How the Hell Does Anyone Do This?

On serving a tennis ball

I wouldn’t say tennis has ever been “part” of my life, so much as it’s appeared in sporadic bursts, like an uncle who shows up once every three Christmases. As someone with a wide range of interests, it’s a habit of mine to dive as deep as possible into one subject or sport in as short a period as possible before moving on to the next. As such, I’ve grown to recognize that I consider myself “novice” at many things, tennis included, but “good” at very few. 

Before this year, the last time I played tennis with any frequency was during summer breaks in college, nearly ten years ago. Through all of these fits and starts, I never took a proper lesson. Often I err toward a stubbornness for self-teaching, and my game in most sports has suffered long-term as a result. When I first played around age nine or ten, I’d face off against my sister, a high school player who’d had five years of lessons before her freshman year, and I’d routinely lose 6-0, 6-0. No surprises there. My flirtations with the game in college saw me fare a little better than double bagels, but these were casual matches, often doubles, against friends with no racquet sports background at all. But what haunted me through it all, the common through-line in all these outings over the course of twenty or so years, was my inability to serve the ball overhand.

As a child, my sister would serve overhand to me, and during my service games I’d try to mirror her, following specific instructions such as, “Just do what I’m doing,” or, “Don’t hit it into the net!” The issue with being told to avoid the net, I found, was that I thought too much about hitting the ball square into the net and routinely drove the ball directly into the tape. Alternatively, I would fixate on avoiding the net so hard that I’d do the exact opposite and sail the ball clean over the court’s fence and into the parking lot of whatever high school or local park where our parents had dropped us off. In the name of not double-faulting every game I ever played, I learned to serve the ball underhand, to moon it directly into the air above the opponent’s service box and let it land without any pace or spin. I continued this habit through college, leaning on it as a crutch, handicapping whatever little chance I may have had at playing the game with any semblance of proper form.  

When I picked the racquet up again this past March, my primary goal above all others was to take this burden off my back—to overcome the fact that in all those years, I never once had been able to hit one of the game’s rudimentary strokes. I took to Youtube for advice, seeking a thirty second clip that might hold the skeleton key for what I’d been failing to do for nearly two decades. What I found instead were detailed videos of fifteen minutes or more, all intricate, all assuming I knew far more about tennis than I actually did—overwhelming to someone seeking quick answers. 

After enough scrolling, I traced my way back far enough until I found a film starring Don Budge, the great Grand Slam winner of the 1930s, called “The Fundamentals of Tennis.” It was twenty-two minutes long, just as lengthy as the rest of the videos, but I appreciated how much simpler the strokes from Budge’s era of tennis were. There was less coiling, less minutiae to explore. No one was serving 130 miles per hour at the time, and no one was jumping into high tosses or screaming as they drove through the ball. There was a calm fluidity in Budge’s swing that appealed to a recreational novice like me. 

I skipped ahead to the chapter of the film on serving, taking notes at each step of his toss-and-swing, scrubbing frame-by-frame through the film to analyze what Budge calls “the pendulum movement,” known in contemporary parlance as “the trophy position.” 

“The rhythm of this pendulum movement should be practiced until it becomes a habit,” Budge narrates. I grabbed my racquet from the corner of my bedroom and began imitating this motion of Budge’s, accidentally slamming my full-length mirror with the racquet’s frame, sending the mirror clattering onto the hardwood. That would suffice as practice for the day.

Days later, unable to secure a court by myself in New York City to practice serves, I instead opted to apply my latest learnings against a series of handball walls scattered around my neighborhood. I took a few phantom strokes, flailing my racquet in the pendulum motion, before tossing a ball for real. When I finally gave the real thing a go, I bounced four balls in a row off the edge of my racquet, leaving them dead at my feet before they could even hit the wall.

“How the hell does anyone do this?” I thought while tossing another and whiffing the swing entirely. 

But after failing enough times in a row, I began to find a rhythm. The ball was soon finding strings and bouncing off a section of the wall that could reasonably be considered above the net on an actual tennis court. 

Soon after, I booked a court in Prospect Park to play with my girlfriend, Suze. Thinking I might impress her with my new overhand serve, and having not told her I was practicing it alone since we last played, I tossed the ball into the air, let my racquet swing in Budge’s pendulum motion, and flubbed a fault two feet in front of my shoes.  

“Can you serve it normal?” She asked, impatient.

“This is normal, technically,” I said.

“You know what I mean.” 

I sure did. Someday I’d be able to serve, I hoped, but it wouldn’t be that day. For my second attempt, I reverted to what I’d been doing for twenty years and doinked the ball underhand into the center of her service box. 

Weeks later while on vacation, Suze and I woke up at sunrise every morning to play a match before breakfast. A few days in, I had yet to break out the overhand attempts, opting for fun rallies and exercise. But on the third or fourth day, in the court behind us, a coach was giving a basic lesson to two children.

“Okay,” he announced, “I want you to put your racquets down, and I want you to stand at the baseline and hold this football as though you were going to have a catch with me.” I continued playing my match against Suze, but only half paid attention, dropping points while I eavesdropped on the lesson behind us. The coach instructed the children to throw the football from the baseline into the service box, making the same rotational motion one would if they were throwing a football, wrist pronation and all. 

Right away I could see where the coach was going with this, a wax-on, wax-off for tennis. I gripped my racquet in the continental and began to drop my shoulder and wrist as though it were a football in my hand, swinging it back and forth, pronating the wrist at the last moment, imitating how I might impart spiral on a short pass. 

I tossed the ball, made the pendulum motion, but this time I implemented the football arm path, relating the feeling to something my body could understand. The racquet drove through the ball and I watched the fluorescent orb bounce square into the deuce-side service box. Suze congratulated me and I repeated the same “football” serve on the ad-side of the court with the same result. 

Finally. I’d figured the damn thing out.

It was as though I’d thrown a weight off my shoulders, summited a mountain I thought I’d never climb and posed for a photograph bearing a flag that read, “I know the basics of tennis.” There’d been weeks of frustration, misunderstandings, and failure. It turned out all I really needed the whole time was to eavesdrop on a nine-year-old’s beginner lesson.  

On her next service game, Suze joined me in attempting the overhand, having never tried in her life, and plunked the ball into the service box on her first go. No old instructional films, no agonizing at a handball wall. Some people just have “it,” I suppose. I am not one of those people.

But for now I’ve conquered one of the Everests of my sporting childhood—one of those things that plenty of athletes can do with ease, but that I could never wrap my head around. There are plenty of others still left to conquer: landing an ollie on a skateboard, playing a round of golf underneath 100 strokes, kicking a field goal from the extra point line—they’re all on my list, and if I ever manage, I’ll be sure to let you know.