The Manhattan Project (of tennis) #2
A month ago, I wrote about how, after forty years of failure, I was going to finally learn a proper tennis serve.So I've gotten instruction and hit serves. Maybe not every day, but 28 out of the last 31. In winds that have been utterly ridiculous, doubling as soon as I get out of my car. My instructor knows I've showed up for a lesson when the trees start bending.
My elbow hurts. My arm hurts in general. I have to warm my arm up for 5-10 minutes to even be able to serve.
Still, I serve.
50-100 serves, day after day. I go about a week between lessons, locking the motion in, but getting feedback before I develop bad habits.
How much can 2,000 serves change your service motion? Quite a lot, as it turns out.
I still have a hitch in my motion, but it's much smaller than it used to be. All kinds of other issues have disappeared entirely. I hit grooves where I serve 10 balls in a row and they're all the same--same motion, same contact point, same landing point.
Eli's coach told him last week that he's hitting about 115 MPH on his first serve now. His serve is like trying to return a flaming meteor. But if I keep improving, maybe I can still win matches for a few more months.
There's an Elizabeth Kubler-Ross process I'm going through, sort of the Three Stages of Tennis Death. Stage one: he's never beaten me. Stage two: I can still beat him. Stage three: I used to beat him.
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