TENNIS

Te Aroha News, Volume XLI, Issue 6439, 17 January 1924, Page 8

TENNIS

William T. Tilden, world’s champion lawn-tennis player, is a generous opponent. This is from his pen after he had defeated W. Johnston. “Little Bill Johnston is a tennis-tired man. No one realises that more surely than Bill himself, yet never a word of excuse passed his lips for his rather unimpressive tennis. It is up to his friends to say what he will not. Johnston was stale, very, very stale. He has endured six long weeks abroad while winning the hard-court and grass-court world’s championships at St. Cloud, France, and Wimbledon, England. He returned to America and played or lived in a tennis atmosphere until the end of the season. It was more than any man, who takes the game as conscientiously as Johnston, could stand. Bill himself did not know how fed up he really was with tennis, yet when the time came for his old dash and daring attack, it was not there. It was not the old Bill Johnson who went down in three sets to me in the final, but a tired, drawn shadow of himself. Many people think that it is the beginning of the end of Billy Johnson. Never have I heard a more ridiculous statement. All Billy needs is a rest of six months a change of thought, a bit of relaxation and he will return the same brilliant star he has always been. Johnston is by far too great a player and still too young a man to slip from his place in the sun.”

THE THEORY OP HITTING

After the first of the hard court series of tennis matches had bjeen played at Wimbledon, England, many of the prominent players voted the hard courts superior to those of grass.

The pace of the surface has a curious connection with the speed of the player’s driving, comments an English player. It is so also in cricket and other ball games. On slow grass you tend to hit harder because the ball does not “come” to you. On a fast wood or hard court, you scarcely need to hit, but merely to “meet” the ball. It is a popular error that impact with the floor slows the ball’s momentum. It does when the surface is rough of texture or slow from various causes.

But on a true, smooth, hard, and resilient surface, impact makes the ball g'p faster than it did in the air. It does this because it is smooth, hard and resilient. On other surfaces the initial pace after impact is “damped.” On a surface of mud there is no pace; but on other surfaces, which admit of a bounce,

impact mechanically gives top spin to the ball, though* hit clean, because, like a wheel clutching the road the upper part of the'ball tends in impact to go faster than the lower, which is in contact. This is a well-worn axiom in Physics, and explains why a wheel goes round. But on a fast and true surface this “toppling over” is a negligible quantity; it is superseded by the “sliding” of the ball. In other words, the ball instead of gripping the floor, skates on it.

The ball is resilient; certain kinds of imparted spin make it more resilient. Cricketers know well the bowler who has a “kick.” In lawn tennis the stroke which possesses “kick,” especially in service, is the so-called ordinary American. The ball “goes with” the arm, and the oblique topspin thus imparted makes the ball “kick”; this is really the result of a check which the spin enables to be effected, and so to reduce the “sliding.”- The result is a pace far exceeding the speed of the air-travel and far exceeding the normal length of bound.

Can a surface be too fast? Cei’tainly hot. It reduces concentration to the minimum, but demands the utmost quickness of eye and body movement, which is all to the benefit of the players and to their pleasure.