Thx for the write up

It's nice to learn some tennis ( and non tennis) history.

Why the change in title?

I liked the old one.

"traitor" not "trader"

That was a full-blooded trans-Atlantic transmutation in just one article...a bit suffocating, but, nonetheless informative, next time give us a warning!

"The only word for this is transplendent...it's transplendent!"

"Maggie's Farm" is the perfect emblem of the attitude you're talking about. I'm not so sure about the legends that have grown up around Dylan's set at Newport; there were plenty of cheers along with the boos (as you can hear if you listen to the liquid "Mr. Tambourine Man" encore here) (also glad Dylan's people aren't taking down these vids!) The Seeger story is probably apocryphal, too. But the myths became part of the arc of the Zimmerman saga, so the truth may not matter.
The details of Van Allen's struggle shows, as Edison said, how much perspiration comes after the inspiration before a new idea works. Still, it would be neat if all the slams followed Wimbledon, and had no 5th-set TB.

I think Dylan's best comment on this event - amidst all his quirky, riddled, and convoluted replies - was in his Oscar winner Things of Have Changed when he sang, "I've been trying to get as far away from myself as I can."

His interviews are flush with his mysterious manner of both shorting his responses and then filibustering. Yet there in his songs, every once in a while, you get the plain and truth of it all.

He no longer wanted to be a part of the scene of which he had become king, instead he simply wanted to be apart from it. His long march away from his early record and records culminated with doing a mainstream country album in Nashville while 300,000 hippies gathered to piss on his lawn, and then when that wasn't enough to silence the cries of his followers, Bob Dylan brilliantly sabotaged himself with Self Portrait.

It all worked out for the best as he gave us his most heartbreaking album with Blood on the Tracks and then its sequel song Sara from the Desire album. He dabbled in Gospel, that forgotten rootball of rock'n'roll, then he wore eyeliner and sucked for the next twenty years. Now he has returned to making meaningful and moving music with a voice that is a testament to walking forty miles on the dark side of a bad road and then waking up on that roadside daydreaming about no success like failure.

thanks, steve

he hands you a nickel, he hands you a dime
he asks you with a grin if you're having a good time

is etched in my mind forever. there could not be a better way of thinking about my job. and somehow as grim as this couplet seems, it comforts me.

...

nice write-up. newport is an enchanted magical place full of music, tennis, the sea, and history. it's no accident that dylan and van alen both busted traditions there.

Very nice.

Well, crud. Lost my post because I said "thank g*d for the electric guitar" or something like that. Bummer.

Anyway, thanks for the great read, Steve. Fascinating bits of history. And thank g*d for Bud Collins too. :)

Great, insightful wri
ting as usual, Steve. This made me go back and re-read one of your posts from last year. http://tennisworld.typepad.com/thewrap/2010/04/so-what-was-that-about.html As a huge fan of Bob Zimmerman, I hope you keep referencing his music in your posts ;-)

princeton and yale finally admit women... think that's mind-boggling...

well, this was not that long ago:

angela buxton and althea gibson (late 50s and early 60s)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2001/jul/08/features.sport

http://www.jewsinsports.org/profile.asp?sport=tennis&ID=57

I think Dylan summed it up best in his "My Back Pages" from "Another Side of Bob Dylan", released in 1964, when he hadn't gone electric yet, but he was clear that he wanted to move in another direction.

The chorus of that song contains the immortal lines

"Ah, but I was so much older then
I'm younger than that now"

Tennis is overdue for a shake-up, it is starting to look like ping pong when you watch it on TV. The easiest thing would be to modify the equipment, or the court itself if that doesn't help. Lots of sports have made modifications to their playing area over the years. More entertaining rallies when squash went from a hardball to soft.

I've always liked the VASSS tiebreak, which as I recall was a 9-point max., first-to-5-point "extra game" that really did have the potential to bring a set to a sudden death conclusion. The first to serve would hit two serves, then receive two serves, then serve two more (if the fifth point was necessary), and then receive the last three serves (if any or all were necessary, having the choice of court to receive the serve on the last (and 9th) point.

During my junior year in high school, in Rhode Island, we used two elements of the VASSS scoring system -- the no-ad game scoring and the 9-point tiebreak. And I loved it. Each game could be decided in a sudden death point, once the score reached 3-3 (like 40-40, or deuce). The receiver, naturally having the disadvantage (in those days, anyway), had the option of which service box to take the serve, thereby mitigating the server's advantage somewhat. It made for all kinds of interesting tactical decisions, because if I was receiving at 3-3, and my opponent had double-faulted in the ad court at 2-1 or 3-2 to bring it to sudden death, I might just make him serve into the ad court again, begging him to try NOT to think about his previous double-fault. Or, if my opponent was a lefty with a wicked slice serve that tailed away from my one-handed backhand, I might choose to receive the 3-3 point in the deuce court, taking away his most prominent advantage.

While I might not go so far as to remove the deuce-ad element from professional tennis, I do believe that the 9-point, sudden death tiebreak is a far better tiebreak than the current 12-point species.

Gotham, I couldn't agree with you more. And, in my opinion, it's a good thing and not soon enough or large enough.

Andy Meek, you're not alone in your observation, but you will find plenty of folks who believe that this new mode of play is an improvement over previous versions. The only real way to bring back the serve-and-volley, or even the frequent serve, then volley attacking tennis is, IMO, to narrow the singles court or return to much smaller frames, perhaps even wood.

But I'm not sure it would be a better product, in the end. Success in the sport has never before been as predicated on the all-round athletic skills of the players. The racquet skills required may have suffered a bit, but the pendulum will swing. We will see a return to more varied forms of aggressive play, especially now that the best two-handed players have shown the anyone who tries to cheat too far toward his backhand to (a) hide a weakness and (b) increase his odds of getting a look at an open-stance, inside-out forehand will be punished for it.

FYI

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/tennis/06/16/san.quentin.prison/index.html

CALLING ALL RAFA FANS !! Go to

http://espn.go.com/espys/?ov=bestplay#!/voting/

and vote for Rafa at the ESPY awards. Voting ends July 9.

Also, vote for Serena.

LET'S PROMOTE OUR TENNIS ATHLETES GUYS!

Slice,

"The racquet skills required may have suffered a bit"

I would say they have suffered tremendously in favor of raw power. How many times have you seen a very good power player like Roddick or Berdych miss an absolute duck of a volley in a critical point within a match (Berdych in AO vs Fed, Andy you know where).
As a comparison... make the Basketball Ring's radius three times as big -> boom, instant scoring. But is it better?

", but the pendulum will swing." this I do not believe we'll see much more serve and volley. It was Aggassi whom I first heard mention that the bigger racquets gave a big advantage to the return of serve. Just look at any top 30 player today and their return of serve is comparable to that of Connors or Borg. BUT, most kids watching tv today do not realize that if you take away the huge light weight raquet and insted give them the old one... their returns would come back down to earth. This is why there was much more serve and volley before. You could DOMINATE a player with your serve in the wooden raquet era (what was it 60 sq in? compared to Novaks 110?), and only the very elite like Borg or Connors could compete from the baseline on Grass (Connors did have a powerful raquet but that thing had no control compared to these new weapons).

And if you need any more confirmation, just look at the average 3.5 or 4.0 player today... give them a wooden raquet and I can just tell you what will happen to most of them.

So it seem to me the game will just move on, ping-pong on a larger court style, with more tv viewership and more raquet sales, and more 6'9'' guys in the top 15

It's still a great game, albeit radically changed by the introduction of huge raquets and light weight materials (and now even strings).

OBVIOUSLY VAN HALEN IS ELECTRIC. WHO GIVES DAMN ABOUT BOB DYKAB!

van halen = van alen :)

Van Halen, Bod Dylan, Van Bob, Halen Dylan....folk or rock acoustic or electric, high brow , low brow, no brow, yo brow, we all need the same relief.

even the president of the United States
sometimes must have to stand naked

Bob Dylan - It's Alright Ma, (I'm only bleeding)

Thanks Steve!

Good article. Although too big a leap away from tennis tradition to ever be adopted, another Van Alen was to abandon five set matches and make matches best 2 out of 3 sets of 8 games each instead of six games each. Not really a bad idea--television would have been delighted.

Van Alen sounds like a hoot. I went to the tournament at Longwood every year when I was a kid, an still miss it. But now I go to Newport Casino every year for some event or another (not the tourney).

Poolside at the party to debut Swan Song Records in 1974 the members of Led Zeppelin see a familiar figure lounging by the bar. The band dare each other to approach the figure. Too scared to make a move, the band's huge (350 lbs) manager takes the bull by the horns and approaches the man himself. He introduces himself, "Hi, I'm Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin." The man looks at him with contempt, pauses, looks down and says, "Don't come to me with your fuc-ing problems," then walks away. The man was Bob Dylan of course.

When Andre gives his acceptance speech, he should blow his nose on the microphone just as he blew his nose onto the court.

There is probably about a full hour of Andre Agassi tournament nose-blowing footage.

He will always be the true Snotmaster and should have his own snotmaster wing in the Tennis HOF.

When the 9 point tiebreaker was invented they would raise a red flag to show that sudden-death was being played, so that fans could stampede to the court to watch the incredible spectacle!!!

That's Incredible!!!

Has Bob Dylan ever taken voice lessons?

The funniest part of the article is the phrase "pure-minded leftist politics"

Bob Dylan's voice teacher committed suicide in 1975.

1963USCtennis, I see your points and they are well taken. However, I've seen enough of tennis over the past 45 years to believe in the pendulum paradigm. Already, we're seeing how Djokovic, Del Potro, Berdych, Soderling, Tsonga and Murray (big men all, with two-handed backhands) are forcing players like Nadal to have to rethink his instinctive court positioning and cover the open forehand court more than he does when playing the one-handers. So what we're seeing (or will see, I am convinced) is a further move away from the Kim Courier style and toward a more balanced defense and attack from both wings. I expect, too, that new serving models, based on the Edberg/Rafter model, as we are starting to see in a player like Raonic, will emerge to help produce more serve-and-volley opportunities. A guy with a kick serve like Raonic's and a wingspan like a condor, with decent speed, has no reason to stay back all day against a guy who's faster and can carve the court in more ways. We thought we'd seen the last of a dying breed of artists and idiosyncratic players when Santoro retired, but then came Dolgopolov and Tomic. And on the women's side we now have Pirilonkova, with players like Kvitova showing the ladies what can be done with spins, angles and attacking tennis.

That said, I do believe that if we want to guarantee the resurrection of true serve-and-volley specialist, we'd need to either narrow the court, widen the service boxes, reduce the racquet head sizes significantly, or some combination of all three.

I remember my first electric tennis racquet in 1971. I forgot to wear insulated gloves and I burned my hand - which is why I never made the pros.

Thank you so much for writing about this. I wish I could be in Newport this weekend.

Perspective is always cool.

Actually during the development of the 1999 prototypes which led up to the Wilson T-2000, several electric tennis racquets were tried. And there were brave tennis test pilots killed by electrocution in those wild days of 1960s tennis. I'm glad to see that this year they will be remembered in a ceremony at the HOF dedicated to the development of the T-2000, which was actually a bigger program than the US Space program.

Many of the advances developed during the development of the T-2000 were borrowed by NASA and incorporated in the LEM.

I don't think it's correct to imply that Dylan was a socialist because he sang some songs about social injustice. It is true that the socialist crowd loved his music, but so did a lot of other people. His songs were about his feelings on things, and that's about it......
I think that serve and volley has become scarce, not because the returns are that much better relative to the serve (the serves have improved tremendously with the amount of spin and power they can generate), but because the HALF-VOLLEY is less effective.....here is what I mean....in the past, if a server caught a return three feet above the net, it was an easy ball to put away, or at least put into a place where the returner could only make a desperate get. If the server, however, was forced to half volley a low ball (or volley a low drive), but could float it back deep without much on it, he still retained the advantage. The returner had to try to pass him with a relatively flat slow shot, or hit a defensive flat or chip lob.....both difficult....nowadays, if the server can get the return down low, the servers only hope is to try a touch half volley, angled off. To half-volley the ball back deep with nothing on it leaves the net man open to a 100 mph dipping passing shot or a topspin lob.....both very difficult to defend, and both hit off the same stroke, so difficult to read.
Ivo Karlovic and Radek Stepanek show that S and V still has a place. I would like to see John isner develop more of this part of his game. Ryan Harrison is making it a big part of his game, and if he can get more on his serve, he will succeed. It wasn't that long ago that Tim Henman beat FEderer at the height of his powers serving and volleying....Pat Rafter's record against the mighty Fed was 3-0

USTA = Failure

USTA = FAILURE