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Tag: writing

  • Encountering MIB right in his Michigan Backyard

    The occasion of my family’s 2025 reunion presented an irresistible opportunity. With a little tweaking of flights, rental car and hotel we found ourselves in South Eastern Michigan with the Man in Black himself.

    Looking south from the roof top of Plaza La Reina.

    The last time the two of us shared a little time we found ourselves on the rooftop of Plaza la Reina in Westwood. The MIB had been generous enough to stay over an extra day so we could play tennis on my birthday. Plus, he got to have breakfast at Henri in Canoga Park, but that is a story for another day.

    I think the last time I was in Metro Detroit I was a little kid and my family was on its way to Windsor Ontario and points further east. This time the focus was on MIB’s and his home in Farmington Hills. After we got in town, MIB generously asked if we wanted to go to Ann Arbor.

    “Fuck no, brother. This trip is all about spending time with MIB in his native habitat.”

    Just when you thought it was safe to step onto a tennis court with a confident stride, you see the MIB looking over the net at you. He’s a great player to warm up with. He likes to start close to the net, refamiliarizing his racket and hands to the variety of shots he likes to play. Then we hit soft volleys back and forth. Then we worked our way back toward the baseline and started to rally. That’s when the MIB Effect starts to take hold. It often seems like his feet don’t interact with the ground with the full force of gravity, he moves with such great ease. His strokes are fine, especially on the angles, but it’s always his footwork that is so fun to watch and listen to. Even the squeek of his Nike Air Zoom Vapor Cage 4 occurs at a higher pitch and amplitude than normal. I especially enjoyed returning serve from MIB (a minor strength of my game). In the end, though, playing with MIB is a reminder of the harsh differential between our games. Still, it was a lot of fun.

    I thought about what it was like to play with MIB all the way home to Los Angeles. I knew there was no hope of reducing the differential to zero. Then again, that was never the goal. What I wanted to do was identify as many things as I could to improve in the specific areas that playing with MIB had exposed. So, I did what I always do. I asked my coach, Caesar, he with the unlimited answers to my limitless questions about tennis.

    The first thing he said was to focus my attention on the racket of my opponent rather than simply on the ball as it crossed over the net and onto my side of the court. Caesar told me that would help me to identify the kind and the pace of the shot that was likely to be coming my way. That awareness was the first step in preparing for the shot I would need to play very, very soon.

    Then he told me of the benefit to moving quickly early and slowing down into the shot. “Bad players are constantly running and stopping. Good players flow to the ball and flow toward their next shot,” he said. Of course, my coach had told me this many times before. But this time it was more urgency and relevant since I’d recently learned I was working too hard creating too little effective movement.

    It came as no surprise that three days hanging with the MIB was just not enough. No sooner than we touched down at DTW it felt like we were on our way home. Though time was far too short, I’m glad we made the trip and look forward to sharing a tennis court with MIB again. I will be a little better prepared when that day comes.

  • A second serve…finally.

    A couple weeks back I was lucky enough to catch a couple lessons with Laura Sax at Del Norte in Sacramento. Laura is a super tennis coach. I always try to show up with a specific issue so my lessons with her can exist in kind a parallel universe to what Caesar and I continue to work on.

    As we drove from Los Angeles I tried to come up with something. What I finally came up with was my need for more consistency when I’m serving. So, Laura asked to see me hit a few serves.

    She said, “Those are kinda Ok. Lotsa pace. Now, show me your second serve.”

    I looked down at the court and sighed, “I don’t have one.”

    Laura said, “Well, show me what your second serve would look like if you actually had one.”

    I sighed again.

    Then, I hit something like a flat serve with the pace turned down. It hit the net with authority. Kind of…

    Laura said, “Ok, follow me up to the net.”

    Over the next few minutes she had me first hit the ball over the net with the edge of the frame while choking up on the racket. That’s not as easy as it sounds, by the way. Then, Laura had me hti the ball over the net with only a downward snap of the wrist. As with an overhead, this was done without the arm or torso bending forward, or following through. A secondary object of the game was to have the ball hit inside the service box, so a distinctly downward strike was in order.

    It was kinda fun. I spent much of the rest of the lesson hitting those spikes from the net and out toward the back of the service box on my side of the net. It wasn’t until Laura had me back up to the baseline that I saw the point of the entire exercise. I was hitting a slice!

    Who knew?

    As the racket snapped, it also rotated left with the ubiquitous pronation that everyone is so excited about. The force of the strike was a combination of the wrist snap multiplied by the racket’s rotational energy. The result, when the ball was struck as the racket was driving forward but still not completely open (read: flat), was a serve with rotation that curved it left (from me) a right handed player.

    I’m not very bright so it was not until that very minute that I understood what the totality of the exercise was about. As I said, Laura is a fantastic coach.

    On the long drive home I tried to reimagine the movements and, more importantly, the feelings of my two lessons with Laura. I had a fairly decent grasp of what I was trying to achieve but as with all things tennis the goal was fogged by age and lack of significant athletic ability. Still, when I got home I could still feel it although I was triyng to hit the ball too hard (don’t I always?).

    Then I remembered something else Laura said. She said that when serving the wrist should be completely at ease and the racket held with the very lightest of grip.

    Now, let me tell you why this made sense:I have always, and I mean always, since the time of my first serve, had a difficult time warming up with my serve. I can throw a baseball softly enough that a newborn could catch it with his offhand (Ok, maybe that’s an exageration) but you get the idea. In contrast, I have a very difficult time warming up to serve. My motion, and the overall pace of my early serves are, far too fast and too hard. Who knows why?

    But, when I deliberately keep my arm, wrist and elbow relaxed I can hit early serves at Speed 1 and then Speed 3 and so on. It is almost as if I can coordinate the speed better because I am managing the tension (or lack) in my serve (note that I do not write, hitting) arm. Simple, but remember that simple does not always equal easy. Perhaps it never does.

    Then, and I hope this doesn’t appear to suplant Laura’s contribution but I stumbled on this video by Patrick Mouratoglou. The looseness or softness is counterintuitive to someone like me who was born to throw a baseball (5.25 ounces at the end of the fingertips) rather than strike a tennis ball (2 ounces, plus or minus) overhead and with an added 27 inches of the racket.

    Yes, it’s still (obviously) a striking motion but a very different one.

    So, there I am and happy to be there. I have been playing tennis since September of 2023 and I now have a developing the tiny bud of a second serve. Now that wasn’t so hard, now, was it? Tt

  • A Tennis thing chat with tennis professional, Long Dao

    I learned about tennis professional Long Dao while researching an article about the rise and fall of the Pierce College tennis team. I have come to think of community colleges like Pierce as stepping stones for students who lack something they need to go directly to a four-year college or university. Sometimes what’s lacking is financial, other times it’s academic and often it’s a combination of things that bring students to a school like Pierce. As a guy who went from Pierce to UCLA, I’m very grateful the school was there for me in all the ways it was. As I think back on the professors I had both at Pierce and UCLA I am pleased to think that, in many ways, it was the professors at Pierce who had the most consistently positive impact on me.

    I didn’t play intercollegiate sports while I was at Pierce but I knew they had a great tennis team. By the way, I went to Pierce in 1980 so we’re talking about a good long while ago. Finding out Pierce no longer had a tennis team was a real shock to me. You see, a couple years back I took up tennis and this has brought me to consider a lot of tennis playing what-ifs, one being a musing about playing tennis for Pierce back in the 80s.

    But, let me connect my first thoughts about community colleges generally to intercollegiate sports. It is more than a shame that Pierce College does not have a tennis team. To me, it points to an institutional failing that may be centered at the Los Angeles Community College District or it could be a home-grown failing with the administration of Pierce College in Woodland Hills. No matter. It is a very unfortunate example of Pierce College failing its students.

    Even though we’ve just reached the day when colleges are able to directly pay their so-called student athletes it’s important to acknowledge that only the most elite athletes playing for the highest-profile colleges are likely to see much of anything in terms of financial compensation. One can argue this an elevation of student athletes at all schools but I would argue that what it really does is create an even greater separation between elite athletes and the kind of true student-athletes who have always been a part of competitive sports at schools like Pierce, or even Division III athletes. More is the pity.

    I am very grateful that Long Dao, the last coach of Pierce College, has been generous enough to be interviewed by Tennis thing.

    Thank you, Long!

    Coach Long Dao with student athletes at Pierce College, 2019 (Photo by Chris Torres)

    Tennis thing: Tell me a little about how you got started in tennis. Who got you into the game and where did you first play?

    Long Dao: My first exposure to tennis was around when I was five or six years old when my family (aunts, uncles and cousins) would play and I would tag along.  But I never did any serious training  until I got to high school.  Essentially, I did not start my tennis career until I was 14 years old.

    Tennis thing: By the time you became a student at Pierce, had you ever heard of Coach Paul Xanthos?

    Long Dao: I had not heard of Coach Xanthos until the first day of fall practice when I joined the team in 2005.

    Tennis thing: How long did your own playing career extend? Did you continue to play while you finished your education at UNLV and Long Beach?

    Long Dao: Competitive tennis ended for me right around when I transferred to UNLV.  I may have played a few tournaments here or there but training and regular tournaments practically ended around then.

    Tennis thing: I know you were an assistant at Pierce before taking over the team yourself. What were the most important lessons you learned from Coach Xanthos? Also, what did you have to learn for yourself the hard way, from your own coaching experience?

    Long Dao: Simplicity.  Coach Xanthos would always try to simplify the game for us as players.  That is something to this day I try to do for my students.  

    As a player, I was always one to drill and drill, be extremely repetitive in training, till I reached my goals, whether it was to perfect a shot or execute patterns.  I was relentless in how I went about that.  I have come to learn that many students, especially the younger players that I have worked with, learn and process things differently than I do.  So being able to change teaching styles to reach and connect with different players was something that I had to learn over time.  

    Tennis thing: I didn’t know Pierce was forced to abandon their tennis program until earlier this year and I was very disappointed. As I point out in my article, it was hard to believe a school with an enrollment as large as Pierce could not field a team. I know it’s ancient history now but do you think Pierce valued its tennis history enough? Could the school have done more to keep a team under the school’s banner?

    Long Dao: Short answer, no. I have some of the fondest memories there as a player and coach.  I have had the pleasure of meeting wonderful people there from teammates, players and staff members to fellow colleagues and coaches from Pierce and other schools, many of whom I’m friends with to this day.  Some of my favorite coaching memories happened there, taking the team from last in the conference to challenging for the conference team title and winning an individual conference doubles title. 

    But, it was shortly after that accomplishment I learned tennis at Pierce was, sadly, not valued as much as I had hoped.  It simply was another class that was offered and if it does not generate the revenue from enrollment or participation than, like many other classes or offerings at the school, the program will end up getting cut.    

    Tennis thing: I’m sure it’s very different for you, being a tennis professional, rather than coaching a group of college students. Do you miss coaching a team and can you see yourself coaching at the college level down the road?

    Long Dao: There are some aspects of coaching a team that I miss and others I don’t.  Will I ever coach another college team? I honestly don’t know.

    Tt