players together and is sometimes necessary to resort to singles play. Such singles encounters preferably should be used to develop one’s doubles game. The author has invented variations of the common game of singles that especially allow the practice of simulated doubles. They can be very enjoyable and profitable for two doubles players forced to engage in a singles match. These tennis options, which have been appropriately captioned “half-doubles” rather than singles, are described in this manuscript’s last chapter.
nes game can be improved, it is well known, by C) iiss against better players. Yet if this axiom were followed to the extreme, the result might be that one would become the world’s most improved player while, concurrently, a player who never wins. On the other hand, deliberately to seek out opponents weak enough to ensure winning a match is not fulfilling. How should you, a player who plans to exploit excellence in the intellectual aspects of the game, select opponents? A simple answer suggests itself: choose players who are physically superior and derive your pleasure from defeating those rivals by your own superiority in strategy. The more cunning and skilled you become in tactics, the greater can be the allowed increment in physical powers held by the opponents.
As to choice of partner, some aspects are straightforward. It goes without saying that ideal partners will possess certain admirable qualities of character. They will be calm, considerate, kind, understanding, cooperative, tactful, self-sacrificing, perceptive, tolerant, forgiving, possessed of a sense of humor, and not in the habit of imbibing alcoholic beverages just before a match. Indeed, you should endeavor to cultivate precisely these personality traits so as to manifest them to your partners.
You and they should be on speaking terms throughout the match, exchanging occasional comments between points and sometimes even during the play. For example, it should always be remembered that the player who, at the moment, happens to be well back from the net is always able to see a partner s location up front, whereas the opposite is not always true owing to the fixed location of the eyes on the front of the head and the need most of the time to face toward the opponents. Accordingly, a player at the rear might be expected from time to time to call out a signal to the forward partner to shift from left to right, or vice versa. Similarly, a player might warn a partner, say, with a call of “bounce,” that the arriving ball appears headed out and preferably should be allowed to bounce, thus allowing the point to be won automatically, before attempting a return. Again, partners can aid their side's execution of returns by early calls of “yours” or “mine” when it is seen that a ball is being sent between them by an opponent.
On the whole though, partners should avoid making specific suggestions as to where and how the other should return a ball when it is actually on its way from the opposite side. Also, the performance of a partner on the next play is rarely enhanced by queries after a loss of a point, such as “Why did you do that?” or “When are you going to learn to hit a backhand?” or purely negative commentary, such as “That was a stupid shot,” or instructions, such as “Quit giving it to their net player to put away.” Admittedly, some interest must be shown in analyzing the play of the game if one aspires to perform in an intellectually alert manner.
On the other hand, open criticism of a partner’s play on the spot immediately after its occurrence is seldom appreciated no matter how constructive and, in principle, justified.
To those convinced they possess such superior analytical abilities as to demand that they accept the responsibility to the tennis-playing society of formulating recommendations, the following advice is submitted: A lasting contribution to posterity through the articulation of tennis fundamentals is best ensured by writing a thesis devoted to the matter, even as has the author. The work then can be read by others at their leisure, and it is impersonal. This is a practical way to benefit the game of others and is far superior to paralleling the play of a match with running dissections of a partner's performance.
Just as one should never lecture to partners or blame them vocally when points are lost, highly detailed discussion of strategy should be minimized. Unless one expects to play virtually exclusively with the same partner for many years, it is prudent to assume that sharing wiles and cunning tactics with a partner of the moment may result inadvertently in sharing it also with an opponent when in some later match the former ally becomes the present rival. Furthermore, as will be appreciated later, when devious acts and dirty tricks are described in this text, it is well that they remain secret from opponents and partners alike, neither included in voluntary confessions nor admitted to if one should ever be subjected to questioning.
Obviously, no specific item of strategy in doubles deserves a higher priority than selecting the strongest available partner in the overall. There is a double reward here.
Not only will that player’s strength aid your side, but his or her absence from the other side, and a replacement there by a lesser player, will lower the opposing team’s average quality of play. But there is more to it than that.
Nobody is perfect, so you cannot have a perfect partner.
But having done as well as you can in selecting and recruiting that partner, you should know his or her gifts and handicaps well and be thoroughly aware of your own strong points and limitations. Then you can build a strategy for your team to maximize the positives and minimize the negatives. Having your own play properly sized up should lead you to choose a partner whose play will overlap with yours, one's strong points covering the other's weaknesses.
Bruno, for example, is a fine partner for me. He has no fast shots to build on but is very steady. He is sure not to net or overdrive a ball of usual, reasonable speed. He will send it reliably, time after time, to a sensible place on the other side. He cannot slam the ball for a sure point or cut into the ball to give it a spin and a confusing bounce, but he can lob accurately. He provides me with much freedom and confidence to move about, planning deceitful stances and clever placements and putting away shots. I know my strategy will never be spoiled by Bruno's moving irrationally or missing easy balls while I am setting up to take the point.
A certain pliability in response to your suggestions must characterize your partner. For instance, suppose your serve is terribly weak and your strategy must include your partner s playing back, avoiding the net position, when you serve. Your partner then should not be one to insist on being up at the net, ignoring, resenting, or failing to appreciate the wisdom of your hint to stay back. Conversely, if your serve is the strongest part of your game, you must avoid choosing a partner who is totally inept at the net. The expected weak return of your serve should be pounced on by your net partner and dispatched neatly for the point. If your partner is physically incapable of such essential pouncing, then by your accepting that partner you will have ab initio thrown away your major advantage.
Similarly, if your backhand is puny and you therefore
Selecting Vincible Rivals and Pliable Partners feel you should take the forehand court, do not team up with a left-handed player also afflicted with an ineffectual backhand. The entire center of the court, the common backhand region of your side, will be a no-man’s land for both of you. Your pairing will stimulate your opponents to send balls between you, balls that neither of you will handle tolerably well even if you manage to sort out which of you has the immediate responsibility for returning them. The tactic of directing shots down the middle will be quickly invented by your opponents no matter how incompetent and disinterested they may generally be in playing a strategic game.
As a final example, if you plan to exploit gifts you believe you possess as a skillful and frequent poacher into your partner's territory, then you must avoid selecting a partner who will be emotionally disturbed by such actions on your part. There are many such players, as will be disclosed in a later chapter.
Having cited these few examples, however, we must make the additional point that your success in employment of a wide repertoire of sly, guileful approaches to tennis will depend much less on your partner than on yourself.
We shall soon see that executions of ploys by the psychological player are mainly solo performances.
ing score, tennis players expect a warm-up period.
Most think this preliminary exercise is solely to loosen their muscles and joints or to reestablish the pattern of their timing of arm and leg motions with the ball’s arrival. Although your body's coordinative memory system can usually do with a bit of refreshing to prepare you for physical precision and focused concentration, the prime reason for your warm-up should be something else. The much more important duty for you to perform during the preliminary period is an intelligence and reconnaissance mission intended to bring to the surface and pinpoint the weak spots in the defense and offense of your opponents.
Thus as you start delivering balls to condition your strokes and those of the tennis enthusiast on the opposite side of the net, an early priority is to test that player's backhand, confirming that it is weak and should be taken advantage of during the game, or maybe discovering in-
stead that it is surprisingly strong and should be avoided. Common courtesy dictates that during warm-up you should direct the balls to opponents equally toward their forehand and backhand sides, to grant them opportunity for balanced practice. But since they will expect your accuracy and control to be poor in the initial stages of warm-up, they will not think ill of you should your initial returns go mainly to their backhands and even force them to move substantially to meet your badly directed shots.
You should start with ground strokes from your back court. After adequately examining the opponent’s backhand and forehand imbalances, you should deliberately hit an easy, slow ball that falls short, barely making it over the net. Again, your behavior as you do this will be regarded as forgivable because it will be assumed that you still are cold and not yet able to control your strokes fully. Your rivals will be so happy to observe any demonstrated weaknesses in your play that they will fail to perceive you have actually delivered that droopy return on purpose. Why do I suggest you place such a short ball to your opponents while they are in their back court? It definitely is not because you seek to exhort them to dash forward, so as to handle your ball after only one bounce. In warm-up any number of bounces is acceptable. No, yours is to be a more subtle objective, and carrying it out requires some observational talent and expertise.
Consider, for example, that every good athlete, when stationed well back, will exhibit an automatic, quick response to a short return. Even as the ball leaves your racket, you should watch your opponent's eyes and body intently. That person, if of exceptional athletic ability, will be seen to tighten muscles and lunge forward instantly.
Since it is the warm-up period, the opponent may quickly control further motion, relax, and decide merely to wait for
observe that the initial response has taken place, however, you will have been warned that this opponent has the likelihood of getting to your balls wherever you may place them. If no spontaneous reaction on the part of your competitors body is to be noted, then you will have learned that during the game you may at liberty send forth a simple, unpretentious short ball whenever that opponent is back, and you will enjoy an excellent chance of scoring the point.
Some players have difficulty dropping a ball just over the net from a position back in the court. May I suggest a line of thought most helpful in executing such a stroke? Imagine that at some point along the net a lightweight target (perhaps a pigeon made of thin wood) is perched, balanced precariously, ready to fall over if merely touched. It is your job to direct a ball at that target—not to knock it off forcibly and certainly not to send it reeling into the opposite court at high velocity but merely to tip it over. If you hold this picture in mind you will automatically adjust your stance and swing perfectly to effect a drop shot.
If you are not way back in your court when you contemplate this short shot, you may find it very annoying to your opponents if you toss a spinning ball over the net. Here your focus of attention must be on cutting into and under the ball to make it spin. You may deliver it well over the net, and it will still fail to go on back to your opponents if you catch them too far from the net. The spin here is the important ingredient, and you can observe during warm-up if your competitors, even if they get up to the ball to try to handle it, find it hard to adjust for the confusing motion of your spinning ball after its bounce, the certain result of your cutting into the ball.
It is difficult to cut a ball and impart a high rate of spin to it while also hitting it with all your might. Achieving such strong strokes regularly would stamp you as an extraordinary, not merely ordinary, player. But it is not too tough to achieve a spin when returning an easy ball that is quite low when you contact it. Here again a particular mental image is helpful. Think of the ball approaching you as having a northern and a southern hemisphere. In the middle of the southern hemisphere sits the continent of Africa. Pretend you do not like it where it is. You would like to wipe it with your racket, when the ball arrives, so as to drive Africa south, actually down into the South Pole. This means you do not swing at the ball with a big stroke to direct it forward, your arm well back as you begin the swing. You do not hold your racket so the string face is vertical, so you can smack the ball directly with the full face of the racket. Nor do you hit the ball with the racket face horizontal, wiping the South Pole itself with your strings. Instead, you tilt the racket about 45 degrees so your point of contact is right on Africa, and you continue into and under the ball, thus cutting into it and turning Africa south.
Practice this play first on a short, slow ball from your opponents. Move up and send Africa downward. Your ball will pass over the net, drop, and then bounce peculiarly.
Your enemy on the other side may either curse or compliment you if you do this during warm-up. You should claim then that your cutting return was the accidental result of your almost missing the ball and happening to catch it way off from the useful area of your strings. During the course of the game, you need make no comment after giving the ball a successful spin. Simply register the point each time.
You should take to the net for a part of your warm-up, and your opponents should be expected also to do so. If they do not, it is in order for you to suggest it, as an apparently generous, helpful act. When your opponents are at the net, receiving warm-up balls from you, politeness requires that you direct your balls to their present, ready positions. Similarly, they should return balls directly to you. Players warming up at the net are considered to be behaving badly if they opt for a wide-angle shot, one deliberately sent off to the side to practice the winning of decisive points in that manner later in the actual play.
Some bad returns on your part during warm-up will be wholly expected and forgiven, however, and this tactic enables you to cover up a few other purposeful tests you should make of your opponents basic court ability.
For example, you should raise an occasional return during warm-up, apparently inadvertently, so that the ball will go well over your opponent's head while she or he is working out at the net. During the play of the real game to follow, your opponents, when at the net, may make all-out jump efforts to intercept such lob attempts. Or they may run back to get behind the lob and try to return it after it has bounced. But in the working-out period it is very uncommon for a player to indulge in such heroic efforts. Your objective in performing the lob shot is to note carefully whether a quick initial body motion of your competitor occurs when the ball leaves your racket. If he or she remains docile in the first stage and commences to move back, if at all, only well after the ball’s high trajectory has been fully established, you will have learned something important. That net player can be readily bested by a lob.
When you are at the net during pregame exercises, you should try to send every ball you can reach directly to your opponents. But also be sure to allow all balls even slightly out of your reach to go on by, making no attempt at interception. This will create in your rivals’ minds the false impression that they do not have to fear your net play and will encourage them toward carelessness. During the match to follow they will send balls to your vicinity that you can put away for the point by taking only a single quick step away from your starting net position, an act they will never have seen you perform during rehearsal.
When your opponent is up at the net, observe how the racket is held. Is it in such a starting position that a ball to either side can be equally well handled? Or does that player choose a racket posture such that returns are bound to be handicapped if the ball arrives on the wrong side? That is, is the racket set only to return a forehand but not a backhand, or vice versa? Do your opponents seem to have the ability at the net while warming up to direct balls back to you even as you vary your position somewhat? Or are their returns erratic, indicating that a little more speed in your shots will do them in? You should be very careful in testing this. Never gradually increase the speed of the ball to opponents at the net seeking thereby to discover the limits of their abilities to handle fast balls. Even if you are justified in assuming little guile on the part of your opponents, you should take care not to raise their suspicions. If you direct tough, unreturnable balls at net players during warm-up, you risk causing them to feel incompetent at the net. This may result in their ruling out coming to the net at all during the match. If the opponents are weak net players, you should prefer that they take to the net often, rather than seldom.
We shall later mention additional aspects of the exploitation of the warm-up period. But the time has come now to speak of appropriate mental and physical actions to be taken during the actual play of the match.
not scored on the tennis court most often by brilliant, super-fast, exceedingly well-placed shots. In fact, points are more often lost than won. For every decisive action that wins a point during an average match, at least two points are unearned, being given away because of mistakes. I refer not to forced errors, the results of exceptionally strong strokes or clever moves of the opponent, but rather to stupid mishaps, those for which there is little excuse except carelessness, loss of concentration, or weaknesses in the thinking capacity of the error-maker. Such botches have consequences (sons of botches, or SOBs). Thus, an all-out dash to a distant part of the court in an attempt to return a ball headed there, rather than conceding the point, may result in a loss of breath. This botch may cause the next two or three relatively easy returns from the opponent to be badly mishandled by the breathless player, a succession of lost points, all SOBs.
The fundamental strategy for players whose physical prowess does not enable them to surmount their opponents play is to concentrate on minimizing errors. This rule applies throughout the match. It is especially to be emphasized at the very beginning of play, with the serve.
Serving is the only time during tennis matches in which players have the opportunity to lose the point entirely by themselves, with no contribution to the action from opponents or partners—especially because the service area into which the ball must be placed is so limited in size and because the net stands mischievously right in the way of that little square.
It is extremely tempting to seek to deliver a served ball so hard and fast that it cannot be returned. Top players attain that objective with reasonable frequency, sometimes even against opponents of remarkable skill and speed of reaction. The ordinary player, however, should discard such an ambitious goal or attempt to reach it rarely and then with caution and reservations. Thoughtful analysis of an average player's real chances of “acing” the opponent usually yields discouraging results. Trying for an ace that will make the point immediately may much more often lose it instead, for two reasons. The first is that the serve may become a fault too frequently, the ball either striking the net or else overshooting the small area in which it should land. To serve only to hear monotonously repetitive calls of “fault!” is truly service beyond the call of duty. The second reason is that even though the effort may result in a good “in” ball, it may fall short of attaining the real speed of an ace and will merely bounce high. An elevated post-bounce ball helps the receiver to execute a forceful return that will immediately present trouble to the server.
An ace attempt which is successful only once in ten times makes too small a contribution when it works. Since only two tries are permitted per serve and a double fault must be avoided, the second serve that follows the effort to ace the opponent is likely to be safe and slow. The ball is accordingly also likely to be returned with power and to be well placed.
An in-between approach is best for a player who wishes to exploit sound strategy. This requires balancing the two needs: to minimize losing the point through double faulting and to maximize winning it by sensible choice of the trajectory (path) and placement of the serve.
Note the diagram of Figure 1, which compares three diverse trajectory profiles of served balls. The one marked A is an ace. It starts at a lofty height and travels with terrific velocity on a virtually direct, straight line as seen in profile. To achieve trajectory A the ball must be thrown up high for the serve, well above the server's head. The racket swing must start from way back, the racket’s head at the start almost touching the server's posterior protrusion. The racket then must be brought speedily to the server's
Figure 1. Three serves: The Ace, the So-So, and the Toss highest reach, where it must connect with the ball just as the racket, arm, and shoulder cooperate to create a whiplike action causing the racket to strike the ball mightily, grab it for an infinitesimal instant, and dispatch it forward in a mad rush. The ball’s enormous speed gives trajectory A its straight line, light-beam-like characteristic. The higher the starting point of the A trajectory, the smaller becomes the forbidden area shadowed by the net, an advantage. The higher also will be the resulting bounce, however, a disadvantage.
Trajectory B shows a substantially easier, so-so serve, one whose trajectory is arched in vertical profile enabling the ball to miss the net by a large margin and fall into the service area on the receiver's side. Trajectory C depicts the slowest serve of all. It is a gentle toss, but instead of being sent high to clear the net safely, it is deliberately directed so that it barely clears that obstacle. Because of its relatively low velocity when it hits the court floor, the ball’s reflective rise is most modest.
We see now why throwing the ball up very high and trying for an ace may yield a disappointing result. If the swing does not come off with near perfection, it may lack full power and deliver to the ball a misfocused thrust. Then only a medium ball speed will result and, unfortunately, having started high, the ball will also bounce high. This will permit the receiver to apply full force from the shoulders to return a deep, hard ball or one with a wide crosscourt angle. Examining serve B, which clears the net generously, we see there is no point in starting it at the greatest height. We also observe that the easiest serve, C, actually can turn out to be the one most difficult to return. This is because the C trajectory requires that the receiver connect with the ball when it is closer to the ground (Fig. 2). Admittedly, a tennis whiz with a large repertoire of strokes for all occasions can take such a low ball and, by
Figure 2. The annoying low-bouncer serve applying a combination of force and spin, send it back in such a manner as to defy return by an ordinary player. But for most of us tenniseers, it is far easier to hit a ball that comes forward with a bounce higher than one’s waist and well above the height of the net. This is because we can then hit slightly downward with our full power and yet miss the net, the downward thrust simultaneously keeping us from hitting the ball long.
In contrast, a ball that must be taken close to the court floor presents a triple dilemma. If it is struck hard, and at the same time is put on a rising trajectory so as to be sure to go over the net, it may land out of bounds. If hit equally strongly, but not also directed upward, it will be intercepted by the net. If touched softly to produce an arcing trajectory that slowly passes over the net, its retarded motion may allow the opposing player too much time in which to respond.
Fortunately for servers, they are allowed two tries at putting balls into the service region of the court. If serving results in a fault, say, once in four times, then a double fault will occur only once in sixteen times, a tolerable blemish on the average servers record. To double fault even less frequently is to be too conservative. Such servers are not trying often enough for a superior serve, perhaps one that bounces in a corner or along an edge of the service rectangle. On the other hand, if double faults occur on the average more often than once per served game, the servers are overdoing, endeavoring to ace the receiver even though the timing and coordination they can muster is too poor to bring it off.
Let me now, as a special warning, tell you about my friend Apropos Brutezza, who possesses a most remarkable, impossible to return ace serve. It is super-fast, and, at the same time, it has a severe spin. I am describing
Brutezza’s serve because you too may number among your tennis-playing associates a Brutezza or two and may wonder how you can best respond. The sensational result of his serve is mesmerizing and seductive. Playing near him tends to cause you to believe you should attempt to emulate his actions. If you are truly an ordinary player, that course will be disastrous for you. Let us see why.
Look at the five ball-and-racket pairs that make up Figure 3. In these sketches, the same racket and the same ball are pictured in successive positions in time from A to
E, starting as the ball is first caught by Brutezza’s racket and ending as it is sent forth toward the opponent. Notice that the racket is not facing the ball head-on, directly, but comes in and “cuts” into it on an angle. This position is the result of a combination of moves, including the use of the backhand grip* and, of course, the stroke or swing that is natural to Brutezza. He starts with his racket very low behind him, his elbow bent way back, and then, with a beautiful combination of speed and strength, brings the racket into the ball in a way it does not soon forget. The
*In the usual forehand grip, the racket is held as though shaking hands with it when the string face is vertical. For the backhand grip, the hand and fingers are rotated slightly counterclockwise.
shocking experience of the ball is paralleled by a severe, traumatic effect on the strings of the racket, so great is the impact of the racket on the ball, and vice versa, and the momentum the racket and its motion impart to the ball.
Position A is just before the ball is struck. Position B shows the ball caught and flattened by the initial collision, with the strings yielding at the same time. In C, the racket has moved forward and is carrying the ball along in its sweep. Because of the angle of the face of the racket, the great friction of the flattened ball against the strings, and the increasing speed of the racket, the ball is wiped and rolled and further flattened. It is slid along the strings even as it is carried forward on the racket. Under the power of this serve we must think of the ball as being like resilient putty.
By now the ball is in terrible shape—no longer a sphere—and the strings have been pushed back and stretched (D). At about this point, three things happen almost at once to give the ball a tremendous surge forward in velocity. First, the ball, having been compressed into a puzzled egg shape, is ready to react and rebound to try to get back to being a sphere. Second, the strings of the racket, presumably very tight, have been distorted by the impact and, like any powerful spring, are ready to spring back to eject the intruding ball forcibly (D). Third, the ball is carried by the racket, which is now suddenly moving at an increasingly higher speed, particularly just before the ball is released, as the arm, wrist, elbow, shoulders—the whole body of powerful Brutezza—snap the racket around with the ball near the top of a mad arc of high velocity.
The misshaped ball shoots forward like a missile fired from a gun, spinning and changing its shape as it goes, a
hits the ground, its odd shape and spin cause it to react peculiarly. The ball bounces unpredictably and is very difficult to return. The scenario up to this point constitutes much of the story of playing against Brutezza, so dominant is the effect of this service in beginning each play.
But what has any of this to do with ordinary tennis? Should you possess the physical capability to execute a cannonball service—if you have the speed and strength and coordination to pull it off—you still should not try it during a match unless you practice often enough to perfect the timing of the entire operation. If, indeed, you can deliver such an ace at least half the time, you have such overall athletic ability and are in such a finely tuned condition that you do not qualify as an ordinary player. This is not your book. Go no further. If you like to read, try historical novels.
The smart approach to serving for ordinary tennis enthusiasts is to throw the ball up to no greater height than will cause the ball to be reliably and firmly under their control.
Using a forehand grip, the next step is to perfect a safe serve, which almost always lands in. After this competence is attained, you should start trying for better placements, near the corners or the edge lines of the service area. Or you should attempt a serve that clears the net by only an inch or two and then drops lightly for an annoyingly low bounce. If you are capable of it, putting some spin on the ball by moving your grip around a bit toward the backhand is exceedingly effective—tar more so than an attempted fast serve that ends up being not so fast and bounces tall. You should plan on enhancing your serve repertoire only gradually, so that a double fault will occur no more frequently than about once in ten serves.
ing having been established, we are ready now to consider the preferred location of the server. First, let us imagine we are serving to and from the forehand courts.
Right-handed players generally are assumed in this discussion. Left-handed athletes, the author is sure, will readily make suitable translations of the presented concepts because through countless annoying experiences with reinterpreting directions produced for right-handers they will have become skilled in so doing. A more troublesome problem is that of a right-handed server dealing with a lefthanded rival. We leave even that task of making suitable revisions to the reader. (Unfortunately, there are righthanded players who can complete an entire match without even noticing whether an opponent is left-handed. We assume the reader is not so unobservant.)
In playing tennis singles, the server usually stands close
Figure 4. Serving from the singles position invites a nasty alley return.
to the center of the court's backline (A in Fig. 4), so as to be ready to defend the entire singles court, that to the left as well as that to the right of the server. In doubles, while half of the longer baseline is available to the server (A to C in
Fig. 4), the approximate center (B) of this line segment usually proves to be the best location. To understand why, let us consider serving from the two extreme positions, first A and then C.
Why should the server ever take the A position, leaving virtually the entire half-court to the right exposed for a quick return by the opposing receiver? There can be only one reason: to make easier a successful serve straight ahead into the backhand of a player who possesses only a meager backhand return capability (Fig. 4). One would not serve that way to a sophisticated player, one whose return would almost certainly be a fast, short cross-court or else a drop shot near the net at D (Fig. 4), both too far away to be reached by the poorly positioned server. Service location A should be used sparingly and never against a player with a strong backhand (or a left-handed receiver with even an average forehand).
If you choose to serve from the other extreme position, the far corner (C in Fig. 5), you have immediately signaled your intention to deliver an extreme cross-court serve, one that will force your opponent off the court to handle it, albeit with a forehand. In fact, if this is not your objective, then starting a serve from C is a handicap. The wide angle of that serve certainly makes it difficult for you to deliver a sure ball to the receivers backhand, if that is what you really want to accomplish.
If your serve is mild, an extreme cross-court serve from position C puts both you and your net partner in special danger when the serve is delivered to a competent and thinking opponent. As shown in Figure 5, in which Stradiveri serves from C, an easy but point-winning return can
Figure 5. A mild cross-court serve is dangerous.
be sent by Guarneri from off court to the area behind
Amati at the net, outflanking her. If Amati moves to the alley to anticipate such a shot and to discourage or intercept it, Guarneri can note this move and choose to direct the return to the other side of Amati, straight into the middle of the court, forcing Stradiveri to rush to handle the return with his backhand.
Admittedly, a serve well hit from the corner, C, can be wicked if fast and started from a high point, say, at tiptoe reach for a tall, strong server. This permits a bounce close to the net (D in Fig. 6), the ball angling off severely to the side of the court. A habitually imperceptive receiver, one who awaits the serve in a generally centered and far back position (E in Fig. 6), can be a patsy for this kind of serve.
ace, the receiver not being able to get close enough even to touch the ball with the racket’s rim.
If the server is often capable of a reasonably potent
Figure 6. Tall, strong servers can exploit corner serves.
serve, then serving from the corner, C, also makes possible reaching the opposite corner, F, of the receivers’ service area with a ball that must be dealt with from way back. (The net is lowest in the center, which helps the server who starts from C.) Even if the receiver is alert to what is coming, a return that has to begin its travel from so far away often can be weak enough on arrival that a put-away net shot becomes possible by the server's side.
All in all, the serving position between the two extremes (B in Fig. 7) offers the most advantages. Serving from B sends no signals automatically to the opponents. It allows service equally well either to the rival's backhand or forehand. It permits a last-moment decision by the server as to which to aim for. The server also is positioned centrally so as to meet the return of serve over all the half-court to be defended.
What are appropriate serving positions if the service is from and to the backhand courts? Again, the medium position (B in Fig. 7) pays off most often, and for the same reasons as before. Location A is useful in serving to a lefthanded receiver with a poor backhand, but it is usually a poor choice for other receivers. Location C, in contrast, might well be favored against any right-handed returner who is known to be endowed with extremely inferior backhand talents.
The guidelines presented in this chapter are intended to cover the most common, typical situations. Exceptions to each recommendation will arise in day-to-day play, mainly because of the special characteristics of opposing players and perhaps because of the particular strengths and weaknesses of your own partner. For example, when Vito
Experto, a truly magical net player, is my teammate, my options as to serving position are opened up greatly. Vito poaches with great success. I try to serve deeply and along the middle line of the court (from A in Figs. 4 or 7) so the receiver will be back and have only the minimum angle for an attempted cross-court in either direction. This means the returned ball (whether I am at the moment serving from my forehand or backhand court) will have to pass over the net somewhere in its middle region, an area covered broadly by Vito.
Or, consider La Belle. She plays the forehand court and always returns my forehand serve with a very timid crosscourt that lands near the net. She does this not from guile but from weakness. Thus I choose always to serve to her from the extreme corner (C in Fig. 4). This gives me the least distance to run up and send a quick, cross-courted short shot right in front of her but off to the side for the point.
ervers have the opportunity to lose the point all by themselves by double faulting. The receivers of serves can do worse, in a sense, even granted they can give away only one point at a time. They can lose points for their side by displaying any one of a great multitude of faults when returning serves. Of course, a true ace is an earned point. Receivers of aces need not feel they have committed a botch and let down their partners if they fail to return the serve at all, or if the best they can do is barely to get their rackets on the balls so they set up an opponent to slam the feeble return away quickly for a sure point. But the ace is not common in ordinary tennis play. Moreover, the receiver, even when confronted with a server who is capable of delivering a ball so well directed and with such speed or spin that it is impossible to return, usually can take steps to interfere with such a stirring performance by the server, as we shall presently observe.
Let us deal first, however, not with aces, but with the common serve, the one we are most likely to encounter in average play. Even the most energetic of servers, when forced to a second serve because of faulting on the first effort, presents us most often with a serve that is returnable if we act wisely rather than foolishly. The ordinary serve is not one that floats to us, asking to be smacked to advantage cavalierly and carelessly, but it is likely to be of such trajectory as to provide the receiver with every chance for a sound return to the right region of the opponent's court.
Preparation for a good return of serve starts with a perceptive study of the nature of the server's output. It is customary in social tennis to allow a server a few warm-up efforts (or even to grant the privilege of serving until a ball eventually lands in) when serving for the very first time during the match. Whether servers are serving to your partner or to you, you must watch closely what they do during this preliminary period, their preferred locations and stances, and their habits in the casting of glances as they get set to throw the ball up and bring their rackets onto it. Most servers take a final glimpse at the very specific region within the serving area to which they plan to direct their serves. For instance, they may have in mind serving to your backhand, thinking, probably correctly, that you are less able to return a ball well on that side. If that should be the case, you will almost certainly find them focusing their eyes for a revealing instant on the backhand portion of your service area.
The location a server chooses along the service line also will tell you a lot. As was indicated in Figure 4, some servers, intent on serving to your backhand (if you are in the forehand court) will actually take a stance at point A, the customary singles service position. Presumably, they would not crowd their partner’s territory so much and leave so large a fraction of their own half-court wide open if
Easy Exploitation of Easy Serves they planned anything but a serve to your backhand. At the other extreme, servers may take positions near the corner
(C in Fig. 4) because they intend to provide you with an extreme cross-court, as shown, to cause you to be driven to your right, way off the court, as you seek to make your return. Noting both the last look on the part of the server before throwing the ball up and the server's choice of location should help you greatly in anticipating where the served ball will arrive and to be ready for it.
A player whose serve is continually powerless usually lacks precision as well as strength. Such a server has to be satisfied merely to get the ball in play successfully and entertains few ambitions about producing a troublesome extreme trajectory to one side of you or the other. That resulting serve is likely to be the equivalent of a mere toss over the net, and it will usually clear the net by an overly generous margin and bounce rather high. You will have time to get yourself forward to an excellent position to return it well. Perhaps this namby-pamby server, who is happy if the ball lands anywhere within the service box, will look in the direction of that little rectangle before finally delivering. But the glance will tell you little you do not already know about that server's pattern.
To respond to that poor serve, you should be sure you are not caught too far back. You should move to such a position that you can hit the ball forcibly when it reaches the high point or crest of its path after the bounce, which likely will be well above the net’s height (Fig. 8). This will ae er en a Crest ies eK omy, TM, a Pe aes
Figure 8. Hit the ball at the crest, not late and low.
permit you to hit the ball on a somewhat downward tilt and as hard as you wish for a potent return, fast and with a wide angle, or else right between the two opponents, who will not have time to work out which should take on the task of returning your ball.
On the other hand, if you commit the common blunder of waiting for the gentle serve to come on back to you, you will find yourself connecting with the ball well after the bounce has passed its peak height (Fig. 8). Then you will have a much more difficult stroke to make, having to send the ball up to raise it over the net. Since, if you were to do this forcefully, you might send the ball long and out of the court, you might be restrained to hit it with little energy, making it easier for your opponents to recover. This consideration applies often to the second serve of a server whose first serve is tough and deep but who retreats after a first fault to a demure second serve that may find you too far back (if you absentmindedly assume the second serve will be like the first).
You want especially to be ready to turn your response into a placement shot. To achieve this you must decide ahead of time where you prefer to direct the return.
Consider Figure 9. Here receiver Spumoni is about to handle the return of Catiatoris serve. A number of extremely attractive possibilities offered by imept server Catiatori should be at the front of Spumonis mind. Thus
Catiatori chooses to stand in the singles court position, A, near the center of the baseline, yet sending a pussycat serve timidly to Spumoni's forehand. In view of this error on Catiatoris part, Spumoni should move up to catch the ball at its high point and then direct it as strongly as possible to the extreme cross-court, into the big area Catiatori has stupidly left completely open. A server who is physically shy and who, moreover, provides this special opportunity exhibits anemia also in the thinking depart-
Figure 9. Spumoni takes advantage of
Catiatori’s blunder.
ment. This shortcoming should be exploited fully. In addition to a fast cross-court, Spumoni will attain good results by giving the served ball, instead of an energetic strike, a gentle pat, flipping it just over the net so its consequent weak bounce will find Catiatori too far away to arrive in time to cope with it.
Some servers unhappily indulge in what we might call the triple-fault syndrome because they repeatedly do three faulty things in succession with each serve. They try for an ace that practically never goes in: the first fault. They follow this with a sissy serve, which, regardless of where the ball lands in the service square, allows the receiver to move up and hit the ball strongly in return: the second fault. The servers then rush to the net after the pitifully puny second serve: the third fault. Servers following this pattern seek to emulate excellent players, who often make the point by taking to the net in a proper follow-up of a bulletlike serve, anticipating correctly a weak and high return, which they smash away. When you face an under-
Figure 10. If server's net partner is good, return cross-court.
Easy Exploitation of Easy Serves powered server who executes the triple fault, you can score by returning the ball almost anywhere, including right at the servers oncoming feet.
There are other excellent choices for return to a diffident server. Assuming the serve is from a sensible medium position (B in Fig. 10), you (at D) might direct your response deep into the servers backhand (E). This is not easy to do if the server has directed the ball to your extreme forehand because the server's partner at the net
(F) may stand in the way. You should not attempt returns to the servers backhand if the net player assisting the server is outstanding. Then the cross-court to G is much to be preferred. Of course, if the server has a reluctant and overly conservative net-playing partner who always hugs the alley, this will invite a return to the server's backhand.
Sometimes a server of low-caloried, flabby balls takes the far corner position (C in Fig. 11) in an effort to deliver an extreme cross-court to you, but fails, simply depositing the ball, as shown, near the center of your service area. If this happens, you (at D) will have been handed generous space into which you can deposit a snappy return, including a quick shot past the net player (F) to the server's backhand. This will either score the point immediately or else force the server to return with a flimsy shot, giving you a chance for a put-away in response.
Let us next discuss a particular return of serve that can be very effective in a variety of circumstances. This is to lob over the net player's head into the corner behind. If the serve is not high-powered, you should readily be able to produce a good lob. Should you judge your lobbing ability to be less than so-so, do not, I pray you, decide to erase this return stroke from your repertoire. Rather, be determined to practice the lob, enduring some loss of points until you develop reliability and accuracy. It will turn out to be an investment on which you will realize a good return.
Figure 11. Return a weak corner serve to server's backhand.
Of course, you should not lob if the opposing net player seems able to read your intention and is unusually fast.
Such net players will move back too quickly, leaving you with little room behind them in which to place your lob and often forcing you to hit long, with loss of the point.
Especially, learn not accidentally to lift the ball up sloppily, creating a “lobette’ (a floating, short lob). A lobette is positioned perfectly for that agile net player to smash for the point with an easy overhead action.
Confronted with ordinary lobs, truly excellent net players will elect to turn their backs on you and retreat to the rear rapidly. There, having sensed and timed the path of your lob correctly, they will turn, ready for the ball, and will hit it before or after its bounce with considerable power. Against such a skilled opposing net player your brain's control center should never admit thoughts of a lob.
Putting aside the bad luck of facing an outstanding net player, let us describe other circumstances in which a lob can be an excellent return. One is illustrated in Figure 12.
Figure 12. Lob over the net player to a server's weak backhand.
Vibrato, as shown, elects to serve from the distant corner, C. A lob return by Legato placed behind Vibrato’s net partner, Ritarde, will require of Vibrato an all-out race over the width of the entire court. He will know he must deal with the lob at E because Ritarde is not a star player and will be unable to move back in time. This lob is especially effective for Legato to perform if she has already discoyered during warm-up or in the earlier course of the play that Vibrato’s backhand is backward.
Many players whose backhands are reasonably effective for ordinary ground strokes find the return of a high, bouncing ball on their backhand side, the result of a lob, almost impossible to achieve. Of course, if such players would only run the additional distance equal to the width of their shoulders, they then could return the lob with their stronger forehands. Anyone chasing after a high lob, who has a frail backhand yet whose play does not readily incorporate this remedy of merely traveling the further span of the shoulders to meet the ball on the preferred forehand, probably should give up tennis for some other sport—perhaps wrestling, where exceptionally wide shoulders or a thick head would be advantageous or handicap less.
One further recommendation remains to be made about your return of a submediocre serve when the partner of the server gives up the net position and decides to play back. Actually, if the server's efforts are lame, giving you, the receiver of the serve, many excellent options, the server's partner should realize early that it is senseless to be up at the net. Playing there merely lays open all of the back court for you to drop lobs in. Even an outstanding net player can be frustrated if the partner's serve is modest and would do well to retreat to a rear position, although ready at all times to rush forward in case a lobette is inadvertently produced by the opposition.
When servers and their partners are both back near their baseline you should favor sending the ball between them. This is especially useful if you are possessed of a reasonably fast return capability, which is more likely if you pay close attention to the advice given earlier about hitting the ball at the crest of its trajectory—and if you bend your knees so that the ball’s height, when it is struck by you, is close to the height of your shoulders rather than being at waist or knee height or even lower. You might then have in mind striking the ball with all your might, aiming for just above the net, which will automatically give your ball’s path a downward tilt. The force will carry your ball quickly almost to your opponents baseline and will not offer them much time to engage in negotiations as to which should accept the privilege of returning that ball. On the other hand, if you know your return will be punk anyway, you should try instead for a light toss of the ball over the net, hoping that it will drop very close to the net and have a low bounce. This will put upon both of your back-stationed opponents the desperate need to run forward at once, even perhaps to a collision, if you have positioned your return between them, favoring neither.
Under all circumstances in which your return is placed between the two opponents, the time lost by them in trying to decide who ought to handle your ball may provide the margin which very often can net you the point. Even if a return of your shot is finally achieved by one or the other of the opponents, it may be a piece-of-cake lobette. If you are ready, you can step toward the net and smash the ball off to the side for the point.
Let us shift our attention now to the situation when you are receiving a serve in your backhand court. Here we shall assume first that your backhand stroking is inferior and that your opponent is aware of that fact. The server will set a priority on a cross-court to your backhand. Suppose he or she serves repeatedly to your backhand and you constantly reply with a willy-nilly, not well-placed shot, one the server then exploits with ease. You will have little to lose by doing something different. Your backhand return may turn out to be superior if you merely hold your racket so as to make of it a backstop. That way you can pop up the ball defensively. Of course, you must be sure to angle the racket to reflect the served ball over the net player. Be assured that this is a much easier skill to acquire than to develop a really strong swing to your backhand stroke. Of course, you must practice so as to avoid accidentally delivering a lobette, that disappointingly short lob that rises but does not go high or deep enough and instead presents the net opponent with an easy-to-make overhead slam opportunity.
Some servers habitually run to the net after each serve to join the partner already at the net and thus present a two-net-player front. If the opposition pulls this trick, you should go for any simple lob you can manage to produce. That lob can be placed anywhere, to the center of your opponents back court or to either of their back corners, nobody being home in any of those regions. Perhaps, since your backhand is inadequate, your lob will not be confident. Then you should be satisfied to block the ball up toward their court’s center. Unfortunately, that is a shorter distance, and you may be inclined to go long and out when you try for a high lob. But this will be compensated for because when your lob does succeed in landing in, with both opponents having abandoned the back center of the court, you probably will win the point right there.
We must add that when you are in your backhand court and you lob to the corner behind the net player, the server, if he remains back, can move to his right and return your lob on his strong forehand side. But if your backhand is punk and both opponents are competent, you may expect
Figure 13. Strong forehanded receiver takes advantage of wrong serve.
to lose the point anyway with your limp return. You might as well try the lob.
What if you have an effective backhand? It is still well to execute a lob return of serve reasonably often. But now you can also consider performing an extremely angled crosscourt shot in response to a serve to your backhand.
Suppose that, while you are in your backhand court, the ball comes to your forehand. Here, should the serves to you be of only fair strength, you must be especially alert to a certain opportunity. Note Figure 13, in which the player
Pizzicato moves toward center, having observed the served ball from Giulini arriving to Fortissimo’s forehand. Since
Fortissimo is able to move up and take the ordinary serve at the crest of its bounce, he can hit it swiftly and confidently to catch Pizzicato with a short cross-court. On the other hand, should net player Pizzicato not move and, instead, hug his alley, then Fortissimo’s forehand return should be solidly down the center of the court, between
Pizzicato and Giulini. In either case, Anonimo, the fourth player, is out of the action because the point will be completed quickly.
An equally good forehand return by Fortissimo, if he notices that Giulini has a weak backhand, is to aim for the backhand corner of Giulini’s court. Here the distance is the longest, and it is probable that Fortissimo’s ball will stay in the court even if he hits it with all his power. It is equally likely that it either will not be returned or will be popped up for Fortissimo or Anonimo to slam at the net.
is exceedingly difficult to handle. Suppose certain superpowered servers are in the habit of scoring aces at your expense. What can you do to increase the potential of their producing faults instead of aces on their first serves?
Again, it is critical to watch the glances and stances of servers. Even those exceptional athletes who have mastered the art of the cannonball serve will very likely take a last look and make a final incremental adjustment of the lineup of body and swing as they aim for a particular portion of your service square. This advance notice, if watched for diligently, may help you to place your racket in the way of the fast ball and, if nothing else, give you a chance of blocking it up over the head of the opponent at the net. This will get the ball into play, which is far better than failing to return at all. Admittedly, strong servers may et us now tackle the important situation of a serve that move over behind their net partners, take your uplifted ball, and almost tear the cover off it with their next stroke.
But they may also accidentally drive that ball into the net or send it out, neither of which gifts can they present to you if you have missed contact with their served ball.
An easily learned ploy often can be helpful to you against producers of aces because all their extremely tough serves may rigidly follow the same path. For example, it is common for ace serves to be sent cross-court, the servers liking the longer distance involved to help ensure a successfully implemented ace. If you should observe that servers are committed to that repetitive pattern, try this tactic: Just when they throw the ball up to commence the serve action, move over from a purposely taken, wrong initial position (A in Fig. 14) to the optimal place (B), where you think you have the best chance of interception. You must make this move conspicuously, so that the servers notice it.
With the serve windup actually started, they will now suddenly perceive that you seem equally suddenly to have anticipated where the serve will arrive. Your new position will seem to guarantee them the point if only the ball is redirected into the area you have chosen not to cover. Of course, the servers should go right ahead and ace you as usual. Strong servers, however, usually find it absolutely irresistible to attempt a last-second shift in their serve path so the ball will arrive where you were (A), not where you now are (B). But, unfortunately for the servers, the ace serve probably will not work now. Those serves, you see, became successful for the servers because they stuck to a well-established, highly practiced line of direction. The polished serve routine of stance and swing is precisely timed and cannot readily be altered. Remember, it is not easy for a server to put the many components of a beautiful ace serve action together, all solidly synchronized. Any-
Figure 14. Spoiling the ace server's pattern thing that slightly disturbs the coordination of the pattern may give birth to a bad botch by the server.
To serve against a receiver who moves during the windup is very disconcerting all by itself. The ace server may be extremely competent, basically able to incorporate the right corrections quickly and so neutralize all your shifty motion shenanigans. But you will have introduced an additional factor with which that acer must now be concerned, and the resulting serve’s accuracy and power will be at least somewhat impaired, at no cost to you.
Ordinary players, if they try to serve as hard as possible, serve doubles often. Their first serves are faults even more frequently. For such a hard-try server, and for virtually all servers, the second serve is far different from the first. The server is under great pressure to get that second serve in, and all action becomes geared to safety. The second serves will be considerably easier for you to return if you approach that task with good sense.
In receiving the second serve from a stout server, it is important that you readjust your position. Probably you have been playing well back to try to handle the first serve, the ace attempt. For the less mighty second serve, even if the server puts a spin on the ball, you will find it advisable to move up. The extent of your shift depends on all of the factors we have discussed. Again, you must watch the eyes of the server on the second serve to help you anticipate the site toward which the ball will be aimed. This is very important as a response to the second serve of potent servers because they are probably capable of accurate placement on that second serve.
That second-served ball is likely to have a severe spin. In any case, you should be looking and prepared for a high, spinning served ball at any time from any server whether it be the first or the second serve. If the server is an ace expert who uses a backhand grip and cuts into the ball as part of his powerful and quick whip action, it will be almost impossible to observe the spin phenomenon in formation. You can do better with other servers. Many non-ace, reasonable-speed servers can succeed in imparting a rapid and disturbing spin to their served balls, and they accomplish it with a racket, wrist, and arm action that fully discloses what they are up to. You must watch for that action.
The spin-ball server does not throw the ball up very high and performs a swipe or wipe at the ball just as much as a hit forward. Picture a ball turning on a vertical axis in front of you. If you wanted to increase the speed of rotation with your hand, you would not hit at the ball. You would wipe the ball’s cover as it spins, moving your fingers tangentially over it in the direction you want the spin to increase. You can readily discern this act when the server does it.
Unfortunately, on its way to you, the spinning ball may turn over, so you cannot be certain, unless you have seen that server's output before, whether the ball will zig right or left after the bounce. It may end up as a top spin with a surprising vertical shoot up in its bounce. Usually, however, whatever bounce characteristic that server's spin engenders will repeat itself. You must watch every ball that server emits, whether to you or your partner. Then you must position yourself to compensate for the spin and the bounce.
e have examined how you can be a cunning returner of serves. But suppose you are the server, and you encounter a crafty contender whose return of your service embodies every recommendation we have described. If you happen to be a powerhouse server facing players capable only of gentle returns of your bulletlike, well-placed serves, the problem is not worth discussing. You will win every game you serve with great ease. What should interest us is the situation of the player whose average serve is only fair. If you are such a server, it is critical for you to outwit the returner of your serve. Basically, you should consider a list of “don'ts.”
Don't indulge in any of the botches listed below. Their consequent SOBs will not be to your liking, and they can be avoided.
Before commencing your windup, make a firm decision about what region in your opponent's service square you plan to aim for. But don’t give away your intentions. Make
Sly Service to a Roguish Receiver it a practice to line up your body stance and do your visual sighting exclusively on the center of the service target area, never on its corners or edges, even though you may deliberately intend to serve close to such boundaries. When you have eyed that center and adjusted your body, legs, and shoulders properly to send a ball there, think about your planned bias away from center, but don’t show it in your glance. Have in mind adding the appropriate increment to the direction you give the ball as your serve action shapes and completes itself, tailoring the thrust of the serve to the right or to the left. You will quickly become accustomed to injecting such small corrections into your serve, so the initial lining up on and viewing of the center of the service region is all you will need.
If you really want to be devious, just before you start the serve, focus your eyes slyly for an instant, very deliberately and conspicuously—at the wrong place.
Don't ever pay heed to last-second movements by the would-be returner of your serve. Remember that receivers who shift position usually think they have received new information or have trickery in mind. Otherwise, they would already have chosen the best position. Since we have agreed that you will provide receivers with no clues, you must recognize that their motions can only be intended to psych and distract you. Don't allow it!
Don't engage in the extreme, short cross-court serve if your serve is an easy one (Fig. 15)—not, that is, if you have ascertained that your opponent is sneaky and has a good forehand. As Staccato is seen to do in Figure 15, he or she will easily return your severe cross-court right back at you equally severely, or, just as annoyingly, dump it behind your net player, Bona Fides.
Don't take to the net after your easy serve. Merely be prepared to run up if the receiver accidentally (or purposely) sends you a short ball.
Figure 15. Don’t serve easy, short cross-courts to a receiver with a strong forehand.
Sly Service to a Roguish Receiver
Don't encourage your partners to play net if your serve is less than unpretentious and you observe that the receiver is capable of hitting it back well. Your opponents’ balls will always bypass your net partners and keep them out of the play. They will be able at most to cover only a small part of the court for you. If they try to play close to the middle of their half of the court, your mild serves will be easily returned at their feet or just as easily sent back swiftly to one side or the other of them. Equally, should your net partners position themselves to defend the alley, you will have to cover almost 90 percent of the court that remains, including the center and the area behind the net player, as well as your half. Since the receivers of your low-speed, high-bouncer serves have so much court area into which they can direct their returns, they will have no reason to deal with your net-playing partners. You will be the only really active player on your side, forced to compete against two players on the other side. Both of your rivals will enjoy the luxury of resting between shots, one getting into the best position while the other is concentrating on a good return to you, while you alone will have to return every ball each of them may hit.
If your serve is puny and your partners nevertheless play net, they had better be exceptionally expert at net play and fast enough to shift almost instantaneously from one place along the net to another. It also will help if the competitors on the other side are not capable of hitting the ball hard.
Should these conditions not obtain, your partner should abandon the net and come on back. Each of you then will have to cover only half of the court.
Don’t fail to watch the receivers of your serve as intently as we previously recommended the receivers watch you, the server. Observe their stances and glances, seeking an early warning of where they are planning to send their responses to your serve. Try to determine early whether the returns will be short balls, spinners, lobs, deep backhands, or cross-court forehands.
A roguish receiver of your serves will attempt to distract you. You should also distract that receiver. Occasionally, after getting all set to serve, with some deliberate ball bouncing, tightening of laces and belts, and other formal preparations—all done from a position you do not intend to serve from—move over quickly and serve from your real choice of serving spot.
You may also inject distraction of a different kind. As server, you are expected to take the main responsibility for keeping track of the point score within that game. After appearing almost ready to serve, you should announce the score but miss it purposely by one point—a point against you, not for you. For instance, if the score is actually 30- 30, and you are serving into the forehand court, state that the score is now 15~30, an obvious error of either the score or your serving position. Do this when facing a player who, experience tells you, is a very fussy scorekeeper. (Every quartet of tennis players has at least one.) Such players will correct you, or someone else will, but they will still be going over the past points in their minds to be sure the correct score has been established and that all confusion about it has ended, while you wind up and send them your next serve. The more often you create a need to review the history of point formation so as to arrive at or confirm the score, the more you will be forgiven for your absentmindedness. You will have caused everyone to be convinced that you are one of those people who is allergic to numbers and scorekeeping. No one will accuse such a mixed-up, nonquantitative person of trickery, of actually fomenting distractions.
player who deliberately takes a stance near the net A should have two purposes in mind. One is to handle a ball from the opponents if it comes within reach, either to smash it away for the point then and there or at least to block it back defensively to prevent the other side from scoring with fast passing shots. The other objective is to exploit the net position by constantly changing it and maneuvering so aggressively and mischievously during the play as to nettle the opposing players. Here your aim should be to deny them preferable options, to force them to be busy taking into account your latest location (and your possible next one), to interfere with their plans, to give them no ease as they ready their body balances and bring rackets back to address the balls, and generally to ruffle and frustrate them.
We shall first discuss the second function, net nettling, because although usually not even recognized as a requirement by the average player, it is the most important aspect of net play. True, it is marvelously exciting to score by slamming the ball effectively from the vicinity of the net, but the opportunity to do so may arise infrequently during most games. Sometimes players who choose positions near the net, thinking they are supporting their partners serves, never in an entire game find a single return coming close enough to enable their participation. Others may take to the net gallantly during play but end up accomplishing no more than handing the full load of future returns to their partners.
All such net players usually share a major strategy shortcoming. They tend to remain fixed in their initial net positions. Their unwillingness to budge, unless a ball is specifically sent and addressed to them for return, becomes readily apparent to the opponents, who quickly bias their plays to avoid the statues at the net. In contrast, net players who continually adjust their site selections to match the dynamics of the play are constantly aiding their partners by distracting their rivals. These opponents will then be more likely to err for a loss of the point or to return ineffectively, setting up the net player's side for a scoring placement.
Consider some specific examples. In Figure 16, Ulcera is at the net and his partner, Angelica, is about to serve.
Ulcera is watching the receiver, Andantino, very closely as he awaits the serve. When the ball comes over the net (and even an instant before, while the ball is still approaching the net) Ulcera sees Andantino starting to respond, commencing a body and racket reaction as he readies himself for the return. What should net player Ulcera be doing during these critical fractional seconds? Certainly not remaining rigidly in his initial position—although ordinary net players make precisely this mistake. When Ulcera’s position was first taken, he could not have known whether the serve would fall near the court’s centerline, thus
Figure 16. Net players must move.
coming into Andantino’s backhand, or turn out to be a severe cross-court, requiring Andantino to move to his right for a forehand return. Ulcera’s first position was of necessity an average position, useful only as a preliminary starting point. It needs to be corrected as more information arrives on the eventuation of the serve.
What do Andantino’s motion and racket dynamics say might be his intended mode of returning Angelica’s serve?
Does he appear to be preparing for a cross-court to Angelica? A lob over Ulcera? Whatever Andantino’s response,
Ulcera’s job is to sense it ahead of time and move to intercept or thwart it, while Andantino is still assembling the delivery of his return. Because of Ulcera’s movements, Andantino is forced not only to adjust to handle the serve as it descends on him but to do so even as Ulcera is clearly setting up to interfere with his return. Does Andantino indeed contemplate a lob? If so, noticing that Ulcera is starting to move back, Andantino may now consider giving up the lob even before he has started it, while he still must keep his eyes and thoughts mainly on the oncoming serve.
Should Andantino consider shifting to a cross-court to Angelica? But perhaps net player Ulcera will move toward the center in a poach threat, causing Andantino to hit wide as he tries to evade Ulcera.
The server's partner at the net should force the returner of the serve into a duel in which each attempts to anticipate the other. Of course, if one of those two competitors exceeds the other greatly in speed and overall skill, the less well endowed will be defeated. But if the two players are comparable, what is the best strategy?
The net player, everything else being equal, should have the advantage, that is, if engaged in proper actions and reactions. The receiver of the serve, after all, has to be occupied with one additional task that the net player is not burdened with at the moment. The serve returner must watch and adjust to the serve and execute a return, whereas the net player has only to anticipate, move, and be ready, no ball as yet being on its way to him or her. This higher load for the returner of the serve will handicap that player, and the alert net player should be successful in the primary mission of nettling the opponent.
A net nettler should also become a skilled enticer. Consider Lusinga Medios usually successful ploy as an example. When Lusinga is at the net, facing the receiver of her partners serve, upon occasion she will move, just as the serve arrives, seeming to abandon her alley. If the receiver, despite noting the tempting, wide region in the alley now left open, decides to ignore it and cross-court to the server, an extreme angle is now required for that crosscourt return because Lusingas new position appears to enable her to reach out to intercept a more usual crosscourt shot. If the receiver falls for the bait, however, and drives into the alley, Lusinga will probably win the point. This is because all along she will have planned to move quickly back to the alley as soon as the receiver winds up.
More particularly, her strategy is to pay no attention to where the receiver seems to be directing the ball. She deliberately assumes it will be into the alley, a return she has enticed the receiver to produce but which she will be back and ready for and will knock off to the side for a score.
During the course of the play, the net player's actions continuously should be such as to deny choices to the other side, steadily forcing on rivals last-minute revisions of decisions about the intended placement of returns. The net player should always provide the threat of a poach so as to cause the opponents to hit wide. Similarly, the net player should shift position closer to the overall court center (A to
B in Fig. 17) whenever the ball has been sent so deep into the court of the opponents that a second-rate return might be anticipated. A deep shot to the opponent's backhand, in
Figure 17. Net player moves toward center when partner's shot goes deep.
expectation of an inept backhand return, especially calls for the net player to take the risk of covering more of the entire width of the court and preparing for a put-away shot anywhere. Fear of this aggressive net player will help cause a likely weak return to end up even weaker, or a high lob return, if attempted, to go wrong.
Further, when the opponents are forced to handle a deep shot, the net player should move toward the net’s center, to cover as much net width as possible. This action will encourage the opposition to feel that a lob is essential. The net player also should pull back a bit from the net (to
C), creating in the opposing would-be lobber’s mind the impression that the lob had better be lofted exceedingly high to soar over the head of that net player. This will often lead to the lob’s overshooting the backline. It is more difficult for your opponent to lob a return if your partner has hit a hard, fast ball. Then a position closer to the net is obviously superior to stepping back in anticipation of the unlikely lob. (If your opponent lobs after all, catching you too close to the net to intercept it, the correct play is for you to yell “yours” loudly to your partner.)
When the net player moves, either to cover the alley or toward the center of the court, it should be in direct relationship with where, in the opponents’ court, the ball in play at the moment is apparently going to bounce. For example, a severe cross-court serve (XY in Fig. 18), requires that the net player move away from a center position
(A) toward the alley (B) to deny the receiver the privilege of a deep alley shot behind the net player. If the ball moving toward the opponents happens to be closer to the central line of their court (XZ in Fig. 18), then the net player should gamble on abandoning the alley and move somewhat to the right (C). It is difficult for opponents to direct balls into the abandoned alley from near the center of their court because the net player is stationed so as to be in a good position to intercept such a wide-angle attempt.
Figure 18. Net player goes to alley on partner's extreme cross-court.
As still another example, suppose an opponent and your own partner are engaged in a series of strong cross-court exchanges, ignoring you. Then you might consider suddenly poaching, lunging into the two-way lane in which their balls are traveling. You should do this just at the instant when the opponent is committing a stroke. You probably will interfere with the swing’s proper execution, causing the ball to be sent, if not to you, then out of the court or into the net.
We shall return to elaborate on poaching shortly, but first let us discuss other roles of the net player.
nless one is playing at the net against pooped-out opponents, net play requires much faster reflexes and speed of arm, wrist, and body motions than does back-court play. The reasons are obvious. At the net you are standing closer to the opposition’s rackets. Balls that come right at you allow you much less time for response than when you are returning balls in your back court. It is not just that the distance is shorter, often by a factor of two or more. It is also that the ball must usually be handled without a bounce, with no opportunity, while watching the bounce, to adjust one’s stance and racket position. Net play requires such speed that it is reasonable to question whether the average player should ever move up to the net except for special occasions.
There are many such special occasions. They will occur, for instance, during the match when the opponents are seen to be in trouble deep in their court and appear
Blocks and Blockheads in Net Play capable of delivering only soft, short, elevated lobettes. These can easily be intercepted at the net, with time to get set and hit the ball off at an extreme angle to register a point immediately. Even if the ball does not come nicely to the net player but is to one side or the other, there will be time to move to meet it.
A common opportunity for ordinary players to score points at the net is in support of a good server. The serves do not have to be aces or even particularly tricky. They do, however, have to be deep, bouncing near the backline of the rectangular in-serve area. A shallow serve, especially if it is easy, too often allows the receiver to move up on the oncoming ball. The strike of racket on ball is then too close to the defender at the net. There is no time to react well to a fast ball passing by.
A deep serve requires the receiver to be back. Even if the returned ball is strongly stroked, it comes toward the net player from a distance. He or she has time to act.
Because the ball must clear the net, it often does so with good margin and may arrive at just the right height for a powerful hit by the net player.
But most often a player at the net has a tougher problem. The average ball will come and go by too quickly, giving the receiver too little time to make a judgment and adjust to its path in order to deal with it. An ordinary return from an opponent, one that bounces and continues on to a player in the back court and is straightforward to return from there, often will be too fast and offer too little warning for the net player to do right by a return. The result is that players who lack adequate speed of reaction and motion, who do not use their heads, and who nevertheless insist on playing net very often will look like blockheads. The ineptness natural to such players will be highly magnified, and they will appear conspicuously at peak awkwardness as they fail to handle balls directed right at them. They will reach out for other balls to one side or the other, either missing them entirely or managing merely to touch them late and clumsily, with their racket rims, causing an embarrassing drop of the ball into their own court for loss of the point.
If, in addition to not having the right ideas in mind for net play, these players are committed to a few wrong ones, they will look particularly stupid as they go on penalizing their side’s score. For example, some blundering net play practitioners think they should bring their rackets back and strike forcefully at the ball, just as they might for a ball coming into their back court after a bounce in mid-court.
But most often, no time is available at the net for a full stroked response. Or they will play back just far enough from the net to make it easy for opponents to direct balls at their feet or so as to bounce a few inches in front of those feet, their rackets never having a chance of influencing the arriving balls.
Yet there are sound tactics that average players, even if they are a bit slow, can incorporate into their net play with extremely valuable resulting benefits.
The most important technique is the block. It takes far less time and movement to block a shot from an opponent than to meet the ball with a substantial counterstroke executed by a swing of the arm and racket. If the racket is held properly, the block can be immediately effective against balls coming directly at the net player, even those of fairly high speed. After a fair amount of practice in blocking, a player can quickly extend the racket to accomplish a block against balls to one side or the other of the net player.
How is blocking best accomplished? As a first step in becoming skilled at blocking, the net player should take a stand very close to the net. The racket should be held in the backhand position, as though its face were a shield to
Blocks and Blockheads in Net Play
Figure 19. For blocking, stand close to the net.
protect the net player’s vulnerable neck. The player should stand with somewhat bent knees, thus lowering the body so the racket can conveniently be at a height closer to the face than the waist of the player and also above the net height (Fig. 19).
From this approximate starting position, the net player can, with hardly a thought or an adjustment of the racket, cause a ball coming right at him or her to bounce off the racket and over the net. The racket does not have to be held extremely tightly if it is close to the net. In fact, this is the one situation in all of tennis when a slightly loose racket
Figure 20. A turn and extension blocks wide backhand region.
can actually be advantageous. Then, when the ball, even a very fast one, hits the racket, that ball will bounce off into the opponents court with its speed absorbed and its bounce negligible, making its return almost impossible
(Fig. 19). Even if the reflected ball resulting from this bouncing action should go on back to give the opposition another chance to hit it, a point still has been saved.
If the racket is held in backhand fashion as a shield, it can easily be moved out to the player’s left, on the backhand side, by a simple, slight left turn of the body and a right arm extension (Fig. 20). If this move is accompanied by a single small step to the player’s left, a generous distance on
Blocks and Blockheads in Net Play that side can be covered. The same blocking action will either win the point or prevent its loss by a passing shot.
This shielding, or ball-reflecting tactic, can be used even to intercept and block balls coming somewhat to the right, or forehand side, of the net player. If a ball threatens to pass by very close to a player's right, he or she need not shift the racket to the forehand but can choose instead to turn so as to expose the right side to the arriving ball and then push the racket out at it (Fig. 21). If the net player is close to the net, such a quick stroke can reflect the ball off to the right at so extreme an angle as to make return by the
Figure 21. A backhand block of a ball opponents highly improbable. The same movement, aided by a single, speedy step to the right, can be used to send balls off to the right that ordinarily would be thought to require that the racket be shifted to the forehand grip and brought back for a swing.
As blockers become faster and generally more skillful, a more sophisticated extension of the blocking idea can be tried. Even if a hard ball comes very wide to the net player's forehand, so it is necessary to shift the racket to the forehand and to reach far out for the ball, it is still well to start with the blocking concept in mind and use the initial shield position for the racket. A special, fast turn of the racket, from backhand shield to forehand block, is possible (Fig. 22). This shift is different from that normally taken when a player in the back court goes from a backhand to a forehand body stance and is intent on getting the racket all the way back, ready for a full swing. When the player is at the net and engaged in blocking, the face of the racket should be kept vertical while, by unfolding the right arm, the racket is merely shifted from being in front of the body to sticking out to the player's right side. That is, the racket starts out protruding to the left of the elbow and ends up protruding to its right instead. Accompanied by one step to the right, such an extended block can cover a substantial part of the court to the right of the net player.
Once the net player becomes capable of performing these blocking actions, the next step is to perfect a quick and subtle angling of the racket face just before the ball impinges on its strings. This will enable the directing of the reflected ball advantageously to either extreme side, or between the two opponents, or sometimes even in a purposely rising lob trajectory that goes over the head of an opponent who is close by.
The most expert of net players probably will not cite the block as their favorite vehicle for net play. One reason is
Blocks and Blockheads in Net Play
Figure 22. Backhand unfolds to forehand.
that they will not want to hug the net, as required for easy blocking, feeling that doing so gives away too much of the court behind them for potential lobbing by an opponent.
Ordinary players, however, will find the position close to the net most advantageous, not only because it permits straightforward, effective blocking, but for an additional reason. It eliminates the possibility of the opponents embarrassing the net players with balls directed at their feet or that are caused to bounce just in front of them. A net player must be extraordinarily quick and well coordinated
sudden reversal of direction at the last instant making for a timing problem nearly impossible to handle. Moreover, any ball very near the ground that has not yet bounced is extremely difficult for the so-so player to return.
Champion tennis players when at the net think of a substantial volume of three-dimensional space as the region in which they expect to reign. It extends in height from the ground to a jump reach, and the floor surface they can cover is more than the entire service rectangle. By operating from the center of this cube of space, truly polished net players can move and cover from the alley to the centerline of the court and from the net to the back court with but two or three agile steps. Such players can put their rackets out to either side and handle balls from their toes to five feet over their heads. These exceptional net artists, when they are discovered to be on the court, had best be avoided by their competitors. Also, sadly, their playing talents are of little use as models for average players.
The ordinary player had best remain close to the net if net play is to be exploited. Against opponents who make points by continually lobbing over the head of the net player, the best advice is not to try emulating the super-fast net-playing expert just described. Rather, the proper counter is to retreat to the back court and abandon the net as a bad location.
ers when they deliver aces, no shot in tennis provides such instant gratification as a fast volley from the net, a return of an opponent's ball with an exhilarating overhead slam. Ordinary tennis players will rarely feel the satisfaction of executing the powerful serve that is struck, bounces, and hits the back fence, each step producing an emphatic staccato bang, the ball remaining untouched by the mesmerized and dismayed would-be receiver. Ordinary players lack the physical attributes for such a performance. But these same average tenniseers are capable of attaining almost as high a level of joy and thrill when at the net. This is because during a typical set, their equally ordinary opponents frequently will offer up softly rising and arching, uplifted but shallow-depth lobettes that even mediocre players can dispose of with finality if at the net. They can attack such a ball with all the power they possess
and send it away for the point, provided they use their heads as well as their arms.
We are not speaking here of a ball from the other side that shaves the net with terrific velocity. That ball can at best be merely blocked by the average player at the net.
Nor do we allude to a well-placed lob soaring well over the net players head. Such a shot can be exploited only by a net expert possessing high speed and perfect timing, who anticipates the lob, starts back early, and, catching the ball high in its path before it has neared its bounce point in the rear, smacks it back with a powerful overhead, achieved by a coordinated leap upward. That response to a lob is not for the average net player, who must merely hope the partner will be in the back court, or will get to it, to return the lob from there.
We are interested here solely in the overhead smash of those easy balls that arrive at the net begging to be disposed of properly. Skillful opponents naturally provide such opportunities very seldom, because when the return is a weak, moderately high-flying lobette, it is truly a botch. But that is precisely why these opportunities occur often in the haphazard play of average racket wielders, whose efforts are always generously peppered with blunders of every kind.
The causes of botched returns that are destined to offer smash opportunities at the net are diverse. Perhaps the opposing player has sustained a loss of concentration, or is disturbed, or is momentarily out of breath as a result of botching the previous play, or is merely not ready. Maybe a serve is well placed, and the returner is surprised and caught off balance. Or perhaps the returner is terribly awkward on the backhand side, or the sudden motion of the net player has nettled the returner, who fails to connect well with the oncoming ball. There are further possibilities. For reasons that are never justified, a common experience of average players is that the racket grip comes loose just as the ball is hit. Or the opponent may be trying for a lob and fails miserably, producing instead a short, medium-altitude lobette. Or the ball is hit on the frame rather than the strings.
These returns can happen at any time during the course of a game. The result in all instances may well be a simple, fairly high, slow-floater ball that the net player can and should kill. But, lamentably, many are the unthinking players at the net who miss taking advantage of these proffered gifts. A most distressing, yet frequent, response at the net is a kindly return right back to the opponent, providing a second chance. Another equally common abomination is to convert the perfect setup for making the point into a disgraceful loss of it by an overly excited, mistimed stroke that sends the ball into the net or out of the court.
Why are such atrocities committed by mediocre net players when the opponents have been so helpful, lifting a ball up in a slow rise that permits the net-positioned player ample time for a perfect slam stance and execution? The answer must lie with an inadequacy in the thinking department of the player. It is not a physical deficiency because, after all, any player who can deliver a serve within the service court with an overhead stroke, even if it is of modest power, should find it straightforward physically to smash a high and slow ball near the net.
To prove this point, let us fantasize for a moment. Picture an opponent awaiting your serve. Now, imagine that you have been permitted by the receiver—who in this dream is anxious to help you in every way to achieve an ace serve—to cheat on your serving station at the backline and move up substantially toward the net. As you commence to serve from up there, you would find you no longer have much concern about the net’s being in your way and you would now easily direct your ball to any spot you choose in the service area. The would-be receivers of your serves would lack the time to adjust because you are standing so close to them.
Now, putting all fantasy aside, your advantage in ordinary net play is even greater than in the imaginary serving situation we have just pictured because in a slam from the net you are not limited to sending your ball into that little service square. Instead, you are privileged to place it anywhere in the entire doubles court, an area five times larger. Even if the opponents guess the directions of your smashes and are back far enough to attempt taking your balls after they bounce, they may bounce over their heads.
The first step toward smashing success at the net in response to unintended slow-lifted balls presented to you is to recognize these natural advantages and be determined to exploit them. The next step is to practice a certain readiness routine. While standing at the net watching your opponent getting set to return a ball, you should constantly be asking yourself this specific question: “If I should be favored with a soft, sure, easy, put-away shot, where will I direct my point-winning return?” Working this query during each and every play of the game is no burden. You are not overly busy when your partner is the one returning the ball. While you are engaged in this thinking and planning, it is the opponents who have the problem because they alone have to handle a ball coming to them at that very moment.
You should always note the empty spaces in the opponents court as the play progresses. Have an up-to-themoment inventory of attractive, undefended locations in mind. If you, Amnesia, are at the net (Fig. 23), while opponent Allegro is back preparing to return and opponent
Asbestos is up at the net, your developed readiness habit should cause you to assume that Allegro may soon offer you
Figure 23. Amnesia is thinking where to return a lobette if it comes.
the shot you are hoping for. If Allegro does, then do not for heaven's sake hit an inane return right back to that undeserving player. Be thinking to yourself that you will place it in the shaded area behind Asbestos, where neither opponent can reach it. Be prepared to move a few feet either way to achieve your smash because the botched return of
Allegro will offer the time to make that movement possible.
Net players who throw away opportunities for a smash of a peacefully lifted gift ball are usually people who are too lazy mentally to engage in deliberations ahead of time.
They do nothing until the actual opening occurs. Then it is too late because they cannot think fast enough. They end up reacting haphazardly and ineptly, when, instead, they could be scoring triumphs routinely.
Super athletes, at least some of them, seem to be born with built-in correct timing programs. Their eyes, limbs, and muscles seem automatically to synchronize around opportunities as they develop. They do not have great need to deliberate as the playing out of a point proceeds. They seem instinctively to do exactly the right thing as the situation forms, and they do it with speed that makes up for their minimum of detail in advanced preparation.
We ordinary players at the net, if we wish to win points, must think, and think ahead.
a position halfway between the net and the backline. The majority of players will discover such halfway measures to be traps. The polished tennis expert will quickly take a step or two away from a central starting point to punch back hard volleys, returns of balls taken before they bounce. Such players will also move up to the net for a smash put-away if a soft, slow ball comes up, or equally, will move back agilely or leap up to send a lob attempt by an opponent back for a scoring point, again without waiting for the ball to bounce. Strong players, by stationing themselves in the center of the large territory they are prepared to cover, discourage lob attempts. They inhibit their opponents generally on all fronts.
In contrast, average players, when caught in the middle, usually will be reduced to ineffectual waving at passing shots on either side of them. They will often be humiliated by balls hitting their shoes and will be unable to time an
overhead slam shot even should they manage to step back rapidly enough to intercept a lob before it bounces.
This is not to say that playing the middle of the court is an impossible approach for uninspiring players. But it greatly magnifies the problem of their executing good strokes. Those who can do it successfully are distinctly members of the upper class of tennis players. We middleclass players must avoid the middle ground because here our most shameful mediocrities are certain to be prominently exposed.
When we find ourselves located neither up near the net nor back in the court's rear, we are forced to spend most of our time trying to hit volleys, balls coming at us without a bounce. It is helpful if those balls arrive high, but not above our easy reach. If we hit forcefully, and on the strings near the sweet spot rather than on the frame, we can send such balls back to our opponents at higher velocity and with very wide angles, giving them significant trouble. But, alas, we often lack the speed and coordination to respond as quickly as is required. It is far preferable for us if the ball bounces ten feet in front of us because the bounce takes some of the steam out of the ball’s momentum. We need the added increment of time, while the ball travels the longer distance, to get set for a solid return.
If we are going to return balls before they bounce, we had best be up at the net, blocking the hard balls off to the sides and smashing down and away at high, floating, botched returns. When, instead, we stand back several feet, we can expect to encounter lots of low and fast balls. These are terribly annoying menaces. We might get a racket on them, but we can’t block them back because we are too far from the net and our reflected returns usually will fall short or go wild. Because the racket has to be held down far from our eyes, its angle and tilt (not to mention its
Advancing above the Middle Class basic position) are too tough for us to adjust, particularly with the lightning speed required.
Even worse, when we are stuck in the halfway region, is our helplessness before a ball that refuses to come on back to our waiting racket and insists instead on bouncing just inches in front of it. It is difficult enough to time and tilt a racket’s projection to meet the ball’s arrival when it comes in so low, but a sudden bounce is certainly a rude change in its path. For this we must equally suddenly compensate in racket posture and height, and that is brutally difficult.
What, then, do we conclude? Should the average player entirely rule out the halfway position? Should it be occupied only in passing, as when the player is engaged in shifting from back court up to the net or getting back to the rear as the play of the moment may require? The answer is that reasons do exist for ordinary players to position themselves upon occasion neither up nor back but rather right in the middle—but in every instance it is a temporary or preparatory position. In every such circumstance the player should plan to go either to the net or the back court at once, depending on the opponent's anticipated next action.
Let us illustrate. Your partner, Carnera (Fig. 24), is receiving serve from Capone. Although most often you expect Carnera to return a deep shot back to Capone, he sometimes disappoints through carelessness and offers an easy return directly to Sophia at the net. If you, Vivaldi, are positioned at the backline (C) you will be allowing
Sophia the maximum chance of returning Carnera's disappointing offering with a short cross-court shot to A for the point. If you are at the net at A, Sophia’s ball will be impossible for you to touch because she surely will send it behind you to C. By starting at the middle position, B, you will have a better chance to return Sophia's shot.
Figure 24. Start in the middle, but move.
Advancing above the Middle Class
Let us recognize, however, that it is only as a defensive and safety measure that you should initially choose site B when Carnera is receiving. The instant you see that
Carnera is succeeding in achieving a routine return to Capone and is avoiding Sophia at the net, you must relocate, most often moving right up to the net at A. Here you will be ready to nettle Capone, blocking his return if it is fast and near you, or to meet his ball with an overhead slam if it is a weak, high lobette. Of course, if you know Capone often lobs, and with accuracy, you might better leave the middle quickly for a perch at the backline (C). In no case should you allow yourself to remain stuck at B.
Consider another situation (Fig. 25). Victor is back, and his partner, Emanuel, also back, has just sent a beautiful high lob into the backhand corner of the opponents. Garibaldi, originally in the wrong corner, is starting to run to attempt a return of that lob. Garibaldi’s partner at the net,
Lolabridgida, anticipating correctly, is shifting to her right. Now, Victor and Emanuel know very well that poor Garibaldi is in trouble because of a weak backhand. Although running at full force, he may have to return with a backhand high over his left side and may miss entirely. Even should he connect successfully with the ball, Garibaldi’s return will lack force. It may be a lobette that can be put away by
Victor or Emanuel if one of them is at the net.
Under these circumstances, neither Victor nor Emanuel should stay put at the backline. They should move quickly to halfway positions as soon as Emanuel’s lob starts to unfold. They should pause there to watch Garibaldi’s act develop. If Garibaldi’s offering arches up short and soft, then Victor or Emanuel should quickly take the two or three steps necessary to perform a put-away slam at the net. On the other hand, if Garibaldi should connect well and loft a high ball, Victor and Emanuel have ample time to
Figure 25. Move up on a good lob to player with weak backhand.
retreat to their original positions far back, just as if they had never left them. It would require more speed than they possess for them to get to the net if they delayed leaving the backline until Garibaldi’s return ball is already on its way. By using the halfway measure, Victor and Emanuel can add an effective option, one that will often yield a point.
Some outstanding players never return a lob with another lob. In fact, given the high bounce of a lob, an acey server, when back and presented with a lob on the forehand side, may well hit it after the bounce with an overhead slam, a shot akin to the ace serve but even more
Advancing above the Middle Class dangerous because it will have to be expected at any point of the entire doubles court. Against such a player about to receive a lob, you do not want to be caught halfway. If you are in the back court, remain there and plan to try a return after the ball’s bounce. If you are at the net, hug it and your alley closely and prepare for a defensive block to avert being shamed by a quick passing shot or one that bounces off your chest or eyebrows.
Other players favor and specialize in lobs, becoming very accurate at executing them, and, conversely, never developing the ability to send forth hard, low returns that pass just over the net. If you are at the net when such opponents seem to have been delivered a ball that lends itself to a lob, you need to assume they may well lob. Here a sudden retreat by you to the halfway position may disturb their plans and put a doubt in their minds about lobbing into your half of the court. The result of the indecision your move will engender might be an ineffective, low-speed return that you can step up to the net to handle, sending the ball off to one side or the other for the point.
As with other guidelines recommended in this chapter, exceptional circumstances are bound to arise in which the rules should be violated. For example, although in my own doubles playing I treat the middle position as uncomfortable and temporary when I am in it, my strategy is totally altered when I have the privilege of having Furore Alighieri as my partner. Furore hits every ball very hard.
Most of his shots go in, and all bounce near the backline. I early observed that all the opponents can do against his drives is to respond with a weak, rising, defensive ball, virtually a block but a block originating from way back. If I stand at the net, the return may go over my head. If I stand all the way back, I can do nothing special with the ball after its bounce. The halfway position is just right when
Furore is my partner. The balls then come toward me at modest speed and at precisely the correct height before the bounce for me to be able to time and execute an overhead smash. I can make points I could not achieve from any other position.
player who starts early to get into position to return A= oncoming ball enjoys a decided advantage in accomplishing the return effectively. Some tennis athletes are particularly sensitive to an opponent's body stance, orientation, glances, and swings. Such perceptive surveyors of what you are preparing to do, when they are your opponents, may move to the right spots and get their rackets set well before your balls reach them. If you do not engage in suitable countering tactics, and opponents talented at anticipating you are about as competent as you in every other aspect of the game, you will surely go down to defeat.
You must endeavor to develop valuable guessing skill concerning the likely trajectory of your rival’s next shot.
Doing so requires, first, that you be determined to inculcate into the pattern of your play a constant, concentrated observation of your opponents as they prepare to produce their returns. We have already stressed that this is a good habit when your opponent is serving to you. But it applies as well throughout the game. Assuming that the playing characteristics of your opponents are not dominated by guile and trickery (a justified assumption when applied to players in general since few are likely to have studied this text), what they are up to will be at least partially discoverable early. When the returns that they assemble are on their way to you, you should be well on your way to the best combination of location and swing to ensure a solid reply, the first steps toward that objective having been taken before the ball arrives.
You should embrace a second objective, however, one that incorporates exactly the cunning and deception to which you hope your opponents will not resort. You should especially aspire to mislead contestants on the other side of the net if you know they are engaged in observing your preparation for a return shot with great diligence and competence. You should employ flagrant feigning and fakery on them, displaying conspicuous clues that are deliberately false. If the opposing player is one who typically pays little attention to you, watching carefully the balls you send but not appreciating the value of continual reconnaissance of your person, then your actions as you formulate the execution of your next shot should be especially flamboyant so they will attract attention and thus mislead to the maximum.
In principle, deceiving opponents as to where you plan to send the ball has no limits. Such skullduggery can encompass some very difficult physical tricks, suitable only for an individual who combines the best qualities of the polished athlete with those of professional jugglers, acrobats, and actors. Thus a player near the net, viewing an oncoming high ball, may contrive to appear to be readying for a powerful slam volley so as to cause the opponents to race to their back court in order to seek a chance to handle the return after the bounce. After this dramatic dissembling, the wizard, at the last possible instant, may cause the ball merely to be slid softly off the racket onto the opponents floor near the net, an unreturnable, scoring coup. Such a performance is extremely difficult to pull off.
It involves the combining of tight physical coordination and timing with acting of a quality suitable for the legitimate theater. Such faking is not recommended for the ordinary player.
Instead, let us concentrate on two basic, everyday, ordinary strokes, in the execution of which your goal will be to create a false impression either about the left-right direction of your return or the up-back positioning of it. We assume you are returning an ordinary ball, one of medium speed, coming across the net neither too high above it nor too close to it, bouncing in mid-court, and coming on back for you to engage it after the bounce as you stand in the back part of your court. We further assume that you are capable of a fairly energetic return but not one that is sensational in power or any aspect of its trajectory. These are the balls that typically go back and forth between average players on the two sides of the net until someone commits a botch or someone else hits an especially wellplaced ball relative to the momentary position of the players. We assume that the problem all four players face is that of anticipating the opponents’ shots and then positioning themselves so as to be able to strike well each arriving ball.
Thus in Figure 26, Tempus is getting set for a return and is facing Presto, a fast net player on the other side. Tempus would like to avoid Presto, so Tempus favors a straightforward return directed at Giuseppi. (We shall assume that on net opponent guessing.
this play Tempus’s partner, Lola, will offer him no more than quiet mental support.) Now, Tempus is aware of one basic problem that may interfere with his simply starting a cross-court duel with Giuseppi and then hoping that such cross-court exchanges will result in Giuseppis making an error before Tempus does. This problem is that Presto has a tendency to poach, at which action he is gifted. Observing Tempus’s motions and anticipating them correctly,
Presto may suddenly step toward the center of the net and intercept Tempus's return to Giuseppi.
To solve this real-life tactical problem, Tempus should resort to dropping a false clue or two. One is to do a quick unmistakable, intended-to-be-perceived glance down
Presto’s alley. Then, as the ball from Giuseppi approaches, Tempus should put his body and racket in such a position as to be able to direct a forceful return precisely into that alley. This action will cause Presto to decide to guard the alley, and he will prepare to make his interception there.
In fact, Presto is very likely to believe that his brilliant observation and anticipation will put him in a position to block Tempus’s strong alley shot, sending it off to the side for a sure point. At the last moment, however, Tempus, even as his swing is still in process, has merely to allow himself to be too enthusiastic as he brings his racket from back to forward and strikes the ball. This will enable him to overshoot on his swing. The result will be that his return will turn out to be a cross-court to Giuseppi after all.
This is a very easy stroke to learn because it is always within the available options of a tennis player, as the swing is carried through, to overshoot on the timing. The opposite is not at all easy. It is difficult and can hardly be faked. That is, if Tempus were to arrange his body stance and orientation and the swing of his racket so as to be set for a strong cross-court to Giuseppi, he would find it almost impossible to perform a last-instant alteration to slow down and time the swing so as to drive the ball into Presto’s alley instead. A slowdown after starting a forceful swing is as difficult as stopping a swallow after it has started down the throat. It will result in an awkward, obvious, feeble arm action. The ball may be hit by the racket’s rim or go into the net or way out.
What if Presto should sense that something is amiss and suddenly dart for the center after all, determined to put away the cross-court that he concludes will constitute Tempus’s return? Then Tempus, being all set for it, can go ahead and hit into Presto’s alley and make the point right off. Presto cannot possibly get back. He may be fast, but he will have committed himself to move quickly in exactly the wrong direction.
The previous discussion has made the assumption that the player concerned is playing the forehand court and is hitting a forehand cross-court ball into the forehand of the opposing player. What about hitting a backhand stroke cross-court over to an opponent in the opposite backhand corner? This does not alter the attractive usefulness of the faking we have described. Even with a relatively weak backhand, it again is true that throwing glances and adopting a stance that suggests to the opposite side that the ball is being directed forward, rather than cross-court, will still leave the perpetrator of this deceit with the splendid option to do either. Once more, an overshoot will turn a forward shot into a cross-court one. This will confuse the opposition, leaving them ignorant as to which it will be until it is too late.
Similar conditions can be set up by a crafty player as to the up-back nature of a return. All during a typical game your opponents would dearly love to know ahead of time whether you plan to try for their back court, that is, to lob over their heads, when they are up at the net, or, similarly, to present them, when they happen to be back, with a short drop shot that just makes it over the net. In all these instances we are speaking of a ball coming to you with ordinary or medium speed, one that bounces roughly halfway in your court and continues on to you for a straightforward return after its bounce. (If, instead, the ball should come over with exceptional speed and be distant from you, so that you have all you can do to get within striking distance, you will simply have to do the best you can. You will not then be privileged to do much choosing about whether to lob the return or to deliver a short ball.
For such defensive returns, your mind should not be busy conniving with the intent of misleading your opponents. )
As before, when we described left-right clues, you can make it your habit to exploit glances and stances. When the opponents are both back you might make it appear that you are going to deliver to them a short drop over the net. You simply set out to do just that with all deliberate care. Immediately this may cause them to rush forward hurriedly. At least, it surely will make them hesitant to remain back where they are and will create doubts as to what regions of the court they should favor.
Putting them in a quandary mode puts you at an advantage. You can be certain their eventual return of your ball is likely to be less effective, whether you go on with your drop shot or whether you shift without notice to a lob. You want to be in a position where, having signaled one of the possibilities, you can indulge in completing either one without divulging any further information to the enemy. Of course, you will be watching your opponents movements out of the peripheral vision of your eyes. If they remain stubbornly where they started, near the backline, you can dump the ball just over the net. If they move up with vigor, you can elect to execute a lifting of the ball well behind them.
Now, how do you handle your body and racket so that you will retain the option and capability to succeed with either of the two choices of return shots without disclosing what you are up to? There must be no discernible difference between how you act under the two possibilities until you have nearly finished the stroke. Obviously, we would not be recommending this particular misrepresentation of intentions if there did not exist a practical, relatively easily learned maneuver to make such faking attractive for the ordinary player.
First, you should have in mind positioning yourself
short drop shot. This generally means that you must be sure to bend your knees and see that your racket is under the ball as contact is made so as to give the resulting return a toss character. The contemplated power behind your stroke up to this instant should be modest so that the toss will be a gentle one that does not carry the ball far into the court of the opponents but rather merely allows it to clear the net. Everything you do with your body and racket should be totally and precisely what you would do if you had no other plan in the world except to deliver that very short ball reliably.
As a last-instant deviation, too late for your opponents to learn about in time to include in their plans, you simply release your stroke so it will be a bit harder and faster. This will lift the ball into the opponent's back court. As before, with the left-right cross-court stroke, it is no problem to add this overstroking. The opposite would be very difficult. That is, if you gear yourself to hit a ball high and deep and then decide (before contact with the ball) to hold back and try to accomplish a short drop shot, the problem of control and timing will be enormous. You would enjoy a very low probability of successful execution, netting the ball or otherwise spoiling the shot much more often than you would bring it off.
If the reader has a mind designed for deception, a question will come to it at this point. Is it sensible to attempt double fakes? Can you prepare for a return so that, simultaneously, both left-right and up-back doubts and false clues can be planted in the opponents’ minds? Can they be caused to wonder not only whether you are intent on a lob or a short drop stroke but also whether you intend to go cross-court or directly ahead with it? The answer is that doing this is in principle quite possible. Whether it is practical depends on your ability to handle the mental concentration involved in the execution. It is not actually a highly taxing intellectual task.
For example, you might start with signaling and preparing for the drop shot directly ahead into the alley but retaining the privilege of lobbing into the back court, also directly ahead. Then, depending upon how your opponents have responded and repositioned themselves, you can elect to follow through with your racket so as to lift the ball more and, at the same time, overshoot your side swing so as to create a cross-court. The end result will be a lob into the extreme cross-court corner. Similarly, you can go ahead with the tossed short shot as to the up-back characteristic of your return and simultaneously overshoot in your left-right follow-through, thus placing that short shot just over the net but cross-court. Both of these combination shots are easy to master with a reasonable amount of practice.
What if your opponents gradually go from suspicion to conviction that you are a false clues dropper because of your noticeable glances and body language? They still will have to reckon with their inability to judge early whether you are going to send them a short or a deep ball and whether you will direct it straight ahead or along a cross-court angle.
There are some other faking and false clue approaches that can be employed with success by average players if only they are aware of the possibilities and are interested in applying enough mental effort to develop them. They involve play at the net, however, and are best dealt with as extensions of the art of poaching, which we take up next.
uccessful doubles play requires that the partners engage in much compatible sharing—of territory, duties, responsibilities, blame, and glory. The game includes rigid compliance with the rule of alternating the roles of serving and receiving when the play of each point commences. Indeed, the respective assignment of forehand and backhand courts as initial areas of coverage by the doubles partners is a commitment made at the beginning of the set, and it cannot be altered from game to game or point to point during the set. The two players should carefully choose their point-starting formation to offer them the most advantages or to minimize their team’s known weaknesses.
After the serve and its return, however, the rules allow the doubles teammates to shift their individual and relative positions in any manner they wish. They may order their handling of the oncoming balls as they choose at all times
Egos and Eggs—The Art of Poaching during the playing out of the point. The stronger partner, in principle, may take over the job of returning every arriving ball. Unpredictable aspects of the play may call for sudden alterations in the pattern of location of the players, and they are privileged to hasten to readjust at will. Thus a lob that falls behind the net player may call for the partner in the back court to rush sideways to handle it. The net player in turn usually will have to shift to the other side of the court, which up until that instant had been the partners region of operation.
No movements made during a game to counter the tactics and ball placements of the opponents or to exploit openings the other side has left can be properly described as poaching. A poach in tennis is an act of invasion of one’s partner's territory. It is an intrusion, an encroachment, a takeover of the area already occupied by the partner. A poach is not a defensive act. A desperate try to meet a surprising shot by an opponent into a region between partners that neither at the moment is covering or a rescue attempt for what otherwise would be a certain loss of the point is not a poach. A poach is an offensive step, opportunistic and bold. It is a deliberate try at intercepting a ball the opponents have directed to the poacher’s partner but which the poacher sees as a ball that can be gotten to, pounced on, and sent off for a sure point.
The poacher’s teammate, at the instant of poaching, may perceive no difficulty in his or her returning the oncoming ball and may be as surprised as the opponents when the poacher suddenly assumes the duties of return. In fact, the action of a poacher almost always constitutes a basis for resentment and protest by the player whose territory is trespassed upon and usurped. Of course, a good (but not perfect) quick neutralizer of such resentment is for the poacher to win the point. This must occur decisively—not as the final result of several additional exchanges back and forth across the net but immediately upon executing the poach. Using slams or perfect placements, poachers must succeed in capturing the points whose control they have grabbed. A poachers ball must not be returnable by the opponents.
Why do we assert that even an eminently triumphant poach is not a perfect antidote for the poison of annoyance which poaching injects in most poachers partners bloodstreams? Because quite often what makes a poach successful is the submediocre quality of the shot proffered by the opponents. The partner of the poacher may well have planned to seize the opportunity to put the easy arriving ball away resoundingly for the point. Poachers, under such circumstances, will be viewed by their partners as having moved in uninvited and unneeded and stolen their moments of glory.
Thus, as seen in Figure 27, Figaro has hit a slow, high-partner's put-away shot.
Egos and Eggs—The Art of Poaching floating, botched return to Tosca. She is back but sees that
Figaro’s ball will land short and, because of its arching, rising path, will bounce high. Tosca has started to move forward and drools over the idea of hitting Figaro’s ball after its bounce with an overhead smash that will be angled off to the right side, too far away and too fast for Figaro to get near it. In her mind's eye she even has formed the image that shows her, should Figaro anticipate her invincible return and move up and to his left to try to handle it, sending the ball to where Figaro used to be, for a sure point in either case. But much to Tosca’s amazement and disgust, her partner La Malfa, supposedly defending his half of their side from a net position, suddenly lunges to his right. He lands directly in front of Tosca and proceeds to wide angle the ball from Figaro to the extreme right to win the point that Tosca has mentally already booked.
Tosca smarts under this aggression by La Malfa. But at least her side has won the point, and she knows there is no absolute guarantee that had she executed the return the way she had planned she would have been similarly victorious.
But what if La Malfa had failed? To Tosca, his poaching act was a manifestation of his feeling of superiority. He rated his chances of accomplishing his objective as higher than leaving it to Tosca. He would never have poached had he thought the chances were only marginal for him to achieve the win. A poacher has to have a strong ego. To succeed in the poach satisfies that ego. To fail is to lay an egg* and create an enraged partner.
Poaching is a dangerous business, not merely because it endangers relations between partners and may lead to the
*Machiavelli, not being familiar with the American idiom, literally wrote “to get egg on one’s big nose,” which is probably a superior expression to describe a buttinsky who commits a botch.
violent applying of the poachee’s racket to the poacher’s head. Worse, overdoing poaching can lead to steady losses of points. Skilled poachers, however, are tremendous assets to their side. Poaching—even the mere threat of poaching—<an constitute a very high payoff by enhancing alert net play, particularly of net nettling, as earlier discussed.
What constitutes competent, effective, and totally forgivable poaching? There is not one criterion, but many, that a sound poacher must meet. The poacher must be fast relative to the speed of balls he or she decides to attempt to intercept. Poaching should never be tried in response to a return from a player who is well above average in quickness and control and who is engaged in handling an ordinary ball. A poach should not be begun until the opponent whose ball is to be countered seems already committed to the stroke. An opponent, if basically a better and faster player than the poacher, will surely observe the beginning of the poach. If not already committed with arm and body, that rival will direct the ball neatly into the poacher’s deserted region. This will deflate the poacher’s ego. It also will lose the poacher the point. It may lead the partner to call for the poacher’s resignation.
Over a period of time, with many exchanges back and forth between the two sides, a simple yardstick can be used to settle whether poaching efforts have proven satisfactory. What is the ratio of the number of resounding, put-away, winning shots achieved by the poacher to the number of embarrassing failures? Assuming a successful poach is equatable to the winning of the point and an unsuccessful one to the losing of it, poachers need only average better than 50 percent. (We assume the poacher does not regularly commit the unpardonable sin of interfering with a ball that the poacher’s partner would surely handle so as to win the point. Under the handicap of such a blunder pattern,
Egos and Eggs—The Art of Poaching only a 100 percent success in the poaching record could be counted as acceptable. )
It is important to keep this quantitative measure strongly in mind in judging a poacher. A poacher’s partner, being emotionally involved, may make a very different value judgment. A point won by the poacher is likely to be undervalued by the partner in comparison with a point lost. When a poacher botches the attempt and nets the ball or sends it out of the court for a loss, the poacher’s partner is likely to think or say, “Why don’t you stay on your own side?’ Grandstand acts that fizzle will particularly cause poachers who meet with such fates to be judged as overrating themselves and accordingly possessed of personality defects as well as playing deficiencies.
If the poacher is beaten in an anticipatory duel by a sharp opponent who sends a shot down the poacher’'s abandoned alley for a quick, decisive point, the partner of the poacher may be inclined to issue the severe instruction, “Guard your alley!” But, clearly, a player who is never caught by the opponents’ leaving an undefended alley is one who confines play too much to a defensive mode. It is not possible to realize successful poaching (or any form of effective net nettling) without accepting the risk of alley shots that will net the opponents points embarrassing to the poacher. What counts is how often such tragedies occur in comparison with the frequency of successful poaches.
Whether the teams on the two sides of the net possess roughly equal tennis skills or are badly mismatched, potential poaching openings will arise reasonably frequently. To exploit the opportunity inherent in an exchange of deep cross-court shots between two players, a very common situation, a poaching enthusiast whose record of success is better than 50 percent should consider poaching to be an essential and mandatory tactic for inclusion in the ready repertoire. This is especially true if the poacher regards his or her partner as, more often than not, the player likely to make the first error in a series of successive interchanges with an opponent. If all poaching is ruled out solely because of exaggerated sensitivity on the part of a poacher's partner, then it is really that partner's personality that constitutes the bottleneck to the best possible team play, not the tendency of the poacher to poach.
If neither of two teammates is capable of performing poaching that wins points more than half the time, this may indicate that team to be weaker than the team on the other side. Poaching cannot be rated as good or bad in the absolute. It is a justified procedure if it works, and it usually will not work if the opposing team is substantially superior. On the average, under those circumstances, poaching cannot help. The team will go down to defeat anyway. Poaching will only make the score even more one-sided.
Conversely, if one’s team is even slightly superior on the whole to the other side in speed, power, and strategy, then poaching is likely to yield a greater than 50 percent success score. Poaching is hence a way to enhance the difference that exists in general playing ability. Poaching will help the better team that employs it and hurt the poorer one that does so. Accordingly, if the competition is very close, poaching will speed up the disclosure of which team is superior.
ing the game of ordinary tennis players is to reduce the frequency of their errors. It is not a botch to fail to return an opponent's ball if it moves with enormous speed and arrives unpredictably at an unreachable location.
Moreover, almost any botch, if engaged in only infrequently, is forgivable. No tennis player can attain perfection. But in the typical play of average players, the score marches inexorably toward a victory for the side that makes the least blunders, and many such ineptitudes are unforgivable. In fact, some are so penalizing and unpardonable as to be properly regarded as criminal. Yet they are susceptible to mass elimination by the players committing them. We have called attention throughout the book to many specific botches and their consequences. These were described in the context of various issues then under discussion. We now are ready to present in an orderly way a list of
errors most often to be observed wherever ordinary tennis is played. We do this because the first step in breaking the habit of regularly indulging in these boo-boos is to identify them with focused clarity.
Of course, as players wander the courts producing their indiscretions, their patterns vary, so the list that follows may not be in the order of greatest importance for every individual reader. Furthermore, although there usually are several alternatives for the correct handling of any play that may occur during a tennis encounter, an infinite number of ways exist to mishandle each situation. Competence narrows the options because it helps a player to converge on the best approach. Mediocrity, in contrast, tends to broaden the spectrum of botches, there being no set limit to the degree of creativity which stupidity can inspire in the generation of errors. Accordingly, all ordinary players can be counted on to develop some wholly original, yet senseless, modes of play that result in their losing points unnecessarily.
Granted all such personalized, custom-made mistakes, it is still true that avoiding the particular ones we are about to list will lead to sterling tennis performance against other ordinary players. This especially will be true if the opponents have not yet learned that the making of errors is more influential in determining the score than brilliant put-away shots.
In addition to the imperative need to keep eyes on the ball, players must be aware constantly of the location of both opponents (and, for that matter, their own partner) and must have in their minds’ eyes the spot to which they plan to direct the ball they are returning. These extra duties for the eyes often result in their not being held on
The Ten Most Unwanted Criminal Errors the ball at critical moments. But most of the visual data useful during the play need be sensed only to within feet. The ball itself must be followed much more accurately, truly within inches or fractions thereof. Thus except for a quick glance or two elsewhere before the ball comes near, the pupils of the eyes must be absolutely fixed, held determinedly, on the arriving ball until it becomes the departing ball. Side or peripheral vision must suffice for completing the picture of the rivals whereabouts and the overall court environment as the ball approaches.
Ordinary players return an extraordinary fraction of serves into the net or out of the playing court. We speak here not of aces or near aces but rather of served balls of average speed and placement which the returner is totally capable of returning well. Why does this crime occur so often? Common reasons, in addition to taking eyes off the ball, are indulging in conversation just before or during the serve; not holding the racket firmly; generally not ready and not in place; hitting a low bouncer too hard; not bending the knees for balls hit at waist height or lower;
glueing eyes on the opponent at the net instead of on the ball; taking too long to decide whether to move to return the served ball with a backhand or forehand stroke; changing one’s mind, too late in the swing, about where to send the ball; changing from a drive to a lob too late. We need only list these player defects to conclude correctly that they are both unnecessary and curable through willful discipline alone.
Sinful errors are committed in a failure to take one little step when the absolute need for it is evident early. The immovable, lazy player waits in a museum pose and hopes for a slow ball to come on back only to end up with a ball that must then be dealt with near the ground. By taking one step forward, the player could have struck the ball with force at the peak height of its bounce. Or a player allows a long ball to bounce just in front of him or her, settling for the difficult blocking of such a “half-volley’ when a single step backward could have made possible a solid swing. Or the player tries for a high ball, one really out of reach from the present location, without the mandatory single step back for which there is time, and hits crazily on the racket’s top rim instead of the strings or misses entirely.
Frequently during tennis play both doubles partners will inadvertently turn up in one part of the court, each badly out of position. Owing to confused reaction to a surprising lob, or in consequence of a mishandled poach, the two players temporarily may even be touching, leaving a vast area uncovered, with little chance of accomplishing a repositioning soon enough to meet the opponent's next shot. Or, perhaps because of a ball well-placed between them, the partners will almost collide as they rush to the same spot, all the rest of the court on each side of them remaining at that moment unoccupied and undefendable.
Thus, as illustrated in Figure 28, a perfect lob from Monteverdi clearly going over De Gaspis head while she is at the net causes her to retreat hurriedly to her back corner to handle it. But her partner, Savoy, not anticipating De
Gaspis valiant effort and thinking he alone can arrive in time, abandons his forehand court and heads for that same corner. Savoy succeeds in getting there and connecting with the ball but just barely is able to produce a lukewarm
Figure 28. The missed cinch point lobette to Columbo. It is a nice soft ball at exactly the right height for Columbo to return with infinite ease for a certain point to any place in the large, inviting area now left vacant. But Columbo blows it, madly driving his return into the net for a loss. Why?
One source of a botch in situations like this one is overeagerness, a loss of control through excitement. The sure scoring of the point is sensed, and heavy breathing and drooling start in anticipation. A calm stroke, one with no more accuracy and speed than the player is readily capable of achieving under normal circumstances, will fully suffice. As with Columbo in our example, one need only direct the ball to the evident, big, open spaces. But the enthusiastic tenniseer caught up in this drama—feeling the coming kill and wanting blood—goes for a powerful, highvelocity, wide-angle shot that, as luck would seemingly have it, is prone to hit the net or go far out. A cinch point is suddenly turned into a disappointing and humiliating loss.
Some nervousness is always natural. The most certain cure is to recognize ahead of time that a botch owing to uncontrolled zeal is possible whenever the other side offers up an irresistible opening. One should be ready for it and register the resolve to underplay the shot before it actually arrives and has to be taken on.
It is equally unforgivable to throw away the opportunity by responding with a perfectly routine, easily returnable ball directed right back to an amazed, out-of-place opponent. How can this possibly occur? Even with a complete lack of presence and tactical sense by the player—which says the return will be essentially unaimed—why does the return not go to some part of the huge unprotected area of the court? By the law of averages, even an absentminded return should usually win the point because the opponents are so badly out of position. To hand the opponents a chance to hit the ball once again would constitute sabotage, a throwing of the game, if it were deliberate. It is not, and yet it happens, defying all logic. It is a mystery!*
Most often, although not always, you have the option to send your return to either of your two opponents. This is especially true if both are back and if the shot coming to you is ordinary and manageable. Therefore, you must always have in mind which of your rivals to favor. If there is
*] hate to second-guess Machiavelli, but a plausible explanation can be postulated: The player is so excited upon seeing the delicious opening created before his or her eyes that the thinking process is jammed. Instinct takes over. Unfortunately, deep in the brain is to be found a ball-return pattern that was instilled in all of us as toddlers by our parents, namely, that you should toss back the ball to the tosser who sent it to you. When ultranervousness blocks rational thought, the reflex action, established long ago, is to return the ball right back to the sender.
The Ten Most Unwanted Criminal Errors a marked difference between them, and usually there is, you must favor the weaker of the two, not the opponent likely to accomplish a strong and troublesome return, but the one less reliable in producing a series of successive good strokes, the one who is more error-prone. Of course, you will need to consider the players’ relative ratings in conjunction with their momentary positions. For instance, a given player may be perceived as much weaker when defending in the backhand than when in the forehand court, or vice versa. The point is that you must hold the pertinent measures of the relative strengths of your two opponents always before you. To neglect this ordering and simply to return at random to one or the other, as though they are equally likely to botch a return or deliver an incisive reply, is to be oblivious to elementary strategy.
Even if you consider your two rivals to be about equal in competence, as suggested by their playing records over a period of time, you should make it a regular habit to recalibrate them as the match of the day develops. One opponent may be having an off day. Make it worse by feeding that player the bulk of the balls from your side.
Similarly, avoid the player who is “on” and seemingly can do nothing wrong that day.
6. The “Illusion of Grandeur” Serve
A mental illness that undermines successful serving is common among men players of ordinary athletic ability but extraordinary strength. They are capable of punching balls with powerful racket blows but do not possess the combination of timing, form, and muscle coordination to produce an ace serve. It is not a rarity that such Samsons will perforate the net with supersonic speed balls on their first serves. Seeking to avoid this on their next attempts, they may raise their sights, but then the cannon-powered balls usually will touch ground well past the backline of the service rectangle. Finding the very small “in” region between the two extremes is made all the more difficult the stronger is the serve action and the weaker the basic athletic talent of the server.
If you suffer from this malady, you must bring yourself to recognize the symptoms. They are usually readily discernible. They include first serves that take the cover off the ball and dislodge the grass yet rarely land in, with double faults galore. The cure is to temper the force and speed of the serving routine and match it better to your coordinative capabilities.
Although this syndrome is particularly penalizing to men of great physical prowess, who are ashamed to be capable of producing only an average serve, it has been known also to afflict two other classes of tennis players: men with limited physiques who, also possessing limited intellect, find the fact of their lack of power unacceptable; and women who are stronger than they are smart. The problem is clearly a mental one because, when adequate brain power is combined with reasonable calisthenic gifts, individuals of modest strength and size can develop good serves. A one-hundred-pound woman can give a served ball enough speed so that when delivered with outstanding precision—enabling hitting the edge lines and corners of the service area with no precursive hint of where the ball is being sent—it often actually constitutes an ace against a large-sized player of average competence of either sex.
Careful study of doubles play among ordinary players discloses that points usually can be won by returns of only average speed if the placement is opportunistically and wisely chosen and soundly executed. Fundamentally, the
The Ten Most Unwanted Criminal Errors court is very large compared with the area quickly reachable by the players. Of course, they can run to extend their reaches, but a ball of normal speed going back and forth in the course of exchanges between sides travels faster than the players. Some balls, such as high lobs, will use time soaring up and dropping down, but others will go off to the side and will require, for their interception, that the defending player move well off the playing court—which is to say that foot coverage is required during the match over an area even greater than the inner court’s dimensions.
It is thus an indication of warped judgment that players often commit botches and lose points by overly avid attempts to hit powerful, fast returns. The priority in the mind of the player who does this is wrong. First attention should go to selecting where to direct the return. The power put behind the stroke should then be limited to that range in the performance of the player where error-free reliability and accuracy is attainable and likely. This range should be exceeded only infrequently and then as part of a deliberate practice program gradually to broaden the practical available scope of the player.
Many players have never bothered to develop a repertoire of reliable shots. They concentrate on only one or two, which then become predictable. These they perform monotonously without thinking. Consider the example shown in Figure 29. Umberto and Luigi are locked into a forehand cross-court battle, which employs their mutually favored stroke. As we catch them now in this exchange, each has successfully directed a half dozen balls to the other, and they have become hypnotized in their pattern of hitting cross-court forehands back and forth, each determined that the other shall miss first. They have become
The Ten Most Unwanted Criminal Errors oblivious to the existence of Nicola and Tesla. Yet Nicola may move in for a point-winning poach from her position at the net, an increasing likelihood the longer Umberto appears to be unmindful of her presence.
Why doesn't Luigi surprise everyone by interrupting that cross-court routine and directing a shot at Tesla, directly ahead into Tesla’s backhand alley? This move would be especially sensible if Tesla has a flimsy backhand and if, in addition, the odds are that Luigi is going to lose the duel to Umberto because the latter is the steadier player, as judged by his victory in every other such crosscourt exchange Luigi has allowed himself to be drawn into with Umberto earlier in the match. Or, if Umberto is the weaker one and hence the likely loser, why does he not try a lob over Nicola, forcing Luigi to run like mad to take the lob in his backhand corner?
The more players build their plays around strength and reliability in only one or two favorite narrow-range returns, the more likely they are to be done in by players with breadth of tactics even if those players are physically weaker and less likely to win hypnotic duels in the specialties of the narrow players.
There is one surer way to lose point after point unnecessarily than to station an inept, slow-reacting player at the net. It is for that net player also to be in love with poaching. It is not uncommon for this combination of mistalents to reside in one player. Given that it is idiotic for a player to be up at the net if totally lacking the qualifications to be a net player, it should not be surprising when that unfortunate net diddler proceeds to do idiotic things.
Consider, for example, net player Lento in Figure 30. Lento is basically an unqualified net player because he is
Figure 30. A preposterous poach
The Ten Most Unwanted Criminal Errors too slow. Even if a nice lobette is accidentally offered by the opponents and it rises to a perfect spot in the air for a put-away, Lento at best simply returns a routine ball that the opponents can handle with ease. At worst, he vigorously nets the ball for a loss.
But as an added fatal curse, Lento foolishly thinks that to poach is the best way to exploit his position. He has a no-good backhand, but he insists on running to his left, where he interjects himself and tries to return ordinary balls headed for the superior forehand of his partner, Delareesa.
Possessing no real slam potential, his returns, even when his racket connects, are soft marshmallows. Opponent
Lombardy regularly responds to Lento’s contributions by dropping shots into Lento’s abandoned alley for the point.
Preposterous, silly poaching is frequent among aggressive players and is most often associated with a net player who is both underskilled athletically and incapable of adequate self-evaluation, an intellectual deficiency.
When you send some players a lob, they will automatically return a lob back to you. They are fanatics about a law they live by that says a lob must be replied to with another lob. These players can even bring themselves to feel offended when an opponent breaks the pattern, as if it were sacrilegious and a violation of a pledge to each other and to some higher power in the universe to answer each lob with a lob. The insertion of an overhead slam return of a high-bouncing lob, or any other form of return except a lob, will be so perturbing as to guarantee a botch in the very next stroke by the emotionally misguided lobberolic.
Once the first lob has been launched, players committed to an unending succession of lobs usually also expect to alternate their lobs from corner to corner. See Figure 31,
Figure 31. The boring alternation lob syndrome in which Scalapini and Curiosa have engaged in such an interchange, forcing their two net players, Antipasto and
Saliva, to oscillate in synchronization. Here, simply returning to the same corner rather than continuing the alternation will be so shocking to devout lob-to-lob players that they will mess up the following return.
ing a tennis match is usually considered improper, discourteous, and annoying because it is likely to be seriously distracting to them. The special quality of such conversation—its power to distract—is too enticing for us to ignore. It forces upon us irresistibly the challenge to turn conversation into a useful offensive tool. Are we not tennis players committed to the use of psychology and tricks to help us win? But how can we do this while maintaining full membership in a playing fraternity requiring exemplary behavior at all times? The answer is that any talk we indulge in must be designed so as not only to put the opposing players at a substantial disadvantage but also to cause them all the while to remain content with our conduct on the court. Let us define our task in the simplest of terms: We must connive to make all communication with our opponents costly to them at the same time that we make them like it.
These two requirements seem totally incompatible. Yet if we set them down side by side and ponder their potential relationship, one to the other, we are led to a principle of great fundamental value in the architecture of ploys.
Everyone enjoys and accepts being complimented on a good performance. Although truly obvious flattery is unwelcome and may actually be judged insulting, the recipient of an accolade that is even slightly merited will forgive anyone who exaggerates the recognition or overrates the degree to which it is deserved. On the tennis court, as in every other arena of life, we need not fear we will burden, irritate, or offend anyone by being generous in bestowing awards for excellence. Thus we have identified an acceptable vehicle for injecting conversation during the course of a match. It remains now to invent how to insert undiscernible, and so unnoticed, negative distractions into the oral awarding of compliments. This we can do best by considering some situations that have promise.
Every player produces a shot upon occasion that is above that player's average quality of play. Of course, one-half of all the plays handled by all tenniseers will surpass the average in effectiveness even as the other half will be below average. But we speak here of the more exceptional returns, perhaps the top 10 percent. These are responses so well placed or possessing such speed or spin as to nail down the point. Never should such a return by an opponent go unnoticed. It calls for congratulations. But the words “good shot’ or “great placement” are insufficient for our objectives. If Martini, for example, who is known to have a mediocre backhand, happens to let loose with a pointwinning shot from his backhand side, he should be applauded not only on the return he has just produced but also on his new backhand grip. Tell him the altered way in which he held his racket made all the difference in the world: “Martini, that new grip you just used in that terrific backhand return enabled you to put your whole weight behind that shot. The way your grip grabbed that ball made
Now, it is conceivable that Martini will ask of you or himself, “What new grip?’ Still, he will recognize that the unusual return he produced was beyond his usual abilities.
He will be totally aware that it will be difficult for him to duplicate it. In that particular stroke he did something right, he will realize, something closer than usual to the proper way to hit a backhand, maybe truly something significantly different (although apparently by accident) in the way he happened to hold the racket. Accordingly, your commendation will focus his attention on his grip when next he goes to hit a backhand. Such concentration will ruin his ability to return backhands at the quality of even his modest average for at least the rest of the match.
This complimenting and commenting on a specific— rather carefully chosen and always credibly describable— aspect of the actions of opponents is extremely helpful when they serve. The conversational technique can be applied with benefit to all servers, even an expert who is capable of acing you. Whatever is the usual level of such servers performances, they will exceed their average substantially from time to time. When they do, you must take advantage of the opportunity to make a conspicuous award of merit while also seeding some destructive corollary aftereffects.
“That was a terrific serve, Pavoratti, my friend! When you threw that ball up way in front of you that way—much
This simple statement, undoubtedly accepted with grace by Pavoratti, who knows that his performance on that particular serve was extraordinary, is bound to cause him to contemplate his throw of the ball as he commences all his serves to follow. For a certainty he will try to place the ball somewhat more in front of him than he is accustomed to in his well-established pattern. You can count on more doubles and easier second serves from Pavoratti for the rest of the match. (I have one friend, Dino Como, on whom I used this ploy four years ago. Como has not yet been able to recover his previously excellent serve, and I doubt that he ever will.)
Remember, the important rule leading you to quick invention of appropriate comments is to call attention to something the opponent did that sounds as though it must be a key factor in producing the extraordinary shot. You do not have to worry about its bearing any true relationship to the dynamics of your opponent's play. What the opponent actually happened to do in executing the above average return is of no importance. For instance, any net player who leaps up in the air to return a ball smashingly for the point should be told, along with being congratulated, “It seems the higher up you jump, the stronger is your return. There is just no putting a ball over your head!” You thus encourage this jumping net player to have an elevated impression of the height of a ball to be tried for. This has a good chance of causing much future leaping into the air to replace the often essential or superior taking of one step back for the handling of a high ball from the net. Balls jumped for are very likely to be hit on the edge of the racket’s frame rather than on its strings, and the resulting points will be yours.
Some compliments commonly given on tennis courts are surely annoying to your opponents, and even more so to your partner, while gaining you nothing. Those should be ruled out. One example is attempting to cover up your ineptness in botching the return of an easy serve by shouting out “great serve, an obviously undeserved bit of flattery. On the other hand, a player who is generally physically superior but who does absolutely no strategic thinking during the game should be commended on the use of strategy.
Thus consider Felicitas, who does well primarily because of her speed and excellent form and coordination but continually fails to take advantage of court openings with properly placed returns. She should be congratulated on her strategy when she scores any point, regardless of how or why. Try telling her, “There you go again, Felicitas! Always outwitting me! Always thinking about what I am going to do next and crossing me up! What a strategist you are!” Do not worry that your comments may drive Felicitas into becoming a competent strategist, thus raising the quality of her game from her present par of merely highly respectable to well-nigh invincible. What you will succeed in doing is the opposite.
Your remark will encourage her to try to think while playing. For her, as for many other players for whom the combining of the mental and the gymnastic will never work, any attempt at using strategy will add nothing but handicaps to the superior physical side | of her game. The
to try intellectual tactics, the more likely you will be to create confusion in their minds about how they ought to play. This will slow them down and put a damper on the strong facets of their games, which are natural and instinctive to them.
But the use of congratulations combined with distractions is only one approach to the exacting of advantages by skillful employment of the art of court conversation. Another is to ask, “Are you ready?” of an opponent, or “Were you ready?” Both questions appear basically considerate. To a player who is indeed ready, the first question riles.
But the fact that it is a vexation for which the opponent feels you should not be blamed, because you have merely tried to be considerate, adds to the irritation. No one enjoys feeling resentment building against a person who has performed a courtesy. When opponents register what they judge to be unjustified annoyance, they are annoyed with themselves for becoming annoyed. That becomes a potent handicap when they handle the next shot.
The second question, “Were you ready?” immediately implies your sportsmanlike willingness to wipe out and replay the point you have just won. If the opponent was indeed ready (and you should never put the question if you have any doubt), your asking is insulting, in a way. It requests a public confession of poor playing habits on the part of your rival, who clearly should have been ready. Yet again, that opponent cannot complain. You are being very generous in actually offering to cancel out a point you have already scored. The victims of your well-put question will be disturbed because of the double blow—first, the loss of the point, and second, the frustrating inability to avoid being rankled by your question. The combination is almost certain to handicap that player for at least the next few plays.
Players often express disappointment at having committed a bad botch (particularly when they have thrown away a good opportunity that they set up rather well). You should never fail to express sympathy and condolence. “Oh! Too bad! What a shame! I know just how you feel!” These comments might produce in the botcher’s mind a desire to throw a racket at you, or at a minimum to tell you to shut up. But the disgusted error-makers cannot countenance such childish behavior on their parts when you are only being kind and showing you care. So they will suppress it, with difficulty. Such negative effects on your rivals of little emotional incidents will be magnified by your having expressed sympathy and their being forced to receive it gracefully.
Some men players think it is macho to hold three, not two, balls in the hand as they start a serve. They think this shows they have large, that is to say, manly, hands. Early in the match, you should ask men servers if they prefer three or two balls. This question, apparently intended to be helpful and to facilitate your catering to the server's preference, cannot be ignored or resented. It may well be answered with, “Three.” Thenceforth, you must always see that the player so replying starts the serve with three balls. You should hope that he will not pocket the third for convenient availability but will actually take three balls into the palm and fingers of his toss-up hand. “Here’s your third one to hold,” you should say as you send him the full ensemble, constantly reminding him of his stated preference.
Of course, no one can play well, throw the ball up to be served accurately, or shift forehand to backhand quickly during the game with balls galore encumbering one set of fingers. You will have talked your opponent into a handicap.
The concept of appearing considerate while injecting impairments to an opponent's game through conversation may sometimes require that appropriate action accompany the spoken words. For example, suppose an opposing player misses two points, each one by a failure to deliver his return over the net—but both times the ill-fated ball manages to hit the tape along the net’s top edge before falling back. With such a close miss having occurred twice it is reasonable and certainly solicitous of you to suggest insistently that the net may be high, a condition you can argue is unfair to your opponent, who, you must point out, is an expert player accustomed to sending returns close to the net and usually doing so with accuracy.
After careful measurements and adjustments to the net, play can resume. Your opponent will now be overly careful when getting set for any and all return swings; this is a mandatory courteous response to your courteous action. The conspicuous attention the episode has given to his or her poor play and the holding up of the game are bound to influence the future power and accuracy of the drives of that unfortunate opponent. Since the balls all had better now clear the net safely, those returns are likely to be hit too high, if hit hard, thus going long. Or else they will become soft tosses arching well over the net, returns that you can move up on and smash away for the point.
Another category of conversational ploys is connected with the process of judging close calls. This subject deserves a special chapter, which now follows.
score depends not alone on the plays but, pointedly, also on the calls. If one team is significantly superior in the playing of tennis it will surely defeat the other. The score will be predictably one-sided, so a small deviation from absolute accuracy in arriving at it is not of importance.
But if the players on the opposite sides are close to equal in the arts and skills of the sport, the score also may be close. Then the decisive question of which team will win may be determined by the close calls.
Balls that hit the net and fall back, or that miss the boundary lines by large margins, be they in or out, are easy to call accurately. It is vastly different for balls that bounce within a few inches of the side or backlines. It is difficult to follow such shots as they rush to the point of bounce and dart away in the next instant. The quality of eyesight, the blinks, the line of vision, and the distance away of the
caller, the sun, light and shadows of the court, and the speed, spin, and path of the ball all are now involved in the call. The key observer who is depended on for the verdict of “in” or “out” may be moving at a full muster of velocity so the angle at which the ball and line are being perceived may be altering rapidly. In summary, close calls are often impossible to make with precision and confidence.
The criticalness of close calls in setting the score of a hard-fought contest is enhanced by the frequent occurrence of borderline incidents. The long and skinny area covered by the lines is, admittedly, very small compared with the court area as a whole. Thus if every ball hit during a game could be assumed to land at random in the general area of the court, a close call would be relatively rare. But the players naturally often aim for exactly those marginal court regions on the “in” side of the lines, trying for wellplaced serves, deep shots just inside the backline, and wide-angled deliveries off to the sides.
Granted these circumstances, what does all this have to do with strategy and psychology? Are not problems or opportunities stemming from close calls nonexistent since we expect absolute honesty on the part of all callers of boundary shots? In reply, we agree first that we must adhere strictly to the rule that all in or out calls must be handled with scrupulous integrity. Cheating should never even be contemplated. (As a practical matter, cheating in making close calls can rarely be profitable. Cheating inevitably will be discovered if it is practiced substantially, the only way it can be effective.) By employing appropriate guile without cheating, the calling of close shots can produce more favorable results for players who master the knack than a laissez-faire attitude about the function would achieve.
The basis for this assertion rests in the fundamental difficulty of judging the bounce point when it is close to the line. This difficulty is so severe that the average player, although having the absolutely sincere intention of always making a correct and honest call, can succeed in doing so only about half the time. The ball is as likely to be out when perceived as in, or really in when thought to be out. We are speaking here of the truly close shot, not those manifestly one way or the other but merely not seen to be either for a certainty by a player with cataracts. In this latter instance, the fifty-fifty average may still apply, but the operational width of the line, the pertinent arena of close calls, simply becomes enlarged to match the fuzziness of the vision.
If half of the close calls are called against you, albeit inadvertently, innocently, and uprightly, you need a set of tactics that will cause a result more conducive to building up the score of the match in your favor. How can this objective be attained?
An idea that is bound to come to mind immediately is somehow to alter your own calls when an opponent's ball lands near a line. Let us immediately veto that approach. You should continue to call them as you see them, trying as always before to aspire to honesty and accuracy. It is important instead to recognize that one steady, certain characteristic of human nature is always present to affect the calls. The instinct for self-preservation is inherent and deep in all members of Homo sapiens. The sensing signals that this instinct generates make you see the opposition’s liners as out balls if any slight possibility exists of arriving at that interpretation. Automatically, with no planning or other effort on your part, your calls of your oppositions very close, not truly discernible shots will appear to you to be out more often than in.
Your opponents are like you, virtuous but also human. When your returns land in the unfocusable visual noise regions along the lines in their court, they will be called out more often than in. It is here that, in principle, a crop of calls by your opponents in your favor is available for your reaping. You must create in the minds of your rivals a bias in the direction of calling the close calls in. To accomplish this we suggest several steps.
You should take the first step early in the match. You must watch carefully for the first ball happening to arrive in your court that is fairly close to a line but is clearly out. It must be far enough out that the opponents also will surely have seen it as out. But—though this may at first seem an incredibly nonsensical action—you must call it in. Yes, you should give away the point! Noting that you are doing this, your opponents may even challenge your call out of earnest sportsmanship. But you must be adamant.
“I saw it clearly,” you should insist firmly. “Your ball definitely caught the line. There’s no reason for playing it over. Let’s go ahead with the game.”
You must perform this step twice. By so doing, before the first set has progressed very far you will have planted three important impressions irrevocably in your rivals brains: (1) you cannot see well; (2) your honesty is impeccable; (3) what you cannot see you will call in their favor out of sportsmanship. Your image will thereby immediately be established as so singularly admirable that the effect will be a preshaming of your opponents. Their subconsciousnesses will come to believe that someone such as you deserves special courtesies and gestures. The twenty or thirty close shots you deposit in their court during the rest of the match will all be seen and called by them as in, whereas, without the spell your behavior has cast, your balls falling into the narrow blurry zones would have been called out.
Meanwhile, in your court, the balls arriving in the semiunseeable line areas will require that your own observation system be engaged in conventional close-call judging duties. You will be totally honest, as usual. But your subconscious will be influenced by the poignant memory of your having deliberately given away two points to the enemy.
Subconscious minds are tough, stubborn, and highly protective negotiators. They always seek compensations for generosity that they will independently judge to be beyond the call. Without your conscious mind even being aware of it, or compromising integrity in any way, you will see liners as out more often than you otherwise would. In view of the respect and awe with which you will have come to be regarded because of your early performance on calls, your opponents will entertain no suspicions or doubts about your honesty. Moreover, being farther away from the bounce point, they will know they could not have seen with any greater clarity than you precisely where the ball actually touched the ground. Have no fear. They will never think to contest your calls.
You can help to maintain the proper impression of your integrity and visual capabilities by taking certain additional steps. For instance, the following common event will occur early in the first set. You will hit a ball out, so far out that your opponents will feel absolutely no need to call that it was out. They will assume you or anyone with normal eyesight will readily have perceived the bounce as occurring well outside the critical boundary lines. When this happens, you must be sure to ask, in a most gentle voice,
“Excuse me, but was my shot in or out?”
This will startle the players on the other side for more than one reason, all useful to your objective. First, they will be surprised to find you seemingly unaware of the optically obvious. Second, they will believe from your question’s wording and tone that you were not debating the call in the slightest but simply wanting to know what it was. Third, they will be reinforced in their impression that you are half-blind and so you might have believed that the ball fell in and that they called it out incorrectly, and even, heaven forbid, that they were cheating. * The result will be a mental memo to themselves to be certain in the future to announce every out ball as an out ball, loud and clear, no matter how far out it lands. And, most important, they will be biased to be very careful that their judgment is right on all liners—which translates to their calling them in balls whenever any doubt whatever exists in their minds, as it always does on close calls.
A closely fought match typically will include enough close calls to decide most games and sets. Shifting half the close calls your way can alter a five to seven set score against you to a six to amore score in your favor. The approach we have described to influence the calls requires that you make only a modest effort the first few times to make certain you perform the steps smoothly. After that you will be able to employ the technique perfectly with hardly a thought. If winning is important to you, that effort will pay off.
*Machiavelli, in this ploy, seems to have anticipated by four hundred years Potter's similar suggestion of a tennis tactic. See Stephen Potter,
Co.).
ixed doubles—a male-female team on each side M the net—is a different game. More accurately, mixed doubles is two games in one, a tennis contest and a sex joust. Effective play of regular tennis doubles requires that the teammates be compatible. This is a challenging requirement because there are so many dimensions of the needed compatibility. The skills of the partners must blend harmoniously. Their weaknesses must not be mutually reinforcing because that will create glaring difficulties in defense and offense. Their personalities must mix well, and adequate appreciation of one another is necessary if each is to deliver best efforts in support of the other. If they are to make use of strategy as a route to victory, a special matching also must exist in the way their minds work. If one is a strategist, the other must be a willing complier. Without cooperation, strategy ploys may be inadvertently (or mischievously and even purposely) circumvented.
But this teamwork is absolutely mandatory for conventional, well-executed tennis doubles. Any two players joining as partners have the potential of either enjoying an advantageous partnership or of failing to arrange agreeable roles and missions in their joint endeavor and going down to mutual defeat. Mixed doubles adds something over and above the inevitable teaming that all tennis doubles entails. It is not that the match necessarily turns into a battle of the sexes, although it may well do that. It is that regardless of details, the new dimensions of the game may dominate on the court over the nominal athletic contest for which the players have presumably assembled. What happens is often in major part the natural consequence of our cultural heritage that sets expected roles for the male and female of the species when they come together. That malefemale pattern, unfortunately, is not always right for the tennis match that is taking place. Equally hazardous to the tranquility of the match is that mixed doubles brings opportunities for the partners to challenge the conventional male-female relationship, one or the other teammate believing that the culture is disadvantageous, lacking in rational justification, and based upon superstition, prejudice, or wrong motivations.
Yet mixed doubles is a common form of tennis. It is doubtless here to stay. It will last as long as there are two sexes making up the human race and the race plays tennis. Accordingly, it is important for us to take up some guidelines that apply to the entirely meritorious desire we should have to win most sets and to make wile and guile properly useful in reaching that objective.
At the outset, let us admit that upon rare occasions a male and female partner may be able to play a tennis match with their sexual differences not appearing to exert even a remote influence on how they play and how they get along. They are simply two tennis players whose cooperative operation depends totally on their skills, both physical and mental. They are not perfect partners because neither is a perfect tennis player and because they are not perfectly matched to achieve a maximum probability of winning every point. Their relationship, good or bad, as tennisplaying partners, however, has nothing to do with their sexes. When such a situation occurs it may be considered a minor miracle. The occasions are so infrequent, so seldom to be encountered by the reader in a lifetime of tennis playing, that they are not worth further discussion here.
We limit our commentary to the far more common and hence more important pairing in which the male-female interplay is indeed a problem and should be dealt with so as to attain greatly improved results on the court. We shall divide our presentation on the devilments and mischievous exploitations of the coupling of the sexes on the court into two parts. First, we shall consider matters inherent in the different expectancies of behavior of the two sexes. Then we shall take up an array of potentials that arise from the fact that very often two individuals find themselves partners in mixed doubles only because they are partners in one or another aspect of life off the court.
A given female and a given male of the species Homo sapiens may be found accurately ranked either way as to the relative superiority of their skills on the tennis court.
On the average, perhaps, men tennis players are stronger than women players. A typical man may be able to hit the ball harder than a typical woman. Men, again statistically, tend to be larger than women and have longer legs. So, although it does not absolutely follow, most men players may be able to run faster than most women players. But power in the stroke and speed in running constitute only two of at least a dozen major criteria defining a good tennis player. Also to be taken into account are timing and accuracy, form and agility, a sense of the ball’s trajectory, consistency, stamina, concentration, training, experience, repetitive practice, sharpness of eye, and a host of mental characteristics, such as the capability to research and anticipate the opponents actions and habits. A player who hits the ball harder may hit that ball out most of the time. A player who runs faster often may run to the wrong place, or fail to start running early enough owing to a lack of observational ability, or overrun an oncoming ball.
Objective analysis suggests that we have no way of knowing a priori, if all we are told are the sexes of a group of players, how to rank them as tennis players. Still less are we able to list them in order of their superiority as tennis partners in doubles.
Yet our culture, the result of centuries, nay millennia, of habit building, causes most men to assume they are better tennis players than most women. Furthermore, many, if not most, women will go along with this same initial assumption. Given a man and a woman without previous mutual court experience who are commencing play as mixed doubles partners, it can be expected that the man usually will presume he is superior physically on the tennis court (and some of the women will grant that to be likely) until the actual play might show the opposite to be true.
Most men and women will suggest that the man should serve first. They think he has a better chance of winning his serve than does his female partner. But this is an assumption that should not be made based alone on the sexes of the two partners. It may be that the man is particularly good up at the net and the first game is more likely to be won if the woman is allowed to serve first by virtue of the man’s skillful net play. Or, it may be that the man, though serving somewhat harder, unfortunately serves doubles too often, especially in the first game, before he has warmed up adequately. Then, instead of accepting the strong probability that the first game will be lost if the man serves, the woman should be the first server. This is more likely to be true if, though her service may not have the power of the standard ace serve, she is accurate and can place the ball near the corners or along the lines of the service rectangle, either of which will help to cause the receiver of the serve to return poorly and set up for her male partner at the net to intercept and score the point.
The man often will plan to cover substantially more territory than his woman partner. When balls arrive between them, he will feel he should take the initiative in making the return. Moreover, he will feel compelled too often to show he is a man by hitting the ball hard, whether serving or performing back-court drives or strikes from the net. Similarly, he may feel it unmanly to allow a high ball to go over his head to be returned by his female partner, who backs him up, and he may make exaggerated efforts at a big overhead smash shot, even if the ball goes high for him and his timing does not permit him to include that stroke in his bill of fare.
Even if he is clumsy at the net, he may be resentful of a suggestion from his partner that he play back rather than messing up his returns or interfering with hers. (More male than female poachers are to be found on tennis courts.) If his back-court strokes are frequently erratic and the woman with whom he is teamed accordingly decides to avoid the net and share the back court with him even when he serves, he may feel insulted. Finally, since it is common for an ordinary player's forehand strokes to be superior to backhand strokes, it is common for the woman, with no discussion, to be automatically placed in the forehand court, the man taking the backhand as the assumed stronger of the two.
Cultural prejudices about the proper roles of the sexes work in numerous diverse ways. Many women bring to the court an affected desire to be ultrafeminine and wish their male partners to be ultramasculine. They expect the man to take the initiative, to poach and encroach and dominate the play on their side. They are disappointed if he does not rise to handle what they consider to be his true mission. By their actions they put burdensome pressure on the male player to play his tennis in the most male-superior fashion possible. They continually and aggressively solicit comments about strategy, grips, stances, whether to play net, whether to serve to the forehand or backhand of the opponent—all such importunings based on the idea that the male partner is the superior tennis player and should act as the captain.
Suppose, however, that the female is steadier, smarter, faster, anticipates better, and has a broader repertoire of strokes, while the male is erratic, sloppy, slow, misses easy balls or nets them, and overhits. A mismatch occurs if either one of the partners allows the customs developed over thousands of years of civilization to determine his or her attitude toward the partner of the opposite sex.
Cultural biases can be the basis not only of the actions described but of severe reactions to them. There are females who will go out of their way to buck the culture, who will insist on taking over more of the court, refuse suggestions from the male partner, and in every way destroy teamwork—even when it happens that the male player actually is the better player both physically and mentally.
There are some reasonable ways to counter this sexual relationship problem. Those ways are based upon the application of common sense, recognition of the problem's existence, and willingness on the part of both partners to eliminate all prejudices and cultural patterns that are useless and harmful to tennis partnership. What specifically might you’ do when you come to a mixed doubles match and have to work things out with a partner of the opposite sex?
The first step is to select your partners carefully with the sex issue in mind. If you are a man with a deep knowledge of your limitations physically but high confidence about your skills in the mental dimensions of the game, you must choose a female partner who will supplement and make up as much as possible for your physical deficiencies on the court. But you also will want to be able to make use of your trickery and craftiness, if that is where your strength lies. This may require a certain amount of docility on the part of your female partner. Of course, if she is equally cunning and you get along well, then you should share the strategy formulation. But you do not want a female player who, while merely tolerable in speed and consistency of strokes, will give you trouble every time you make a sensible suggestion about strategy because of her supersensitivity about a male superiority complex.
If you are a female, select a man who will support you to the maximum, of course. But if you are a well above average player, do not allow yourself to pair up with a male who is totally impressed with his physical endowments and is also erratic. He will pushily take over your returns all over the court to the detriment of your score.
There is no magic solution and certainly no single simple rule that will eliminate the curse of the sex issue in mixed doubles. What you can do amounts to a series of specific approaches that will cover a substantial number of cases that you will come up against. In addition to selecting your partner so as to minimize setting up the worst of mismatches, there are some other things that you can do once you are teamed up. Thus if you are a man who is an ordinary tennis player teamed with a woman who is equally ordinary, refuse, even if pressed, to operate as a captain.
Insist on being just a partner, as she is. If you are asked where she should stand in given situations and a preference does not readily come to your mind, tell her she should do as she wishes because she is at least as good a player as you are. If she holds back when a ball comes between you, looking to you to take all of them, recommend an alternative scheme. Suggest that you will take a boundary ball when you happen to have the forehand (that is, if you are certain your forehand is clearly superior to her backhand, which may be the only alternative).
If either of you is left-handed and the other is righthanded, discuss your preference as to the side each of you should cover based on those characteristics. Throughout, your discussion should be based on your admitted strengths and weaknesses. The more you insist that your tennis relationships go to such objective matters, the more you will remove from your partner's mind, just as you will have removed it from yours, that territorial and strategic decisions should arbitrarily be based upon sex alone.
If you are an ordinary woman player and you have little choice in the matter because of limited availability of male partners, plan to make appropriate verbal responses if your male partner starts to boss your side without adequate justification. You should suggest tactfully that you have another opinion about how you should handle the situations in which he is overcaptaining and that even if you may be wrong you would much prefer to do it your way. Of course, if you have a severe personality problem on your hands with an overly zealous, overly mannish male, any comment you make, no matter how you put it, may create a major rift. This may handicap your teamwork and the final score much more than if you put up with a certain amount of male chauvinism. The important point is that you have to consider all of these possibilities and try to make do with the best relationship open to you.
There is still another approach that will often prove to be the best of all. Bring up key aspects of the sex issue with your partner before starting the match. For example, if you are aman, you can say to your partner, “I hope you are not one of those female tennis players that expects the man to do all the work and win all the points, just because he is the
Similarly, if you are the woman in the partnership you can say to the male as you go out to take your positions on the court, “I hope you are not one of those male players I often run into that will try to hog the whole court just because I'm a female. If you do, I promise I'll hit you with the racket. If you treat me like a partner, I'll play better, and I’m sure that will make you happier.”
The most important thing about understanding the problem of mixing doubles and sex is not, however, what you can do to minimize the problem on your side of the net. It is rather what you can do to maximize the difficulties that are almost certain to exist with the male-female combination on the other side. Differences between your opponents, unreconcilable or not, should become apparent within a few games. Facial and body grimaces and signals, thinly veiled scoldings, stony stares, the throwing of hands and rackets into the air, and finally vocal utterances expressing caustic criticism and disgust, sarcastic rebuttals to suggestions from partner to partner, muttered phrases by the opponents to themselves—all provide ample evidence that something is wrong between the partners. Often what is wrong is clearly called out. You must stand ready to ad lib modifications in your play so as to accentuate the troubles of which you will become aware.
For instance, is the male player inclined to poach too much with generally bad results for your opponents? When the male net player is in the alley with a possibility of moving rapidly to poach into the middle of the court, you should make it a point to use a stance and glance before your final swing action to lead him to believe the middle is precisely where you are going to send the ball. For the overly avid poacher who thinks it is his duty to protect his weak female partner, a lunge toward the center is an almost inevitable response to this slight encouragement on your part. Either he will mess up the poach, as you will have seen him do (as has his unfortunate partner) a number of times earlier in the match, or he will leave his alley open to you for a quick put-away shot.
Does the female on the opposite side hold back whenever you drive a ball into the back court between them, leaving the field to her supposedly stronger male partner? Then send the ball not so precisely between them but somewhat more toward her. This will confuse her as to whether she should take it after all. It will cause her male partner, who is expecting to handle all shots between them, to overextend himself as he moves into her territory and either hits her or interferes with her return. Even if the ball comes back to you, almost the entire half-court just vacated by the male player will be available for you to drop in your easy return for the point.
Is the woman on the other side seen to be turned down by her man when she suggests that he should come back and not play net in view either of her weak serve, which she knows is a permanent part of her game, or because the man happens to be a very poor net player? If so, you should favor hitting shots right at the net man. Even if he might handle half of them under more tranquil circumstances, the fact that he and his partner have had an altercation about the matter will cause him to be overly anxious, emotionally involved, and hence very erratic.
Does the man on the other side give instructions to his partner about how to handle your spins? Then be sure to keep hitting nothing but cuts to the female partner, giving the male plenty of excuse to go on with his unrequested tutoring, the female becoming more and more riled and incompetent in handling those rotating balls you send her.
It is time now to discuss the most penalizing mixed doubles problem to occur with great regularity. This is the husband-wife combination. Here the fundamental problem is obvious. Two people may have a good or a bad relationship in their marriage or in other aspects of their joint or separate activities off the court. But whatever that relationship is, it would be a remarkable coincidence if it turned out to be one that could be carried onto the tennis court unchanged and would just happen to fit and serve well there.
In their married life either of the two mates may be the strong one, the two having developed a stable pattern in which the weak leans on the strong. Perhaps the two have come into this relationship naturally or perhaps they have carefully worked it out in their own private school of hard knocks. Perhaps the male is the strong partner in their marriage. But what if, on the tennis court, she is the stronger athlete? This could be the case for numerous reasons—her talent, his lack of it, her speed, his sluggishness, her daily practice, his infrequent playing, her excellent physical shape and stamina, his terrible out-of-shape condition making him unsuitable for severe physical activity, her court smartness and steadiness, his stupidity in tactics and erraticism.
Of course, in their marriage the man might be the dependent one, looking for strength and leadership from his wife, while on the tennis court he may be far superior to her in every department of play. The point is that the pattern of relationship in marriage, whatever it may be, is too often moved over into the court, where it is inapplicable. Not surprisingly, all shortcomings, defects, incompatibilities (some fatal and others merely limiting happiness) that exist in a marriage, when brought to the tennis court, are made worse. Bad personalities, immaturities, selfishness, lack of mutual regard and confidence, and resentments often suppressed in a marriage that is not on solid ground emerge on the tennis court. Everything comes out. If one partner is a poor sport, inclined to blame the other when things do not go well, assumes a superiority that is unjustified, finds it difficult to admit being wrong, and is convinced of being right but annoyed because of being thought wrong by the partner, then these attitudes become quickly evident when doubles play does not go well. And naturally, if the relationship of partners incorporates these negative aspects, the play is unlikely to go well. To this listing of deficient partners we can add those who are prone to recrimination, who must win or fall apart, who are overambitious, inconsiderate, and excessively critical. One partner may be given to a little cheating on close calls, and if the spouse rebuts the call instead of backing it up, the perpetrator considers the challenge disloyal.
As opponents, we can see unfolding before us on the other side of the court not only the negative playing results of inharmonious matching, namely, point-losing tennis, but also the deterioration of their marriage through the injection of a tennis facet. Marginal marriages can be thrown on the rocks by doubles play. Those on the brink may go over before one set is completed. This is bad if the marriage could have survived without the mixing of tennis doubles into the marital stew. It is good, perhaps, if the dissolution of the partnership was sure to be only a matter of time and if tennis partnering accelerates the inevitable.
I mention among my tennis-playing friends only the case of Vostro Culpa and his wife, Mia. Apparently, in their marriage, they developed the habit of blaming each other for whatever went wrong. When they took up tennis, they incorporated that habit into their doubles partnership.
Every lost point created a competitive battle between them, both Vostro and Mia rushing to identify what the other had done wrong to cause the loss. They seemed more interested in scoring points against each other by calling out the other's errors than in winning the match. Mia even appeared to enjoy giving an easy shot to the opposing net man if he seemed likely to hit it hard at Vostro’s feet to take the point and embarrass her spouse. Vostro’s clumsiness in failing to return, conspicuously and immediately pointed out by Mia, gave her pleasure. Of course, equally quickly, Vostro blamed Mia for the botch of unnecessarily donating a put-away opportunity to the other side. Now that they have separated, the Culpas are playing better tennis.
Unfortunately, the problem of playing mixed doubles with spouses as partners is not totally solved by arranging for a quartet of married folks to trade partners before starting play. This can lead to the problem of the other woman or the other man when a spouse is seen to play exceedingly well and get along better if teamed with someone else's spouse.
The spouse-partner situation we have described stems fundamentally from the fact that the partners involved in tennis already have another involvement off the court, one not conducive to good matching as partners in the playing of tennis doubles. This can apply to lovers, for example, as well as to man and wife. The lovers can be male-female or either of the other two combinations. Similarly, when two attorneys who are partners and have learned how to relate to each other in their practice or the law court come onto the tennis court, it again may be natural for them, if they do not plan it to be different, to continue their relationship, ignoring the major modifications required to go with their respective characteristics and abilities as tennis players. A boss and an employee have the possibility of like problems as tennis doubles partners.
Even the most intelligent and flexible people face the problem of dropping the off-court relationship and designing a new one suited to the task at hand, the winning of tennis matches. Always, it is true, the tennis doubles playing experience may disclose aspects of the partners makeups that may be helpful in their outside relationship, causing it either to be improved or dissolved. The new information the court experience provides about their characters and needs may be a revelation.
Thus two lovers may find that their excellent relationship in one type of courting is spoiled by their participation in another. Or, and this is the good side, a few tennis matches may disclose that the lover pattern will constitute a mistake if altered to a more difficult-to-sever involvement, say marriage.
But straightening out off-court relationships is not what tennis doubles is for. The recipe for mixing doubles should start with the premise that male-female relationships off the court are irrelevant to their best relationship as tennis partners. Their pattern of association more pertinent to winning in tennis doubles needs to be built with that fundamental point of view very much in mind. Since most partners in mixed doubles will not take the time or have the interest to look at the situation in this way, they will open up vast opportunities for crafty players on the other side.
accumulate two years of wisdom and craftiness if they are to go on winning, unless, of course, the opponents are equally old and also less guileful. In particular, if the well-matured man plays against young men, he had better possess a store of well-matured tricks of strokes and stances or he will not be able to hold his own. An old man who has a reputation for frequent use of dirty tricks probably will be called a dirty old man by the tennis society around him. In that case, there is nothing to be lost in reputation and perhaps something to be gained in admiration and in the pleasure of creating jealousy in younger opponents if the dirty old man plays the part somewhat broadly.
For example, the DOM might bring onto the court as his partner a sweet young thing, a carefully recruited, fresh, and beautiful specimen of the opposite sex. Now, it may well be that in some circles such partnerships are frowned upon when they are in the form of social company-keeping
outside of the narrow arenas of tennis, unless the alleged daughter, niece, or granddaughter shows an instantly recognizable family resemblance. But these biases of the outside world need not concern us as we continue our study of every technique that can lead to winning tennis matches.
How can the DOM exploit the presence on the court of a young damsel at his side? Of course, she might turn out to be a sensational tennis player whom her wily partner has brought in as a ringer. That would constitute an adequately sound strategic step all by itself. Conceivably, on rare occasions, it might be possible to achieve such delightful teaming. Let us put that possibility aside, however, since its values require so little analysis. Instead, let us assume, as we have with the other heroes and heroines of this book, that, as to basic athletic gifts, she is an ordinary tennis player and her extraordinary attributes lie in totally different categories. What, then, could be the strategic motivations behind the coupling we have postulated?
The circumstances for gaining by the unique association we have suggested are not everyday affairs. But then, the same is true of many of the tennis tricks that a skillful psychological player will use. As we collectors of ploys develop our art, we are bound to arrive eventually at the need for inventing detailed and specialized ploys for numerous occasions even if individually they may occur only rarely. The occasion here might be a match that finds an older man with two young men on the other side. We recall that the satisfactions felt by a player who leans heavily on strategy are derived mainly from taking on opponents who are physically superior and yet managing to win anyway by adequately injecting superior mental dimensions into the game.
Your partner, the comely lass, should be stationed at the net. She should be instructed not to poach and not to be
Tennis for the Dirty Old Man (And Old Woman) overly aggressive. In fact, it will be helpful if she displays a relatively helpless look accentuated by occasional shielding of herself with her racket in fearful protection and even screaming at times as one of the strong young men on the other side winds up for a powerful smash that might conceivably be headed in her direction.
Fundamentally, you will be relying, with justification, on some very basic laws of the human species. First, you will have taken the precaution of suggesting to her that she plan to play in as skimpy a tennis costume as is permitted.
Moreover, it will be helpful if she arrives and warms up in a body-covering warm-up suit, removing it to face the opponents at the net only when you have decided it is time to start scoring. You can count on a considerable amount of diversion then and there through the employment of this trick (which is, as a matter of fact, so elementary as hardly to deserve being called a trick in our usual sense). These opening steps will permit you the opportunity to use some of your more general repertoire on the two physically superior opponents, who are now less likely to be looking intently at any ball you hit. You will have diluted your tennis rivals’ interest in the game you wish to win and shifted some of their brain power to contemplation of another game entirely.
Have no fear that the strong young players on the other side will direct hard balls at your soft partner. They will be most protective of her. In particular, they will take no chances of hitting her and so will send all returns widely to you. They will not lob over her head for fear of embarrassing her and perhaps driving her to tears. Similarly, they will abstain from directing fast passing shots to either side of her, wishing to avoid making her sad. Your partner's mere presence at the net will ensure that a substantial fraction of your court, from one-third to one-half, will constantly be defended with perfection, having become ruled out and made unavailable for production of winning points by your opponents.
When it is her turn to receive a serve, you may be certain no attempt will be made to ace her. This is for reasons similar to those already called out, namely, fear of hitting her with a hard ball or causing her immense unhappiness by passing her. The instant she has completed her return of their deliberately affable serves, have her understand that she will move to the net as speedily as she can. The next ball then will certainly come to you, and it will not be well hit. You will be returning it while both potential receivers of your shot are focusing on her movements as she leaves the backline and takes her new position closer to them.
Are there some parallels here to be exploited by an older woman who chooses a handsome, well-built young man as her tennis partner in mixed doubles? Not many. Most of the considerations, in fact, are almost directly opposite to the rationale underlying the opportunities inherent in the old man—young woman combination.
First, we must recognize that female tenniseers, especially those who play tennis regularly, never become old women. They simply ease up a bit. They last longer than men; that is for sure. Also, it will not be conceivable to most potential opponents that any woman, young or old, will resort to the use of dirty tricks. People will speak of a dirty old man but never of a dirty old woman, even if she is elderly and shows up with a very young Adonis. They will assume he is a grandson. Seeing them together will give everyone a warm feeling.
But putting together and taking advantage of both prejudiced thought and sexist expectancies in a creative way can enable the older woman to attain interesting results on the court (and off it perhaps) in the actual employment of deceit and wiles. If you are a woman well past your high-
Tennis for the Dirty Old Man (And Old Woman) speed period on the court and are planning mixed doubles, by all means find a sterling young male as a partner and do the unexpected. What if the outside world should indulge in gossip when an older woman and a young man become frequent teammates in tennis? Winning combinations are what we are after, and to reach such goals it can be eminently sensible for a middle-aged woman tennis enthusiast to abandon the idea that her male partner should be someone in her age group even if all of her opponents are generally in that category.
Here no chivalry will be involved during the play. The opponents will play against the woman and the lad with no holds barred. Moreover, although the young man may be ogled by the mature woman (and, for that matter, possibly by certain of the mature men) on the other side of the net, the real and sole purpose of selecting the young man as a partner is to provide strong tennis competition. To provide this, common sense dictates that the woman should head for the net as early as possible in every game. She should take her stance very close to it and plan either on engaging in blocking or in executing put-aways angled off to the side when the opportunity comes. She should leave all the region behind her, as well as the entire other half of the court, to her young, energetic, fast, and more powerful hitting partner. In this way her wisdom and his vim and vigor will constitute an excellent partnership.
If he is as good as he ought to be when the older woman chooses him as a teammate, the opponents may actually seek to avoid him and try to overcome the woman. But, time after time, skillful blocking at the net should do in the opponents. If the woman is not capable at net play, even though somewhat above average in the rest of the skill departments, she will not be in a good position to take full advantage of what the young male partner should offer the team.
Figure 32. The signal-poach play
Given a fast, young partner, it is well for the woman to establish a signaling system that will trigger a sudden poach by him for an almost sure point. Consider, for example, Figure 32, in which Dedrica is serving and Travolta will poach to intercept a cross-court return by
Rigidero. Dedrica gets ready to serve from a position and on such an angle as to require receiver Rigidero to be near court center, rather than severely cross-court. She purposely leaves a large area on her forehand side exposed, hoping to entice Rigidero into sending his return there.
Bouncing the ball twice before throwing it up for the serve—by prearrangement, as a signal to direct her agile partner, Travolta, to poach hard to his right—she then releases her serve. Rigidero winds up, his racket back, intent on sending his ball short into Dedrica’s empty alley. Travolta moves into the returned ball near the net, surprising both Rigidero and Modesto. The return from Rigidero is caught easily by Travolta and knocked off at a wide angle to the extreme right for the point. Dedrica moves quickly to her left after her serve to defend the half-court Travolta has abandoned, just in case.
The woman, in this play, always should be the one to do the signaling, perhaps with an agreed-on ball bounce, hand, arm, or racket move, her partner merely glancing back at her for an instant to watch for the clue to poach whenever she is moving into her service position. This same trick of poaching and side-switching can be employed during the game, of course, when the woman is back and her agile partner is at the net.
What might motivate young people to associate themselves as partners on the tennis court with older players who are somewhat past their prime period physically and consequently will play a slower game? (We refer here, of course, to the motivations applying strictly for tennis partnering and are not seeking to broaden the discussion beyond the scope of this book.) The rationale for a young person to accept an invitation to join in such a teaming lies in the store of wisdom, and yes, wiles and guiles, owned by the potential older partner. Some, although not all young people, unfortunately, realize that they too will age in time. When that happens they will need to depend more on strategy and cunning. Moreover, adding such dimensions to ones game early in life cannot hurt and will eventually uplift the record of wins even for a youthful player possessed of a maximum of power and speed.
So why wait? Why not become indoctrinated while young in the mental concepts that will become vital later? Why delay, until desperately in need, acquiring the trickery know-how critical for one’s later years? What better way to become skilled in strategies useful for all of a long tennis life than to join in partnership with an older person who is already a master of the special arts of winning although aging?
the game. It is inherent in the way the human body reacts to the game, and these reactions are focused almost entirely on the joints. Tennis players rarely receive skull fractures and cracked ribs or break their necks. In tennis the physical forces originated and felt by the body are percussive, sudden, peaked, and hence shocking in their impact. Tennis requires much running and followthrough swinging, but these actions are not the causes of the injuries. The staccato, short-duration, high-intensity startings and stoppings of motion, the quick reversals of the body, and the consequent intense, jagged stresses on the ankles, knees, shoulders, elbows, and wrists are the sources of the traumas that the joints, unreasonably, must absorb.
All tennis players are beset by joint problems. Young players have much more flexibility and strength in those key body regions, but these admirable assets do not elimi-
nate the hazards because those same young players, possessing more forceful bodies and capable of higher speeds, produce more overstress on the joints. The stress increase is just enough to use up the higher ability of the younger joints to resist the stress. The balancing of forces and injuries ends up the same—a stalemate between the creating of stress and the resisting of it, with the joints always sore.
Younger players can recover from injuries more rapidly than can veterans, but this merely allows them a faster turnover of injuries. One knee recovers, then quickly the other is hurt, or next it is the elbow or the shoulder. As the body matures, and if at the same time the brain portion of the body insists on continued engaging in tennis, the joints never do recover fully. Injuries tend to become permanent. The game of the older player is merely adjusted to include the constant favoring of one joint or another. Once adequately analyzed, an older opponent's injury handicaps, you may assume, will remain the same. But you will constantly have to update your records of your younger opponents handicaps, that is, if you wish always to understand their playing impairments with a view to exploiting such knowledge during the match.
Understanding your opposition’s injuries can pay off, be your rivals on the other side of the net young or old players. You must continually case the joints of your opponents. You can win points by including in your tactics plans to take advantage of all the weaknesses of your opponents, including their present weakened joints.
The reader, a true sportsman at heart, may at first be upset at the suggestion that advantage should be taken of opponents who have sustained injuries and who, as a result, are likely to alter the pattern of their play to avoid pain or to accommodate an inability to perform certain body motions and strokes. Is it unsportsmanlike to bias
Tennis Elbowing—Casing the Joints one's play so as to emphasize opportunities arising from these particular weaknesses of the opponents? To answer affirmatively would be utter nonsense.
(I recently conducted a poll of forty of my tennis-playing friends asking if they would stoop to taking advantage during play of an opponent's injuries. The score was two yes to thirty-eight no. After correcting this result carefully for honesty and the assumption of a closely fought match, the poll result became thirty-eight yes and two no.)
Suppose an opponent is known to be relatively unintelligent, in fact, rather stupid when it comes to major aspects of the playing of tennis. Must we then avoid being smart in our play? Does sportsmanship require that we play equally stupidly? If the receiver of our drives is unable to handle them because of their speed, must we slow down those shots, bringing our level of physical performance down to that of opponents who are inferior? Whether based on physical or mental actions, proper and sensible competitive play must be based on adjusting our play to minimize the effects of the strengths of our opponents and maximize the benefits to us of exploiting their weaknesses. There is no basic difference in principle between making use of one opponent's accident-caused, temporary sore elbow or anothers naturally and steadily weak one in the way we should plan our game to win. One opponent may have painful deposits of crystals in the ankle from a touch of gout, while another, through inherited family genes, may have been born with weak muscles around the ankle. Both players may be unable to move quickly to respond to a ball some distance away. We should exploit this slowness, if we can, to win points in either case. The physical abilities of the two opponents are similarly limited, and the result is the same regardless of the different origin of the limitation.
Playing a set of tennis may disclose that one or another player on the court is a sore loser. All avid tennis players will find themselves sore, even if they win, in one or another joint. If at any time during an extended period of tennis play (other than when first walking out on the court after weeks of layoff) a player has at that moment no soreness in any one of the many joints of the body, that player should go see a good physician because something may have gone wrong with the nervous sensing system that reports pain to the mind.
Casing the opponent's joints is often made very easy because of the unsolicited assistance in performing this reconnaissance rendered by those very opponents. First off, many players are inclined to sport elastic bands, braces, trusses, and other conspicuous mechanical aids. If players should arrive at the court with such adornments, they have provided you automatically with a very good beginning, before the game even starts, on preparing the list of their impairments that you will want to integrate into your playing plans. Included in your initial observations should be not only the devices and gadgets just mentioned but also such psychology-based items as bracelets, necklaces, and paint jobs. Some players who have sustained, or are seeking to avoid, injuries such as tennis elbows, swollen knees, or sore shoulders think that with the right props and brews they can scare them away or stop them from entering and affecting their bodies. They imagine the injuries to be evil spirits that can be fought by magical deterrents. You want to spot such players early because they are especially susceptible to suggestion. You must recognize that in the match to come they will be likely suckers for all your tricks.
Whenever the opposing players offer displays of their handicapped joints, you are most certainly privileged to inquire sympathetically, out of ordinary human kindness, about the nature and extent of their injuries. In response to such evidence that you care, you will receive a great deal of
Tennis Elbowing—Casing the Joints detail, much more than you can fully use in designing your ploys. Even when tennis players come to a game with only the slightest of injuries they are enthusiastically willing to engage in discourse in depth about them because they provide alibis. Typically, your opponents may volunteer such comments as: “I have a nasty tennis elbow today. I thought of calling the game off, but then, what the hell,” or “Youre going to have to be easy on me today because I have this bad ankle.” A player with a sore joint may want his partner to be alerted—not so much so that the partner will take over more of the return responsibilities but so the partner won t fuss when not adequately supported and will forgive the shortcomings of the player who confesses the handicap. You should listen carefully to all conversations among the partners as the rackets are taken out of their cases and visors are placed on the head.
Somewhat more difficult, but nevertheless essential for a thorough evaluation of the physical malfunctions of the opposing players, is watching for evidence of injuries during the warm-up. Does a player who ordinarily reacts quickly, who pushes away instantly from an initial position toward the region where the ball is expected, now hold back and register a facial grimace as part of the response?
Does an opponent who normally shows excellent form in returning balls from the back court appear now to be failing to bend the knees? Does pain rack the opponent's face and does that player grab the elbow after returning a backhand? When you throw up a lobette during the warm-up period, does your opponent, who usually eagerly and expertly hits an overhead in return, now simply do a high racket block and immediately rub the shoulder or the arm holding the racket?
Having listened and observed both before and during the warm-up, you must now exploit what you have learned about the physical handicaps of the other team. Let us take the possibilities one at a time, starting with tennis elbow.
Tennis elbow most often results from hitting the ball improperly on the backhand. It is far less often the result of a strong forehand swing or of stressful activities that can affect the elbow off the court. Returning a relatively hard oncoming ball, but unfortunately failing to connect with that ball on the sweet spot of the strings, has the effect of introducing a twist into the racket. The stronger the arriving ball and the greater the power applied in returning it, the more severe is the force of the impact and the consequent torque that the arm receives from the hand to the elbow. The shock of that twist cannot make the turn at the elbow. It has to stop there and be absorbed.
The position of the elbow relative to the applying of force in striking a ball is very different between forehand and backhand. In a forehand stroke, the weight of the body, the muscle force, and the momentum of the arm are all behind the racket as it is directed into the ball to impart forward momentum. In backhand, the arm, including the elbow, is in front of the racket, just as is the ball. This backhand juxtaposition of elbow, arm, and body is most awkward, and it puts a very severe stress on the arm from the wrist to the elbow. The racket must be held very tightly, yet the tighter it is held the more severe is the shock to the elbow if there is a twist.
All this suggests one simple, preferred action to take when dealing with an opponent enjoying tennis elbow. You should favor returning to that players backhand. Of course, you might in any case be basing your play on that idea if you already have assessed the backhand of that player to be inferior to the forehand. But whatever would have been your chosen balance, catering either to the forehand or the backhand side when returning to that unfortunate opponent, you should bias it somewhat toward the backhand so as to capture the benefits to you of the
Tennis Elbowing—Casing the Joints opponent's special weakness, the elbow. Naturally, if the opponent happens to be way over in an alley of the court and leaves you no room there in which to deposit a ball to that players backhand, so simple an approach is precluded.
By the same token, however, that player will have left open much more region difficult to cover on the forehand side.
The more you place balls to the backhand of players who have become relatively helpless on that side, the more those players will be inclined to run around their backhands and to offer you an attractive forehand area that is now relatively lightly defended. Moreover, you will also be forcing your elbow-sensitive opponent into the territory of the partner, that being a natural result of running around the backhand for a player who is defending in the forehand court.
Note the situation depicted in Figure 33. Crudele, totally aware of Sofferenza’s tennis elbow, has directed a ball between Sofferenza and his partner, Scacco, but has carefully placed it so it is clearly Sofferenza’s duty to make the return. Ordinarily, the return would be readily handled by Sofferenza on the appropriate backhand side. But, as Crudele expects from having observed previous backhand responses by Sofferenza, Sofferenza runs around his backhand to make the return on his stronger forehand side.
Scacco is helpless to aid because his area has been invaded by Sofferenza, nor is he able to run all the way around
Sofferenza to assume the defense of the forehand court Sofferenza has abandoned. Either Crudele or her partner, Gusto, now can place their next ball in the vacated region of Sofferenza’s court and score the point.
Other attractive joint ventures are available to you, corresponding to opponents specific injuries. For example, an opponent with a sore shoulder has to be delicate rather than forceful in attempting overhead strokes.
Smashes will be difficult to perform. Such an opponent can
Figure 33. Tennis elbow causes a penalizing run-around of the backhand.
Tennis Elbowing—Casing the Joints be lobbed to with considerable safety. Instead of just moving back a step or two and jumping into the air to turn your lobs into points against you, the defensive player with a sore shoulder will be likely to present you with a soft high ball that will merely be a high bouncer. You or your partner can move up on that ball and be a hero with fast shots wide-angled to the side or sent between your opponents on their backline.
Ace servers with sore shoulders will try to reduce pain by easing up on their serves. You should plan to move up from your usual receiving position. You should anticipate that the handicapped server will deliver to you an easier ball but one that still originates high and hence bounces high, an advantageous situation for you.
Let us descend now to the knee joints. It is often said that athletes’ knees go first. Surely the knees are jolted heavily as tennis players, even ordinary ones, push away from a present position to start a run and then come to a sudden halt, a common motion scenario in tennis. Quick starts and stops put the full weight and momentum of the body onto the knees. It happens that the majority of strokes in tennis, forehand or backhand, require bending of the knees for solid stance and power in the swing, yet players with sore knees are forced to try to minimize that bending. Even when such impaired players are courageous enough to bend their knees so as to execute a strong stroke, they are likely to be slow in coming back up. Aside from their oral admissions or conspicuous elastic girths and braces as evidence of their knee problems, you can usually tell players with sore or weak knees by their failure to bend them or their being stuck at a reduced height after they do.
During warm-up the knee-bending problem will be especially evident when the sufferers take low-bouncer balls that touch down substantially in front of them, requiring that the ball be played relatively close to the ground. A returner of a low ball with a knee or two that does not permit adequate lowering of the body is very likely to hit the ball up softly rather than producing a fast drive whose path just barely misses the net. It goes without saying that during the course of the play you need to favor drop shots whenever an opponent with knee injuries is in the back court. In general, placing soft returns at some distance from that player is better than trying for exceptionally hard drives.
If your bag of tricks includes cutting into the ball with ease to give it a spin, you should employ such a return generously against weak-kneed opponents. It will be very effective against a player unable to make quick, last-minute motions to allow for the spin. The knees simply will not back up such adjustments well when these joints lack strength and are painful. Some players may be able to ascertain quickly that you are about to put a spin on your shot. They may be so talented and experienced in responding that they will modify their mental control and swing so as to account exactly for the deviant bounce your spinning ball will take. But it is to be assumed that your own ability to add spin to the characteristics of your ball is not totally consistent and predictable. If your ball goes to your opponents with substantial rotation, it will be necessary for those players to alter their stances after the bounce has taken place, when little time is left. Quick shifting of the entire body is especially hard to execute if the knees are not in shape to maintain body weight balance.
Let us consider the other side of the coin. Assume the player on the other side of the net is a skilled cut artist who normally sends you spinning balls that are hard to handle.
If that tenniseer, a specialist in delivering cut balls, has a sore wrist, he or she is going to have to depend less on ball spins than usual. If you have been accustomed to setting yourself in readiness to handle the shift of the oncoming
Tennis Elbowing—Casing the Joints ball after its nasty bounce owing to its spin, you can now relax. You can hit the ball back with firmness. Also you should deliver balls that will tempt the handicapped player to try a cut even with the now decreased odds of success because of the bad wrist. Usually cutters prefer to initiate such action on low balls. Hence feed those players a larger share of low ones, encouraging cut after cut to their own defeat.
A player with ankle problems is unable to run fast and cannot take off rapidly to respond to a shot of yours placed some distance away. It then becomes even more incumbent on you than previously to favor placements away from that player rather than to hit at each ball with full vim and vigor.
In closing this essay on the exploitation of injuries, it is well to call attention to your side of the net, the side where you and your partner are conducting your offensive and defensive measures and are working out how to accommodate to your own joint injuries. There are some rules to keep in mind. Do not come to the court and talk about your injuries. Avoid decorating your body with giveaway evidence. During the warm-up, endure some pain to hide your body defects. The more you are injured the more desirable it is for you to hit your balls badly out during the warm-up. This will keep the opponents busy recovering balls so that they will have less available time to observe your situation. If you are injured badly, your opponent will discover that soon enough. Make it later rather than sooner.
priate game for ordinary tennis players, the singles branch of the game being mismatched to the capabilities of such players and suitable only for extraordinary ones. A singles match sometimes has to be resorted to, however, because the full complement of four tennis athletes may be unavailable at the moment. The question then naturally arises as to the potential value or harm of engaging in singles play if the prime objective of the players is the maintaining or enhancing of skill at the preferred game of doubles.
If the singles court is too large in area to be covered by a tennis athlete of only average capability, a player accustomed to doubles will have to run faster than usual in a singles game. If you are such a player, your running speed ought to be enhanced by this exercise, as should your ability to coordinate leg, body, and arm motions to get set quickly to return a ball. With no time and opportunity to
Half-Doubles Is Better Than None rest while your partner is handling the ball, the result of your playing singles also should be to build stamina as well as muscle. Thus singles play is beneficial training in some ways for the most befitting doubles matches to come.
But engaging in singles will result in many negative impacts on your doubles game. For instance, the important alleys, and the lovely wide-angled shots you should be depositing in them regularly, are entirely ruled out in singles. Worse, you will develop the habit of holding the bounces of your balls within the narrower singles court, which will make it easier for your opponents to return your shots when you next play doubles. Your mind’s calibration of where to stand and how to swing so your offerings will approach the side boundaries, but not exceed them, will be impaired. When you go back to doubles you will need to reset your controls.
Net play in doubles is vastly different from net play in singles. Lacking a partner to share responsibility and court area, and being unable to start near the net when your partner is serving or receiving, means that in singles your opportunities at the net can arise only by your engaging in a run from the back immediately upon hitting a ball from there. Also, when you arrive at the net, if you make it there, you must cover a much wider region. You are entirely on your own in handling a lob sent over your head.
Singles net play is much harder to perform well than doubles net play. Of course, some similarities exist, but net nettling, blocking, poaching, and most strategy aspects of doubles net play are either absent entirely as useful tactics in singles or else require such alterations as to be untranslatable profitably. Admittedly, net play in singles may tend to increase your speed of muscular responses and your endurance. Only in this indirect way will it make you a better net player in a future doubles match. But you could get the same effect by engaging in boxing or fencing.
There are two novel ways to play singles that will yield you remarkable gains in subsequent doubles play, your priority form of tennis. These approaches to the game should be called half-doubles rather than singles. The first way could also be named diagonal or cross-court tennis. As shown in Figure 34, in which the forehand courts are shaded, the play of the first point of the game, according to the rules of cross-court half-doubles, must be limited to this shaded area. A serves to B, and B must return, as must A next, only into the respective cross-court halves of the full doubles court. Any ball bouncing elsewhere, for example, into either backhand cross-court, must be called out.
In playing this first point, it is as though A and B have partners C and D who are invisible but very much present. C and D never poach, but we pretend their skills are awesome. Both, we imagine, are certain to put away for an immediate point any ball that strays into their halves of the court, that is, any ball that fails to bounce in the crosscourted areas. Accordingly, A and B must avoid those two unseen players. The penalty for sending the ball outside the cross-court regions is the loss of the point being played.
The second point and every alternate one thereafter calls for a serve from and to the backhand court. Again, the playing out of the point is restricted to exchanges between those cross-court areas. Any ball going into the two forehand half-courts is counted as an out ball.
Half-doubles requires the players to imagine a line (X-Y in Fig. 34) to be drawn on the court. Since this line is not present on the markings of the standard court, a burden is placed on players making close calls regarding balls bouncing along that invisible line. But the main objective of the game is to develop doubles skill, not to win singles contests, still less to build up accuracy in the calling of close shots. Thus inaccuracies in close calls should not be greatly disturbing to the players, although there may be more of them than in a standard doubles match.
We notice that most elements of play in this half-doubles game have direct relation to regular doubles play. The area of the useful half-doubles court assigned to each player is exactly as in doubles. Serving and receiving of serves are identical with corresponding doubles situations. Especially so are the routine cross-court exchanges from the back courts. Moreover, if you put your opponent into deep trouble with a very effective deep shot, you can practice dashing up to the net just as you might in doubles. The width of the net to defend or exploit is precisely that covered by a net player in ordinary doubles under like circumstances.
Admittedly, you will find some aspects of true doubles play missing or different, as for instance, your running behind a partner to return a lob, or the fact that the invisible partner never takes over to provide you with respites during the playing out of a point. But everything you do in strokes and motions while playing cross-court half-doubles provides you with practice for a similar doubles situation. Half-doubles should improve your steadiness, accuracy, power, and physical conditioning for the playing of doubles.
The other form of half-doubles is illustrated in Figure 35. This might be called a fore-and-aft version of half-doubles.
Again, the first point starts with a serve from the forehand into the forehand (the shaded area in Fig. 35). The server has the privilege of serving from anywhere on the service line (S-L) but may prefer S to L since immediately after the serve—in this form of half-doubles—the return must be to the server's left or backhand court. The rules now require, you see, that all returns be to and from the directly opposite half-court and never cross-court. Again, the serving location and the half-court involved will alternate from point to point, going from forehand to backhand for the serve and its return. As before, all play must be to the