The Iron Law of Tennis by Robert Firlus

If there is not an iron law in tennis there should be:  Never, necessarily, believe anything any one says about using a tennis racket to hit tennis balls. There is one obvious reason. Modern gurus who write books begin and end their books with past myths and fallacies which formerly and still conveniently consume part of an hour of tennis instruction at thirty dollars an hour. Other reasons for the iron law exist. Other myths are lying around untouched.

Years ago the United States Tennis Association (USTA) in its wisdom suggested that: Stroke production evolves to accommodate the grip. The USTA has been essentially ignored. The USTA neglected to tell what a grip is except that a particular grip was originated at a particular place on the earth and that if a particular point on the hand is located at a particular place on the handle of a tennis racket the playing abilities of world class players can be replicated. The names of these grips are the Eastern, Western, Semi-western, and Continental. An Australian, Neale Fraser, conveniently threw in another continent and called it the Australian grip. There are some variations to these grips such as mild, moderate, or extreme. Semi-western could possibly be considered an extreme Eastern or a mild Western. Semi-western might confuse a youngster into thinking it came out of the Midwest. Chicago, maybe.

The USTA has neglected to say what a particular hand or hands and their fingers do or don’t do when they locate on a particular place on the handle of a racket. The USTA throws in a postscript. Of course all players, world-class and otherwise have their idiosyncrasies which are buried in the hundreds of ways people can hold a pencil or tennis racket. There is a one syllable word for idiosyncrasy.  Call it a “twitch.” The twitch is what separates one eastern from another eastern including the westerns from the westerns.

A former French tennis player, Francoise Durr, who won the French Open in 1967 and was in the top ten for about ten years, deserves special mention in talking about twitches. Most twitches can’t be observed with accuracy. Francoise had a goofy grip.  It was so goofy that anyone who saw it knew that something idiosyncratic was going on. Francoise placed her index finger straight to the top of the racket on the rear of the handle. She hit with a bent wrist and elbow on the backhand. Her grip on the forehand was essentially the same. Her serve was shaky.   It was caused by what can be called a: Hitch in her Twitch. Some people are limited in their stroke production by their twitches. Chris Evert is one. Her net play and difficulty in getting to the net was not in her stars but in her twitch. Jimmy Connors had trouble with short balls to his forehand and his serve lacked pace. Rod Laver was probably more aware than most of the importance of the grip when he said: The grip is everything. His particular grip not only brought him fame but also a forearm on his playing arm that was twice as big as his non-playing arm and  serious problems with tennis-elbow in his playing days.

Today’s gripping gurus designate the bottom (base) knuckle of the index finger as the point on the hand to locate on a point on the racket’s handle to make a certain type of grip. Older gurus use the “V” between the thumb and forefinger as an indexing point.  Some gurus use both points on the hand plus throw in the heel of the hand. The problem is that points on a hand don’t make a grip.  Fingers do.  Some perform a gripping action and some don’t.  All grips consists of two parts: (1) The location of the hand/fingers and (2) fingering action/inaction (twich). Let’s simplify the grip. Call it the “LT.”  “L” is location and “T” is twitch.

The problem with today’s high speed video and yesterday’s high speed photography is that the “L” (location) can be seen but the “T” (twitch) can’t be seen. The “T” is a tactile sensation while the “L” is a visual sensation.  It is inside the “T” of the “LT” that the idiosyncrasies of tennis players can be found. Most world class players have no idea of what their “T” is because they have no standard of comparison. They were born with it.  One man from Australia stumbled into his “T” and talked about it in his book:  “ Successful Tennis”, published about 50 years ago. Neale Fraser suggested that on the forehand and backhand the little finger should dominate the grip just forward of the butt cap with the top pad of the little finger on or near the lower left bevel of the handle. He advises against use of the index finger and thumb in the gripping action. The dominance of the little finger results in what he calls the Australian grip. Fraser won three slams with a lot of effort placed on his little finger.

About 50 years after Neal Fraser talked about his little finger and thousands of miles north of Australia, a young lady in the San Francisco area came up with a twitch that could be called notorious by Australian standards. She won 7 slams playing with her little finger off the handle below the butt cap. Her name was Venus Williams.

What Venus Williams accomplished on a tennis court minus her little finger might seem to Neale Fraser like playing with one finger tied behind his back.  Let’s limit the Venus twitch to her forehand since her stickhandling was more involved than Fraser’s.  She played a two-handed backhand while Fraser played one-handed off both sides.

 

The dominant feature in the location (L) of Venus’s grip is that she  plays with the butt cap in her palm pocket with her little finger located off the handle below the butt cap.  Her circumferential grip places the base knuckle of the index finger on the lower right bevel and the base knuckle of the thumb on the upper right bevel.  The top pad of the index finger locates on the front panel of the handle and pulls the handle into the base knuckles of the index finger and thumb. The middle pad of the middle finger pulls the front panel into the hand together with the top pad of the index finger. The middle pad of the ring finger rests on the front panel of the butt cap and performs a blocking action versus a gripping action.  The location of the index knuckle on the grip will give gurus the impression of the semi-western grip. Buy the key to her grip is where she locates vertically and circumferentially on the handle and how her index and middle finger are the gripping fingers.  Attempts to grip with the ring finger can destabilize the grip of the dominant index and middle fingers. The ring finger blocks and does not grip while the little finger is orphaned below the butt cap.

There are many sad tales of those who attempt a grip change. It often involves a brush with insanity or a flare-up with a coach. Grip changes require the obvious. The hand moves to a new location.  This is easy to see and do. The twitch (T) is also required to move to the new location. But since the twitch is a tactile (touchy/feely) hand habit it may  not respond to its new location on the handle. It wants to go home where it was comfortable on the bevels and panels it once knew.

Most tennis is taught in a helter-skelter fashion. The best strokes of tennis heroes are supposed to mix and mesh into one style of play. Things don’t work that way.  Twitches don’t mix. Where did Neale Fraser come up the importance of his little finger and call it the Australian grip? There is no question that it was his grip and and his book and he could call it what he wanted to call it. Fraser was a world class player, coach and head of the Australian Davis Cup Team after Harry Hopman.  Hopman was an early coach of John McEnroe. Hopman suggested on one occasion that McEnroe hit like a girl. Hopman would probably have preferred that McEnroe hit like an Australian. His time would have been better spent going after McEnroe’s LT.

Is it possible that the iron law of tennis could apply to Venus Williams’  LT (forehand) described above?   Why not?  But one thing is certain. Fraser and Williams don’t look alike, they don’t talk alike, and they don’t put their hands on a tennis racket alike.