Mother of Invention by Katrine Marçal

Author:Katrine Marçal [Marçal, Katrine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-05-04T17:00:00+00:00

8

In which Serena Williams beats Garry Kasparov

A nine-year-old Serena Williams is throwing an American football across a tennis court in Compton, south of Los Angeles. It is around this time that her father declares to the world that one day Venus will hold the top spot in women’s tennis, and that his youngest daughter Serena will probably be even better. It is only some seven years later, when Venus comes from nowhere to reach the US Open final, that anyone really starts to believe him.

Serena and Venus throw the American football back and forth to each other. Having started about one metre apart on either side of the net, the sisters move back slowly, throw by throw, until they find themselves at opposite baselines, the ball spinning through the air between them.

Their father, who is coaching them, had only taken up tennis in middle age, using videotapes borrowed from the local library. It was on one such tape that he saw the drill involving the American football. As it turns out, getting an American football to rotate in a tight spiral across a tennis court requires almost exactly the same hand motion as landing an overhand serve.

What makes the tennis serve such a difficult shot to master is that it involves not just hitting the ball over the net at high speed, but also landing it in the service box on the other side. This should be practically impossible: you have to whack the hell out of the ball to get it over the net, which can in turn make it sail across the court at such speed that it doesn’t drop into the box in time.

Of course, if you’re tall enough it’s much easier to land the serve with some force: you simply hammer it down from your full reach. Serena Williams, however, will only come to be five feet nine inches tall. Which is where the American football comes in.

You see, it’s all a question of spin.

When serving in tennis, the trick is not to hit the ball flat. Instead, you have to extend, jump and all but fling your racket at the ball. This throwing motion is what makes the ball spin, which in turn makes the air around it do the same. A pocket of lower air pressure forms beneath the ball, and as the air is pulled upwards the ball is pulled down, causing it to almost stop and drop in the right place.

Sir Isaac Newton, the father of modern physics, observed this phenomenon back in the seventeenth century from his window at Trinity College, Cambridge, which just so happened to look out over a garden where tennis was played. Serena Williams’ father understood the same thing from the videotapes he borrowed from the library in Compton. Anyone who can learn to spiral an American football across a tennis court will be able to incorporate that same hand motion into their serve. The key is repetition: doing the same thing again and again until it imprints itself in the body.

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