Wanna
Play Tennis?
Tim Henman
Although
he has hung up his rackets, and has joined the ranks of those who bore for
England in the Wimbledon commentary box, Tim Henman does at least merit his
place alongside real tennis players like MeEnroe, for he was in and around
the world's top ten players for a decade or so, which is a
record
that few men in the history of British sport could match.
To put this into
some kind of perspective for football fans, this wouldn't just include Henman
in the squad for the national football side, but for a World XI Squad: For
the greater part of the past decade, his ranking would've qualified him for
the starting eleven.
How many English footballers would make it into a world 11 on a regular basis?
Not too many, methinks.
I don't claim to know Henman or to have ever
met him. People like me, who have very clear ideas about tennis and what it is good for (and who can expound
these ideas a little too clearly for the jobsworths in the numbers game),
rarely get past the army of PR yes-men, agents and the like, who have attached
more to sport than is healthy for it.
But I have been on the receiving end
of Tim's willful eyeballing.
On outside courts at major tournaments, photographers
use a bench that's situated on the court surface itself, and they enter and
leave by the same gate as the players. Some years ago at the French Open,
the steward opened the gate at the end of a game and I wandered in, with
a huge 400mm f2.8 lens perched on my shoulder, which obscured my view of
the court. I knew something wasn't right because the crowd were looking at
me rather than the court: I turned to find Henman beside me, waiting to return
serve (the steward had opened the game when it wasn't a change of ends).
Henman fixed me with a steely, willful eye that belies the 'Nice but Tim'
tag, and asked me to leave the court. Normally, when being glared at in such
a manner, those with a working class chip on their shoulder might respond
with 'don't ******* look at me like that, you ****'.
But I was so worried my court appearance might be going out live on Eurosport,
I just muttered a 'sorry, mate' and wandered off with my tail between
my legs.
The great thing about individual sports like tennis,
if you have the talent and skills to survive and rise above junior tournaments
and all the cheating,
tantrums, partisan parents and posers that live within the breeze-block walls
of Britain's tennis centers, is that it's a game where the best (wo)man always
wins. Networking skills and a well-connected agent
count for nothing: if you've made the main draw, you've got your big chance.
Let it be said that in his playing days, Tim Henman used his big chance
to the best of his talent and ability.
Unlike the many, however, he should consider himself fortunate that he was
blessed with the opportunities to do so.
Tim Henman: The Forehand (an edited, sample selection from Part 1 of The
Digital Tennis Book)
Run the sequence of Tim and the first thing you should
realise is that, like Mats Wilander, he's hitting off the back foot to
generate some topspin. Here,
however, we see a mobile weight suspension and Tim sinks down onto the back
foot as he slides his back foot over to the wider ball (it's a clay court,
remember).
Run the sequence again and notice how precisely Tim sets himself up to hit
a ball that's out to the side of his body.
Give your full attention to the
line the ball is travelling along and note Tim doesn't get too close to this
line. Rather, Tim's eyes provide the data and his brain accurately gages
the distance he needs to be from the line to hit his perfect contact;
his feet then heed the brain's directives and take him precisely to where
it
wants him to be (there's a lot in that sentence, so read it until it clicks).
Like Rome, this routine of setting up for a perfect contact cannot be built
in a day and Tim makes it look so darn easy because he’s had a lifetime
of pratice.
At connect, we see Tim direct much of the racket head speed up the
back of
the ball, and his upwardly mobile efforts, off a sunk back leg, take him
off the court surface. The final frame is a rollover image, so click the
last letter m and then roll your mouse over the image to reveal the final
one. In this frame we see the end of the stroke, as Tim lands back in the
court's atmosphere on his back foot. Having his right leg out to the side
of the court is one of the plusses of hitting 'open'. From here, Tim is perfectly
set to push off his right foot and move sideways, back towards the middle
of the court, from where he will be best placed to cover the next shot from
his opponent.
Tim Henman: The Flat and Kick Serve
Roll your mouse over these two images and (or s in
this sample) you'll see I've put both contact points onto one image. In i
I've thrown the contact
for
the
kick
serve out
of focus and in s it's the other way around. Toggle back and forth between
the two buttons and see if you can spot the differences in the two contacts
before I explain them. Let's stay on these two images for a while because
they reveal much about the two serves.
Each of the three main serves (the flat serve, slice and topspin kicker),
are made up of the same two tasks: you are throwing your racket head at a
perfect contact.
The big difference on each of the serves is how you direct
the force of the thrown racket head.
For a flat serve, in i, you hit through
and direct the force in the direction of the hit.
This requires the perfect contact that we see in i, as well as all the others
we've seen up until now.
For topspin, in s, you are directing the force up the back of the ball, from
low to high.
This requires your placement hand to put the ball in a particular place.
Once again we are back at the particulars. These are particular variations
on a perfect contact that encourage, or allow, you to hit the ball in a particular
kind of way. Read on.
The above is an edited extract from Part 3, The Serve
20
years of world class technique for the
price of a
20 minute lesson.
Try
another sample page from the book, where the text actually looks as
good as it reads!
