Category Archives: Injuries

recursive Bambino, tennis memes

This morning I was reading about memes on the web – ideas that rapidly spread to all parts of the internet. The originator of the term meme, Richard Dawkins, described the meme as an idea that is passed from generation to generation. The idea of God for example and the perfect meme of all time: the bible. Any behavior can be supported or refuted if you search the bible long enough. It answers all possible questions you could possibly have about life and even encourages you to recruit more Christians, built-in meme generation behavior. Memes on the web are mostly short-lived, they have a short life in the meme pool Dawkins would say, but some memes make a big splash.

For instance, the curse of the Bambino. The Red Sox (as of today mind you) have not won a World Series since they traded Babe Ruth to the hated Yankees. Every year the media writes nonstop about the curse and television cameras scan Fenway Park with images of Red Sox fans wringing their hands and praying for an end to the the curse, recursive behavior you could call it because the mythical idea of the curse is reinforced every time it is mentioned.

Here is yet another reason I am pushing for Curt Schilling as a write-in candidate for president. In a recent Time magazine article Schilling intelligently explained that any baseball player who thinks that games are won or lost because of a curse instead of superior play is not likely to taste success any time soon.

And yet we all have this behavior. Last week I played in my league playoffs. My opponent was winning every game with a rocket serve and a vacuum cleaner net game. He was eating me for lunch and I was fully cooperating. I should have tried something different, anything at all, because the alternative was losing and I was already doing that. I could have come to the net. Come to the net on his second serve, come to the net on my first serve, hell, come to the net on any serve. If I’m at the net, it’s harder for him to get there. I might have lost a lot of points but I probably would have won a lot more than I did. That’s what happens when we tell ourselves that we are baseline players. We perpetuate a mythical curse on our tennis game that prevents us from seeing opportunities that could lead to a win.

In some matches your opponent is in the zone and will win no matter what you do, in some matches you are in the zone and will win no matter what they do. Most of the time, though, there’s a way to win so if I think of myself as a tennis player who can find a way to win rather than repeatedly reinforce the idea that I am a only a baseline player, I’m gonna win a lot more of those matches.

Injury Report: my physical therapist, Andy Choi, suggests that I twist my shoulders before my trunk on my backswing. This increases my twist and therefore increases my power.

He also suggests that I shift my weight to my back leg before I hit the ball on my serve so that I can better keep my eyes on the ball.

swingers, rehab

I once worked with a group of women who were trying to start a women only sex party. As part of my “research”, I spent an evening at LA Couples, a weekly downtown Los Angeles swingers club site. My job was to serve wine to the clubgoers. As the evening wore on, more than seventy or eighty couples and an assortment of unaccompanied women (unaccompanied men were not admitted) mingled in the cafe and moved together in different configurations on the dance floor – the women usually in the middle and the men outside of them making sure not to get too close to each other. Periodically, various couplings went off to the Arabian theme room or the doctor’s theme room or the Sultan’s tent theme room to have some fun. The man who was helping me serve wine disappeared now and then to chat up latino women to see if he could set them up with his wife. Now that is an accomodating husband!

I was thinking about this as I was doing my gym workout this morning. I do a lot of cable pull exercises with rubber bands that involve twisting my hips. The idea is that my arms don’t move the cables, the movement of my hips does all the work. I discovered this morning that if I move my hips slowly as I’m twisting, I can engage my hips better and build up more strength. It also feels kinda sensual. I’m telling you, there is no end to the benefits of tennis strokes.

We never were able to get the sex party started but we had fun trying.

Injury Report: the sprained ligament in my thumb is not healing. I have to stop playing tennis (oy!) until it heals. I hope to be back playing the week after Thanksgiving. Nobody pays me a million dollars to play tennis so I have to come up with my own rehab plan:
1. see the physical therapist once a week to get ultrasound on the thumb
2. go to the gym three times a week instead of two
3. go for hikes two days a week, sometimes substitute aerobic sessions at the gym
4. mentally rehearse my practice routine so I keep the feel of my strokes.
5. practice my serve without my racket so I can continue to increase the range of motion in my shoulder

competitive schlumps, winning takes care of itself

I have been concentrating on identifying and attacking my opponents weaknesses, thank you Brad Gilbert. Today I repeatedly hit short to T.’s backhand to draw him to the net then I lobbed him and won the first set. After that, apparently, I was satisfied; I played ok the rest of the way but the fire was gone.

Michael Jordan grabbed onto the tiniest slight to get himself motivated for one of his games in the endless season that is the NBA. Make the slightest disparaging remark about one of Jordan’s teammates or, God forbid, Jordan himself, and you were likely to get your head handed to you the next time you played the Bulls and be subject to 48 minutes of non-stop trash talk on top of that.

Jordan is clearly one of the most competitive individuals walking the earth. But what about us workaday tennis schlumps? How are we supposed to maintain our competitive fire from match to match let alone point to point? Clearly I’m not an expert at this, check the scores below, but, as usual, I have a theory.

I read it all the time, “Take care of the details and winning will take care of itself,” or, “If we execute the game plan, winning will take care of itself.” After I won the first set I was so happy that I lost track of my plan to attack my opponent’s weaknesses. I had traveled off to a happy island in a parallel universe instead of paying attention to the next point. I hadn’t traveled all that far, I still hit my shots and played pretty well but it was far enough to lose my competitive edge and the next two sets. I remember Peyton Manning, my favorite football player in the world by the way, once complaining that with the fans and media it’s always, “What have you done for me lately?” But you know, that is how it is. Moment to moment there is always the next point to take care of, where am I going to hit it, what should I attack, am I hitting the ball deep enough, and so on. The victory 5 minutes ago doesn’t mean anything.

So my theory is that it might not be necessary to scour the world for the slightest hint of attack to your person, it might be enough to pay attention to each point with as much attention as is humanly possible.

Performance Analysis: practiced for an hour and a half, played 3 sets and two rally games with T.: 6-4, 3-6, 3-6, 7-15, 10-15
Solutions Analysis: since T. comes in very close to the net when he approaches, I can win points by lobbing him.
Success Analysis: I finally took a set from T.! I attacked his backhand approach and hit a lot of high looping junk to his backhand. He started to run around his backhand which opened up down the line.
Injury Report: the sprained ligament in my thumb is killing me, I have to tape it up each day to hold things at bay.

elvis pelvis, silly walks

Most of the exercises in my new workout regiment consist of pelvic twists such as this cable pull exercise: The pelvis does all the work in these exercises, the arm just follows along. It’s supposed to be the same in tennis. I’m supposed to bring the racket back by twisting my trunk then step into the ball and whack it using pelvic twist and abdominal muscles to blast those winners. Watch pro players, they propel themselves at the ball and twist all the way around as their shirt goes flying. Then watch recreational players. Much of the time their arm does all the work. No wonder there are so many tennis elbow straps sold. Did you ever see a professional player wear a tennis elbow strap?

When I severely injured my back in 1986, my movement teacher gave me a very valuable suggestion. She asked me to watch how people move so that I could learn how to move efficiently myself. Watch joggers for instance, they look like they belong in a Monty Python silly walks episode. Sometimes their legs move and their top doesn’t. Sometimes their arms move and very little else. Sometimes they land on their toes and other times they look like Frankenstein clomping along. Look at walkers also. Notice where the movement stops in their body: are their hips stiff, is their spine frozen, are their arms glued to their sides? Your entire body should move from the foot through the legs then the pelvis and the trunk. Start noticing how other people move and then look at how you move.

Practice Report: worked out at the gym for an hour and a quarter

palmball, technique or results?

Peter was practicing his serve on the court next to me. I sprained a ligament in my thumb trying to return his serve a few weeks ago. He made up for it today – he looked at my serve and suggested I toss the ball with the palm of my hand instead of my fingertips. This way the ball doesn’t spin. I suppose it’s like a juggler, they pop the ball up in the air with their palms.

Before each stroke in a match, I rehearse my next shot – I am practicing technique. Once the point starts I think about where I want the ball to land. After the point starts, it’s too late to think about technique, there’s no way the one-step-at-a-time conscious mind can keep up with all the steps needed in even one rally. But what happens if I lose technique during a match? My serve starts going into the net for instance. It’s likely that I’m taking my eye off the ball but to correct that, I would have to be thinking about technique during the point. I don’t know the answer and the back and forth yo-yoing between the two is driving me a bit crazy. I can sometimes choose to think about one technique thing only during a point, say keeping my eye on the ball while serving, but it takes me out of the rhythm of my shots. Any suggestions?
practiced for an hour; played two sets with M.: 6-4, 7-5; practiced my serve for one bag of practice balls
Success Analysis:
1. I hit some hard serves for service winners.
2. I played agressively and won a lot of points at the net.
3. I moved back a bit and gave myself room to step into the ball and hit it more solidy.
Injury Report: I went to see my physical therapist, Andy Choi, because I was feeling twinges in my elbow again. Two things seem to be bothering my elbow: I am still dropping my racket as I hit the ball which weakens my wrist and puts pressure on my elbow, I twist my racket to hit across the ball when I make contact on my serve but I don’t really have enough flexibility in my forearm to do this.