Unfortunately, my ball toss is humiliating
Dear diary, why am I like this?
Hello, I’m a good enough recreational player with a dreadful serve, due in major part to a dreadful ball toss. I need help. Can you help me?
Former world number one and thrice Grand Slam champion, Arthur Ashe, once proclaimed, “Life is like a tennis game. You can’t win without serving.” He of course meant serving well, and Arthur, I want that. If you’d prefer to ignore the sage words of an icon in favor of a flippant Pinterest quote, I’ll extend to you some relative optimism: “You only live once. But you get to serve twice.” Lucky for me, there’s no limit on how many times you can toss and catch your ball before—at last!—striking it. Know what else is limitless? The multitude of ways you can torture yourself for repeatedly tossing trash balls. Any upstanding masochist will agree it’s the best way to make yourself more anxious.
In pursuit of self-improvement, I’ve videoed myself committing toss crimes, and reader, they are humiliating. I’d sooner die than show you the videos, but if I did, you’d find parallels to an inflatable car yard mascot: limbs flailing gracelessly; movements born without rhyme or reason; a woman-child detached from her own body. As someone who first picked up a racquet almost thirty years ago and played competitively as a teen, this is a regression of the most tragic kind.
One consensus is that your toss should be somewhere between 12 and 1 o’clock. My balls do not belong on any timepiece. They are too far behind my head or too far in front. They spin unintentionally, or curl too far left or right. I have been known to catch tosses 3 or more times before striking a ball, and even then, I might make contact just to spare my gracious opponent any further frustration.
Three simple principles are said to unite in a perfect toss:
Keep your arm straight
Hold the ball in your fingers, not your palm
Release at eye-ish level
I resent succinct *recipes* like this because they reveal my gracelessness, and neglect the other things that should be happening concurrently: your racquet traveling back and caressing your shoulder blade as you lift the ball, your knees bending as you release, your racquet hand making a smooth, uninterrupted motion. Some people (me) have never been coordinated enough to pat their head and rub their belly at the same time, and it shows.
Below: a rare day in 2023 in which I tossed three decent balls in a row.
I assign some blame to a thing that is ordinarily—famously!—great to have: full control. Thing is, starting the point means making your own momentum, and having nothing to react to means you have to invent from scratch. And so by my calculations, if you serve, you are an inventor. And being an inventor is difficult, no matter who you ask. This page was blank when I started writing, and inventing these words was intimidating, but not as intimidating as serving. The cruel irony is that I could be intimidating if I could hit serves half as well as I can hit backhands. Preposterously, I hit backhands frequently (ego), and rarely face my affliction (coward).
Anecdotally, it seems that the toss and serve at large are problematic for many recreational players. I treasure this flimsy hearsay, but some of my peers scoff. They look at me amused, incredulously; maybe even with pity, as I describe my quandary. I’m frankly furious with the school of thought that a ball toss is effortless.
David Foster Wallace maybe gets it? “The tossed ball rises and seems for a second to hang, waiting, cooperating, as balls always seem to do for great players,” he posits in String Theory, his poetic body of work about our beloved game. His wistfully worded thesis might reveal something about his own toss plight, or I might just be looking for a comrade in someone much more prolific than I. In any case, I know I should stop expecting balls to “cooperate”, and start *doing the work* (Instagram activism voice). Again, reader: Can you help me?
This article originally appeared on the Palmes website in 2023.
Update 8/25: Given my impediment seems to live as long as I do, I’m always looking for sound advice. This video—especially the part about tossing slow to fast—did(!) translate into better tosses for me the last two times I hit. In case nothing sticks, pls share your hypnotherapy recs.