A game I’ve always been in love with (completely one-sided) is tennis. I always received the most horrible of instruction. Why? Having played it for 50 years now and thanks to the miracle of YouTube, I could teach someone the fundamentals in 30 minutes or less. Why have I spent half a century learning the ‘secrets’? Why the hell is it a secret? Because of the pay wall! You don’t get nothing for free when it can be sold. I could make one video and be done with it. But there’s no money in that. These YouTube coaches stretch it out into literally hundreds of videos on the most minute aspects of the game to get views! (revenue) Tennis camps are held in Arizona to sell lessons. You kind of have baseball camps and you kind of have soccer camps, but not like tennis. Tennis is where the learning never stops, according to them anyway.

20 years ago you could type someone’s name into a search engine and have their phone number and address, an electronic phone book. Pretty soon they said, “Hold on now! We could be selling that info!” The same here. I’d love to do a “Tennis for Dummies” video. As an example I struggled with my forehand for decades. There’s no reason for it! When the ball comes to your forehand, you turn sideways to the ball holding the racket slightly elevated with both hands. You release your left hand to hold it stretched out slightly above your waist palm down. You make a ‘C’ motion with the racket hand so that when its behind you about waist high the racket face is roughly down like the palm of your left hand. As it comes forward the head of the racket is slightly below your waist with the butt pointed at the ball.

As you hit the ball about 10 inches in front of you at about waist level with the racket face moving forward and up to give it spin. Because you started with a forehand grip (the top edge of the racket pointing towards 11 o’clock), it is close to vertical. On follow through the racket head moves from waist high to roughly shoulder height. Voila. Two paragraphs. Instead I wasted decades on the court fumbling around. The man in the video (‘Nick’), is too good, he gives away the whole game on a slice serve in one 10:57 second video. The shyster channels have a ton of patter and would have taken 7 videos to do it, and never would get to the point!

They have one video on the stance for a slice serve, one video on the toss, one video on the stroke, one video on the follow through, one video on where you should hit it to… Nick here with Intuitive Tennis just spills his guts in 10 minutes telling you everything! I doubt if he even has a video telling you the “Secret of the Slice Serve!” I like Nick. He’s not slick like the carny’s selling steak knives or siding, he’s just honest and provides you helpful information without all the patter of a conman. I bet he could do the same thing for the forehand and backhand, there you go, ready to play! And you didn’t even have to go through 50 years of agony!

[As a side note, one of the funniest aspects of tennis is the serve in relationship to professionals. Most games go like this. The server after a big production winds up and hits the ball really hard – into the net. He then hits his second serve (a kick serve at slower speed) which goes over the net. I looked up the stats for professional players. The Top 10 players in the world have a first serve percentage around 65%. After that the success of the first serve being in drops to around 55%. That’s barely better than half. And in a lot of games its not even that! Its crazy. They expend all that time and energy to hit it into the net. That’s nuts. It reminds me of professional baseball players when they are at bat sit there and watch the first pitch go by for a strike! That’s the best pitch you’re going to see and you sit there and watch it. You start your at bat down automatically 0 – 1. You now have 2 chances in which to hit it, when you should have 3.]