By Will Carlin
“Rough or smooth?”
Remember that? For those of you who don’t, this was the most common method of deciding serve for many years. One player would spin a racquet and the other would call “Rough” or “Smooth” which referred to fine stringing (known as the “trimming” or “trim”) at the head (and sometimes the bottom) of the racquet face; this extra string—that looked like heavy thread—went from one side of the head to the other but instead of going over and under the vertical mainstrings, it went all the way around each mainstring. On one face of the racquet (the “smooth” side), therefore, your finger could trace the trimming in a continuous line, gliding over the mainstrings; on the “rough” side, your finger would stop at every mainstring as the trim looped around it.
The trim was an artifact. When tennis first began, racquets originally all were strung with this “around the mainstring” pattern, so that one entire face was “rough” or “smooth.” Once the cross-strings were weaved over and under the mainstrings as they are today, the trim became a decorative nod to the past. These days, the trim has disappeared, and the racquet tosser most commonly asks “Up or down?” Sometimes, if the racquet is a Wilson, the call becomes “M or W?” If a Prince, it might be “P or D?”
Most racquet sports still use the spin of the racquet to determine who serves first. And because the spin is so ubiquitous, many players have a strategy for what they will call. Whenever someone has a Wilson racquet, for example, I like to have them spin. That way, when they ask “M or w,” I can call “W.” It is both my first initial and the first letter of the word “winner.” The fact that I have even thought of that is surely a sign of my own insecurity as a player, but now that you know that I am trying for positive thinking right from the start, it won’t surprise you that I always call up instead of down and P instead of D (continuing the “up” trend).
It is important, however, to note that I am not necessarily advocating being the caller, rather than the spinner. A friend, for example, prefers to be the caller, but against one opponent, he reports that he has lost the toss 35 consecutive times. “My regular opponent has the uncanny ability to stop the warm just before me, and then he spins his racquet in his hand instead of the floor, covers the butt with his palm, and says ‘up or down?’ No matter what I say, I always lose.”
Though every toss, in theory, gives this friend a 50/50 chance to win the toss, 35 straight losses of the toss to the same person does seem to defy the odds. It seems more likely that he is a victim of gamesmanship from his opponent. When I told this story to a different friend, he immediately reported that he once had to figure out how to deal with his own regular opponent who did the same thing. One time, right after the racquet was spun, he asked the other guy, “What was it?” The spinner, caught off guard, actually offered an answer. “That’s right,” said my buddy and went directly to the service box, ball in hand.
Pre-match gamesmanship is not limited to the racquet spin, however. There still are a number of players who seem to want to conduct the “bad warm-up” where they hit consecutive balls to themselves (sometimes many) before hitting a ball to the wrong side of their opponent or hitting one that breaks around their opponent. The theory here is that if they can prevent their opponent from getting into a groove during the warm-up, they might be able to “steal” the first number of points in a match. One thing to note: there seems to be an inverse correlation of skill and how many balls in a row a player hits to themselves; in the pros, for example, they rally, only occasionally hitting a ball back to themselves.
The “never lose” toss and the “bad warm-up” both are tactics designed to gain an edge through behavior that either is cheating, annoying or simply frustrating. One of the most famous acts of pre-match gamesmanship, however, was accomplished by taking the opposite approach: being extra nice.
Months before his famous 1973 match against Billy Jean King, 55-year-old Bobby Riggs had first challenged the recent number one woman, Margaret Court, to a tennis match. Played on Mother’s Day, Riggs gave Court – a mother of three – a big bouquet of roses. The expression on Court’s face showed that she was really touched by the gesture. But it was a ploy camouflaged by niceness to get her psychologically unprepared for the game to follow. Riggs won the match 6-2, 6-1.
For those who love gamesmanship, Riggs may be the racquet-sport poster child. I remember one older squash player who seemed to win more than his share of racquet tosses. One day, after we played, he started telling me admiring stories about how Riggs would try to gain every advantage. His eyes actually glowed with a combination of pride and mirth as he told me to look at his racquet. “I got this idea from Riggs,” he said. “Look at the trim…”
I looked at it closely once, twice and three times before I finally saw it: the old guy had had his racquet strung with the trim rough at the top and smooth at the bottom
