An engineer overthinks tennis in a daily journal.
Tennis ball machines hold a special place in my heart. I personally own two full fledged ball machines as well as a toy that has been repurposed to effectively work as a ball machine. My local tennis club has a commercial grade ball machine that I also frequently use. I love them all. I have decided to write about them in order of acquisition which means that my Lobster Elite 2 which was purchased back in 2009 is the first out of the chute.
Rene Lacoste is best known for the premium brand of sporting apparel that bears his name. He won seven Grand Slam Championships and was one of the “Four Musketeers” of the formidable French Davis Cup team that dominated tennis in the late 20s and early 30s. He also invented the ball machine, a fact that I was reminded of during my recent reading of “Ted Tinling: Sixty Years in Tennis.”
According to the media, the anticipated COVID “Baby Boom” didn’t materialize. Apparently the people in my orbit didn’t get the memo, because I have been celebrating the arrival of quite a few little ones lately. In the process I have discovered a new “go-to” gift for such occasions.
If you can fight through the obvious product placement promotional schtick, some genuinely useful items regularly emerge from the racquet bags of the pros appearing on the Tennis Channel Bag Check series. One of the oldest Bag Check videos featured Marat Safin. In related news, Safin is the answer to the trivia question “Who was the last man to win a Grand Slam Title before Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal started their joint reign of terror?” in professional men’s tennis. You can probably win a bar bet armed with that knowledge.
Since the moment they first appeared, I have been a huge fan of the Bag Check short segments that run as commercial fillers on the Tennis Channel. Once you cut through the blatant product placement, some genuinely useful objects are frequently revealed in the series. This presents is the perfect opportunity to take a closer look at some of the gems that have emerged from the professional player’s bag over they years.
The “Cone Game” is one of my favorite tennis practice drills. In fact I carry a set of orange cones in my portable ball hopper at all times. Whenever a week passes when I don’t engage in this drill, I detect a perceptible drop in consistency during match play. The cone game may be the most essential drill that I perform on a regular basis.
The tennis players that are playing in this year’s Australian Open series recently exited a fourteen day mandatory quarantine period required of everyone who enters Australia. While in isolation, some of the players were allowed to leave the quarantine hotel for a few hours each day under controlled conditions to train and receive treatment. However, many of the players were forced into a “hard” quarantine after others on their chartered flights tested positive for the COVID virus on arrival. Those players were not allowed to leave their rooms at all.
Fiend At Court spent a virtual six weeks with Dennis Ralston in 2020. To be more precise, this site spent six weeks on a structured improvement program inspired and derived from Six Weeks to a Better Level of Tennis, a book he authored with Barry Tarshis. Unfortunately, Ralston passed away last month following a long battle with cancer. Revisiting the Fiend at Court “Six Weeks” project became compulsory with his passing.
At some point in the near future I will most likely rebrand the Fiend at Court Tuesday content theme to “Tennis Technology & Training.” In the meantime, I am going to lean forward a little bit and talk about a training topic this week.
If you have ever seen a dude carrying a jar of pickles around at a tennis tournament and wondered what that was all about, there is a two word explanation: Muscle Cramps. Pickle juice is widely regarded as a magical cure for muscle cramping within tennis circles for a very simple reason. It works.
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