Tennis Secrets for the Champions

Continued ...

Test 1

Let's say that you are playing with a player of just about equal playing capability (say, you and him are equal in head to head count). We imagine that you two are playing a title match and so are summoning your best efforts. It does not matter who is serivng. We will assume that a rally is underway.

1. If you put the ball in the net or it sails out in under 5 shots from you and you are doing this in 4 out of 10 different rallys lasting 5 shots or less then I will say that your miss rate is (4/10)*100 or 40%. We do the same for rallies lasting 10 or less shots an so on. We can formalize this in a table, see below:

# of shots    Failure Rate    # of Rallies       Miss Rate(%)

<= 05               3                         10                     30

<= 10               4                         10                     40

<= 20               7                         10                     70

<= 40               9                         10                     90

Remark

Of course these are just numbers to clarify the concept. Also I could make it more rigorous if it was necessary but for my purposes it is not necessary.

In plain English line one says this: You played against a player and there were 10 different rallies lasting 5 shots or less and you lost the point in 3 of those rallies and so on for the other lines.

We will now take the weighted average of these numbers in the last column:

We are going to assign weights 1, 2, 3 and 4 to the rallies in the table. Notice that the longer rallies have a larger weight. Of course, this is arbitrary but the weights reflect some plausibility and my experience which is non-trivial. The longer rallies have a larger weight because of their larger psychological impact. So the weighted average, lets' call it the Miss rate is;

Players' Miss Rate = (30*1+40*2+70*3+90*4)/10 = 68%.

We shall say that your PNL capability is then 100-68=32%. What does this mean in plain English? Just this that your ability to see the ball, net and the line(s) correctly at strike time is accurate only 32 % of the time. A further elaboration would be that if a match, say lasts one hour then you are able to see the ball , net and line combination accurately for (32* 60)/100 = 19.20 minutes of the 60 minute match. Not very good! So if you are going to play a player that has a higher PNL count, say even 35% it will be difficult for you beat him. Pretty disappointing, don't you think and discourageing. Just wait though.

I already said that you cannot do much about your PNL position except the excercise I gave you and deep, deep rest and staying away from late night parties and other debilitating activities. Also be aware that your PNL postion is deteriorating each day with age and you must keep it stable by following the comments just given and staying away from any exposure of your body that can cause accidental or other injuries to your body. Injuries are your responsibilites as a player and are not to be used as an excuse. If you have a problem, remember that is not your opponents' problem. When asked that "Nadal was not all there" when he beat Nadal in the French open, Soderling snapped (correctly!), "I don't care, I beat him." Do you get the point?

It is this deteriorating PNL position that ends most players' career at about age 30 or earlier and not any physical or other abilities. Players must guard against it. By the way, I still don't understand how did Serena cut her foot in a restaurant. Do they really expect me to believe that? Did she leave her shoes at home? Does she walk barefeet in public? That is a classic example of not guarding your body as I mentioned above. Another one: Sam Querry sits on a glass table and cuts his hand!. How dumb is that? I am at a loss at what these people do to their bodies. Personally I can smell danger about a mile away and a day sooner and know what to do. I do not know about others. But, sorry for the digression. I had to get that out!

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