More Tiger Tim

Hopefully this blog brings in readers that care about my tennis journey. But hopefully it also shows some people just how great my favorite tennis player, Tim Henman Actually is.

Don't believe me, huh!?!?

Check it, yo.



Who else has their own Wimbledon tribute video!?!?

Brings a tear to my eye everytime.

What I'm Reading: Monday's Link Round-Up

Cheryl Murray's TennisTalk contains a very interesting post about rising tennis star, and one of my personal favorite tennis players Gael Monfils. Cheryl talks about some rabid middle aged fan who tries unsuccesfully to catch up with Monfils in a golf cart while screaminng "Montiff".

Monfils is also coming into his own by winning his first match in the warm-up tournament in Vienna for the end of the year Masters event in London. His second match is today at 11:00 AM.

Sean Randall on TennisX posts an article about a professional ATP player Ernests Gulbis getting arrested in Sweden for apparently taking home a prostitute.

Well done sir.

 Andre Agassi, one of the many "good guys" of professional tennis admitted to using crystal meth in 1997 during one of the peaks of his tennis career. This comes as no surprise to me when you see what Agassi was wearing back in those days.

GoToTennis posted some of the more memorable quotes from the last Masters series event in Shanghai.  My personal favorite is the one from Mr. Safin in which he discusses his upcoming retirement. This heartfelt quote shows how much he has matured since the video from below was taken. You can see him in his glory at the 57 second mark.






Speaking of funny and weird tennis moments, check out this link from a professional doubles match.

Randy Johnson esque if you ask me.

Then There Was a Bump in the Road

I suffered a bit of bad news on Thursday in regards to the mission of this blog.

I woke up Thursday morning with a twinge of pain on my lower back and I was having trouble walking. I just shrugged the pain off and figured it was just me being sore from the tennis I had been playing lately.

However, the pain persisted through my morning class and became pretty intense, so i decided to take a trip to the Prime Care medical center to get myself checked out.

Turns out that I have a polynomail cyst on my coccyx.

While the injury is not really all that serious it is extremely painful until the anit-biotics kick into my system and eliminate the cyst completely.

The point of me writing about this is to say that I will have to take a temporary hiatus (about a week or two) from playing tennis.

However, this will not prohibit my Wii table tennis training and the eventual tournament.

More details on the tournament to come.....

Wii Resort Table Tennis

One of my roommates came home with the new wii resort last night. All the games are pretty standard, except for the table tennis game which is AWESOMMEEEE!!!

I may have never been able to take a real set of tennis off of Cory yet, but I have his number in this game. We played seven rounds and went a perfect 7-7.

Here is a gameplay video of the game below....




I am issuing a challenge to anyone of my readers who wants to take me on in this game, i guarantee victory.

Also, we are having an apartment wide table tennis tournament, we need three more people to make an even 8 person draw if anyone is interested.

Results will be posted later this week.

The Re-Match

It was a beautiful Saturday afternoon when Cory and I decided to finally take to the court again to see if I could do the impossible and take a set off of him.

Standard rules applied with a best two out of three sets. The first player to win six games in a set wins the set.

I began the set serving and was broken at love (without winning a point to those of you who are not familiar with tennis lingo). 0-1

Cory then double faulted an entire game as his serving troubles have continued. 1-1

Some botched drop shots, and a few misplaced back hands cost me another service game. 1-2

Cory double faults four more points in a row and I win another game without having to put the ball in play. Cory then proceeds to scream at the top of his lungs, and chucks his racquet against the fence surrounding the court. Luckily the stick survived without cracking.  2-2

Who Art Thou Cory!?!

With my upcoming showdown with Cory quickly approaching, (Wednesday afternoon), I realized that my millions of readers might want to know who exactly Cory is.

Cory has been my best friend since the day we met seven years ago. That we played the same three sports, were involved with all the same extracurricular activities, and shared most of the same classes throughout high school basically meant that we had to be friends.

The problem with this friendship: we have played 500 plus sets of tennis, and I have never won a single one of them.

Zero

Zip

Nada

Nil

The underlying goal of this blog for me is to finally get to the top of the mountain and beat Cory. Since I have yet to accomplish this in the 7+ years of tennis we have played against one another I feel the hike is going to be pretty steep. I do have a couple ideas on how to beat Cory.Here's the tale of the tape:

                   Justin                     Cory
                      
Serve:           X                             -

Forehand:      -                             X

Backhand:     -                             X

Volleys:         X                             -

Intagibles:       -                            X


As seen from the highly technical chart from above Cory has the advantage 3-2.

My serve is better, and thanks to my doubles experience in high school i can volley quite well.

Cory's groundstrokes are much better than mine because he is much more consistent. Also, since I have never beaten him I gave him the edge in the intangible department because of the psychological advantage he has on me.

How do I beat him? I need to draw him into the net and put pressure on his serve because those are the weak points of his game. Hopefully, by using my knowledge about his game, various strategies and different racquets I will hopefully be able to finally get the monkey off my back and beat him.

          

Favorite Tennis Commercial

I was watching the tennis channel today and I came across this commercial, which is one of my favorites of all time. The professional player in the video is Taylor Dent who was an up and coming American star at the time.

Since this commercial Dent has had some struggles with his body requiring a few different back surgeries and never really living up to his potential.

Dent's game was all about the serve-and-volley which is why I included the video, that and the fact that he almost gets his ass beat by a little kid (Agassi and Graf's son) is absolutely hilarious.

Enjoy!

Top 10 Best Tennis Shots Ever

I was poking around the internet for some tennis stuff today when I found this nugget of gold. My personal favorites are number 6 and number 2. How do you get a ball stuck into such a hard surface????

Unreal

What do you guys like best??

"Very superstitious, writings on the wall"

I think in any sport there are superstitions that are followed by the athletes involved. Some professional players even have some of the weirdest quirks I have ever heard of.

Raphael Nadal will place all his water bottles in a row before each match, and will drink out of every single one evenly and not misplace the water bottles from there designated area in the row.

John McEnroe and Martina Hingis refuse to step on any of the white lines while they are walking around or through the court before or after matches, sets, or games.

Top woman's player Jelena Dokic refuses to read the draws of the tournaments she is in more than one round in advance.

Much like many of these top professionals, I also have a weird quirky superstition.

Hats!!

I cannot wear hats, headbands, bandana's....nothing!! When I play my head has to be completely uncovered.

Why is this!?!

Not entirely sure

I have just never been able to play with a hat on. I had lost some bigger matches in high school when i wore a hat, and now everytime I wear one I psych myself out, thinking I am going to lose the match before it even begins.

I know that a hat really cannot effect my tennis performance one way or another, but it does however effect how I feel in a way I cannot fully describe.

Am I crazy? Possible but it does make me feel a little better to know I am not alone in my own weird superstitions.

Player Profile: Tim Henman

In my last post I talked about what serve-and-volley tennis is, and how to implement that strategy into your individual tennis game.

I then got to thinking about how the best way to show exactly what serve and volley tennis was. This thought brought me to doing a player profile on one of my favorite tennis players of all time, the pride of England, Mr. Tim Henman

It is obvious that he is my favorite tennis player from his rugged good looks which can be seen to the right of the screen on the wikipedia page. However, despite his boyish charm I always loved watching him play tennis. His serve and volley style was a throwback to the 60's and 70's era of tennis. Also, watching him try and compete with the baseliners of the modern day game always gave his matches a little more excitement.

Even though he retired at the end of the 2007 season without a major championship to his credit he never tried to change his style of play, and was close to the top of the rankings for many years. If it wasn't for the fact that he played during the Agassi/Sampras era he probably would have had a few more titles to his credit.

I have included a few videos just to show what a true serve-and-volley game looks like (aside from Sampras of course), and I believe Henman was the best example of this because he did indeed follow the serve and volley fomat to a T and throughout his career hit amazing shot after amazing shot at the net.

Video: Tiger Tim Henman Benzer: tiger, tim, henman, tennis, sport

As you can see from these videos Tim is not always up at the net, but he does spend alot of time up there, and his volleys are always extremely crisp. This is what I hope to accomplish to some extent when I play my next match.