Tennis Scripture

Like your typical tennis nut, I used to buy every tennis book that came out. Soon I was disappointed though.

I'll wager that the vast majority of lifelong tennis players have had the same experience. With the same result.

Now, of course, there are exceptions, but for the most part it's always the same old same-old. I'd purchase a book and find nothing in it that I hadn't read in all the previous ones. In fact, you could read the same old same-old in books published before 1960.

The only difference is all the padding that's added. Like we need to be told that you need good tennis shoes and should carry a towel to court and not eat heavily right before you play. Spare me that fluff, please -- I want meat. I'm not so stupid I need an authority figure to tell me that.

When you buy a book, you expect something new. Fresh. There's nothing more off-putting than finding that it's nothing but a rehashing of the same old cliches. Expressed in the same cliches of language too. For example, how often have you heard or read that you should return "at a net-rushing server's feet" and make him hit from "shoetstring level" in exactly those words?

Do we need a new book to tell us that every five years? And it isn't even exactly true. You should return to the DEPTH of a net-rushing server's feet, not necessarily AT them. If you have an angle that can make him have to turn on a dime and lunge at that low shot, take it!

Like all cliches, these expressions get so worn that they've lost meaning. Consequently they don't sink in any deeper than words do to a parrot. Some are even wrong or at least generally misunderstood.

A good example of a stinker is the instruction that, to hit an overhead, you should point up at the ball with your free hand, cock the racket back over your shoulder, and in that pose move backward under the ball.

Baloney. Watch, the pros who tell us to do this don't do it themselves. Why? Because it's clumsy as hell. So clumsy that, if you are good little tennis player who follows instructions and does this, I guarantee that you have a lousy overhead. Don't you?

Where did this instruction come from if none of the pros do it? (Some women do, but they are the ones with lousy overheads. )

Obviously, someone important invented this truth so that it became tennis scripture -- sacred, infallible, and authoritative by virtue of who said it instead of what it says. Hence authors and instructors ever since have parroted it.

One of the most important things I learned from Vic Braden at his tennis academy course for coaches is that the top tourning pros don't know what they do. For example, they will insist that they hold the racket one way, and you will have to prove to them on film that they actually hold it a different way. So, when they tell you what to do, they're repeating conventional wisdom, unaware that they don't follow it themselves.

This fact collides with the belief that the great players are the best ones to tell us how to play. Few great players are students of the game who contribute orginal thought and analysis to it.

Another thing you quickly learn is that books on tennis don't help your game. You can't play by memorizing a thousand rote verbal instructions and recalling each one at the right moment during play. It all becomes a blur. And your brain can't sort through its whole system of relational databases (which is bigger than the Pentagon's) for the right one in one second during play.

Result? Those instructions that are "simplified" to rote dos and don'ts are inaccessible information during play. At best, a few get internalized as a little voice in your head barking things like "Watch the ball" to distract you and bawl you out during play. For an explanation of how this hurts, instead of helps, your game, read the excellent book, The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey.

And then they wonder why tennis books don't sell. The kicker is that the demographics are that of the top book-buying market. So, what's the problem? Hint: content, content, content.