A Tennis Website by Chuck Coleman

13 May 2024 Recently, I've seen a lot of tennis matches decided by the same, 7-point tiebreaker used to decide a set. It seems to me that if one player gets hot and wins 3 of the first 4 points, he or she has a high probability of winning the tiebreaker. And so, it's almost like tossing a coin, but not quite. I hope the ITF rules committee will consider using a longer tiebreak game to decide a match, say, first to 9 points or 11 points (and ahead by 2 points) ?

7 July 2024 Nice to see that Roland Garros & Wimbledon are using a 10-point tiebreaker in the final set :-)

18 August 2024
Note for Iga Swiatek: You are hitting (my opinion) your first serve too hard, and your second serve too slow.

I hope you can learn to hit what I call the 95% serve (roughly 95% of your maximum speed) on both your first and second serves. By taking a tiny bit of speed off of your first serve, you will get it in the box more often, putting mathematical & psychological pressure on your opponents. In addition, you can use the 95% serve to actually attack the ball on your second serve. Your groundstrokes and returns, of course, are just outstanding and superb. Gosh.

2 September 2024:
Prayers for Chris Evert, as she fights a tough battle with cancer +++

12 September 2024:
Recently, I got out my copy of A Handful of Summers, by Gordon Forbes. If you've never read it, I think you'll enjoy it. Forbes gives us a very pleasant description of what it was like to play world-class tennis in the days before Open Tennis came along in 1968. Right now, I'm enjoying the European tour in 1955. Players were paid under-the-table, so it really wasn't pure amateur tennis. The players seemed to actually have FUN, in those days.
One story talks about a player who was unhappy with his performance, so he laid his racket down on the court, and while walking in a circle around his racket, he looks down and talks to the racket, telling it how disappointed he was in the way it was performing that day.

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