What I Learned From the Inner Game
Part 4

John Yandell

In this series we have been looking at Tim Gallwey's legendary work--the Inner Game of Tennis. In the last article we looked at one of his major conclusions about ball watching—following the seams of the ball during the flight of shots from your opponent to your racket and then back, and how that idea squared with how the human eye actually works. (Click Here)

In this final piece let's look at another major tenet of Tim's work—the idea of using "Bounce Hit" both to time the strokes and improve the relationship between Self 1 and Self 2 that we looked at in the first article. (Click Here)

Bounce Hit With a Beginner

In Tim's second Inner Game book (Click Here), he gives an extended description of using the bounce hit technique with a middle aged woman who had never played tennis.

Gallwey started with an awareness drill, dropping a ball and asking her to watch the ball and say bounce when the ball hits the court and hit when he hits it with his racket.

Then his assistant started throwing her some balls and asking her to say bounce when the ball hit the court and say hit when she thought she should hit it, but just let it go by.

Next he asked her to continue to say bounce and then say hit when she actually made contact. Gallwey says the first ball she hit over the net had "astonishing gracefulness."

Initially she was hitting with her body facing the net. But over time, without prompting, "she was stepping consistently sideways with her right foot and stepping diagonally across her body with her left, close to textbook perfection."

Some of her rallies with Tim lasted ten or twelve shots. "I'm really getting into the rhythm," she said.

Tim asked if she was moving her feet on purpose. No she said. "I am just doing bounce hit and not thinking about anything. This is really fun."

Tim explained more on the purpose of bounce hit. "The point was to give her Self 2 some input about how a tennis ball behaves on a tennis court, without the distractions that tend to intrude once she has hit the ball. Very few beginners are given this opportunity."

Advanced Players

But how does bounce hit work for more advanced players? According to Gallwey, "Most players find it simple to say bounce and hit on time and still entertain a number of thoughts about how to hit the ball.

"What must be practiced for best results is to let go of trying to hit the ball ‘right' and to concentrate the mind totally on the ball. It's not unusual for two players to double or triple the length of their rallies when performing this awareness exercise."

Gallwey goes on to explain more advanced players can get thrown out of the bounce hit rhythm when they see a difficult ball approaching. They can shift back of "trying" to hit the ball instead of keeping attention on just seeing it.

Gallwey says they should simply notice the difference between these two states and observe the results. In this way they will automatically approach the state that works best.

Gallwey's work with the beginning woman was actually the subject of documentary filmed on the Inner Game. And it basically shows and confirms everything he writes about in the book. Here is the documentary itself.

Questions

In reading the book and comparing it to documentary video, a major question arises. The beginning player definitely learns to rally with Tim, but what about her technique? If you have read his books you probably wondered as I did: "this all sounds magical, but what did the players he taught actually look like in terms of their strokes?"

This is what the documentary showed. The beginning player had no ready position and just let the racket dangle at her side.

Her forehand take back has some major extraneous movement. Her follow through is short and low. And on her one handed backhand she doesn't have a grip shift.

Not mentioned in the book is Gallwey teaching her the serve as well. Interestingly Tim demos his own serve and asks the beginner to close her eyes and visualize herself executing the same motion. You can judge the results for yourself.

Based on all this it is hard to imagine she ever became a regular tennis player, but maybe she did—that's not addressed in the documentary. If so she probably had some ingrained bad habits that would limit her development.

But does any of that matter? Tim definitely got her rallying almost immediately. But what point if at all would Gallwey introduce any technical information?

Counterpoint!

I posed these questions to my friend Sean Brawley who worked with Gallwey for years and has given numerous seminars around the world demonstrating the Inner Game technique with beginners.

Sean himself is a great technical player, having played major Division 1 college tennis, reached the top 150 in the world, and won the USPTA national singles championship in the 1980s—there are always some tough players in those draws!

He's been reading my articles and has agreed to provide some "counterpoint" thinking which I look forward to publishing in future issues. Stay tuned!