The Prince of Tennis
Jul. 6th, 2005 12:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sub_dividedI watched until episode 16 on Saturday. Then I conned a friend into teaching me tennis. I’ve played occasionally for years – just never, you know, correctly =_= and now I’m looking at more than a decade of bad habits. There’s a reason the Seigaku first-years aren’t usually allowed to play!
I also drove myself out of forty dollars’ worth of gasoline. Worth it to spend Fourth of July in Ohio, where fireworks are legal? Maybe. Sandusky could use better beaches, Cleveland is a cleaner friendlier more prosperous version of Detroit, family in Canton/Columbus was as usual. I am so, so tired. Why am I always more tired after vacations than before?
Sorry, I was talking about TeniPuri.
1. If I were Nanjiroh Echizen – okay, so this is pretty pointless to think about, because I doubt there’s anyone reading this who is as profoundly selfish as Nanjiroh. But if I were Nanjiroh, and my goal was to raise a worthy competitor because the professional circuit bores me, I’d be a little more worried about the kinds of people I let my son learn tennis from.
I mean. I’ve seen sixteen episodes and already two people have used self-destructive techniques. I'm starting to think Tezuka’s arm might be something similar. It’s no wonder the Junior High teams are all better than the high school teams! All the best players are forcing themselves into retirement before ninth grade.
Ryoma doesn’t have any long-term goals at all. I get that his Dad wants him to learn from others until he becomes someone Nanjiroh can enjoy playing, but that’s not exactly going to happen if Ryoma decides to learn some super technique that ruins his elbow, for instance, before he graduates. And then he’ll have nothing to do with the rest of his life and Nanjiroh will have spent all that effort for only a few good years of play.
So depressing. Moving on!
2. You know what the most awesome part of Prince of Tennis is? In one of the early episodes someone explains The Lob. “When your opponent rushes to crowd the net, there is a technique where you hit high…” and there are diagrams showing the ball path and all the spectators are like, WOW, WHAT AN AMAZING TECHINIQUE RYOMA IS SO COOL.
Within six episodes of this, Fuji hits a ball that doesn’t bounce. It’s given the same treatment.
One is standard practice. One is impossible. Prince of Tennis does not discriminate XDXD I could hear Brad Bird saying “the mundane and the fantastic! The mundane and the fantastic!” while I was watching these scenes. Cracked me up.
5. Less emphasis on Ryoma’s fangirls/boys/woman, please. It’s making me feel self-conscious.
4. It’s a shame that Inui isn’t a regular player anymore. If playing him is like playing yourself at your best, doesn’t that mean that to beat him you’d have to play better than yourself, every time? So you’d be constantly improving. Also, I’d think Ryoma would be used to playing himself, since he plays his father all the time and they have identical styles.
6. I can totally see what![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
worldserpent means about being a gen Prince of Tennis fan. (“I even know Prince of Tennis fanboys,” she says.) For example: a tournament starts. You know Seigaku is going to win. Will they take both doubles, but lose in third and second singles? Will they take first doubles, second singles, first singles? Will they sweep? The fewer matches it takes you to guess the outcome of the tournament, the better your PoT senses. This is something you can do even without getting into any of the pairings.
But for the record, it’s MomoRyo all the way.
Fanfic! Just something I wanted to get down before I forgot. Written with Mike Doughty – Looking at the World from the Bottom of the Well on repeat.
Title: Non-trivial
Series: Prince of Tennis
There is a point, just when the racket connects, when the ball is held motionless between opposing forces. It's a stage between coming and going that even even casual players will recognize. What’s surprising is that so few people realize how long it lasts. (For a drop shot or slice, all nineteen strings. For a straight shot, less, but still many times longer than the fraction of a second it takes for information to travel from the hands to the eyes to the brain and back.) The most significant limitations on a shot at that point are stance, changing center of weight, elbow position, and imagination.
Some people get the wrong impression when he takes advantage of this. Tennis is just tennis, it isn’t Crouching Tiger. Bullet time does not exist; at the instant of contact, time does not stop or even slow down all that much. A split-second is a split-second -- but with an open mind and decent reflexes, that’s more than enough time to decide.
Ryoma reaches the ball in plenty of time. He hasn’t had to think about the mechanics of his swing during a match in years, so he doesn’t worry about grip or setting his trailing foot or depth of swing (short in this case, the ball isn’t moving particularly fast). He aims, generally, for the left two-thirds of the court (deep), but keeps his swing non-committal. His eyes are on the ball caught against the loosely-strung strings of his racket, but at the corner of his vision he sees Kentaro break left.
Why not? Ryoma pushes and the ball goes left. Because Kentaro’s strides are too long to be efficient, he reaches the corner at the same time as the ball and isn’t able to do more than catch it on the outer edge of his racket. His return goes wide.
Kentaro stumbles to a stop, breathing heavily. “Did you see that? I –“ gulp for air –“I almost made it. I read that shot perfectly, all I needed was a little bit more speed.”
“Oh?”
****
The tennis is (partially) made-up. If Konomi can do it…
But Ryoma’s strings are low-tension, you can see it in the way he bends them with his fingers. Physics says he’ll have to convert most of the incoming momentum himself -- I wonder if his rackets are heavy -- so he should have more control at point of contact, more time at point of contact, etc.
Probably. ^^;; my impromptu coach is leaving for Pennsylvania today, so from now on I’m on my own (again). How much tennis can I learn from watching PoT, do you think?
I also drove myself out of forty dollars’ worth of gasoline. Worth it to spend Fourth of July in Ohio, where fireworks are legal? Maybe. Sandusky could use better beaches, Cleveland is a cleaner friendlier more prosperous version of Detroit, family in Canton/Columbus was as usual. I am so, so tired. Why am I always more tired after vacations than before?
Sorry, I was talking about TeniPuri.
1. If I were Nanjiroh Echizen – okay, so this is pretty pointless to think about, because I doubt there’s anyone reading this who is as profoundly selfish as Nanjiroh. But if I were Nanjiroh, and my goal was to raise a worthy competitor because the professional circuit bores me, I’d be a little more worried about the kinds of people I let my son learn tennis from.
I mean. I’ve seen sixteen episodes and already two people have used self-destructive techniques. I'm starting to think Tezuka’s arm might be something similar. It’s no wonder the Junior High teams are all better than the high school teams! All the best players are forcing themselves into retirement before ninth grade.
Ryoma doesn’t have any long-term goals at all. I get that his Dad wants him to learn from others until he becomes someone Nanjiroh can enjoy playing, but that’s not exactly going to happen if Ryoma decides to learn some super technique that ruins his elbow, for instance, before he graduates. And then he’ll have nothing to do with the rest of his life and Nanjiroh will have spent all that effort for only a few good years of play.
So depressing. Moving on!
2. You know what the most awesome part of Prince of Tennis is? In one of the early episodes someone explains The Lob. “When your opponent rushes to crowd the net, there is a technique where you hit high…” and there are diagrams showing the ball path and all the spectators are like, WOW, WHAT AN AMAZING TECHINIQUE RYOMA IS SO COOL.
Within six episodes of this, Fuji hits a ball that doesn’t bounce. It’s given the same treatment.
One is standard practice. One is impossible. Prince of Tennis does not discriminate XDXD I could hear Brad Bird saying “the mundane and the fantastic! The mundane and the fantastic!” while I was watching these scenes. Cracked me up.
5. Less emphasis on Ryoma’s fangirls/boys/woman, please. It’s making me feel self-conscious.
4. It’s a shame that Inui isn’t a regular player anymore. If playing him is like playing yourself at your best, doesn’t that mean that to beat him you’d have to play better than yourself, every time? So you’d be constantly improving. Also, I’d think Ryoma would be used to playing himself, since he plays his father all the time and they have identical styles.
6. I can totally see what
worldserpent means about being a gen Prince of Tennis fan. (“I even know Prince of Tennis fanboys,” she says.) For example: a tournament starts. You know Seigaku is going to win. Will they take both doubles, but lose in third and second singles? Will they take first doubles, second singles, first singles? Will they sweep? The fewer matches it takes you to guess the outcome of the tournament, the better your PoT senses. This is something you can do even without getting into any of the pairings. But for the record, it’s MomoRyo all the way.
Fanfic! Just something I wanted to get down before I forgot. Written with Mike Doughty – Looking at the World from the Bottom of the Well on repeat.
Title: Non-trivial
Series: Prince of Tennis
There is a point, just when the racket connects, when the ball is held motionless between opposing forces. It's a stage between coming and going that even even casual players will recognize. What’s surprising is that so few people realize how long it lasts. (For a drop shot or slice, all nineteen strings. For a straight shot, less, but still many times longer than the fraction of a second it takes for information to travel from the hands to the eyes to the brain and back.) The most significant limitations on a shot at that point are stance, changing center of weight, elbow position, and imagination.
Some people get the wrong impression when he takes advantage of this. Tennis is just tennis, it isn’t Crouching Tiger. Bullet time does not exist; at the instant of contact, time does not stop or even slow down all that much. A split-second is a split-second -- but with an open mind and decent reflexes, that’s more than enough time to decide.
Ryoma reaches the ball in plenty of time. He hasn’t had to think about the mechanics of his swing during a match in years, so he doesn’t worry about grip or setting his trailing foot or depth of swing (short in this case, the ball isn’t moving particularly fast). He aims, generally, for the left two-thirds of the court (deep), but keeps his swing non-committal. His eyes are on the ball caught against the loosely-strung strings of his racket, but at the corner of his vision he sees Kentaro break left.
Why not? Ryoma pushes and the ball goes left. Because Kentaro’s strides are too long to be efficient, he reaches the corner at the same time as the ball and isn’t able to do more than catch it on the outer edge of his racket. His return goes wide.
Kentaro stumbles to a stop, breathing heavily. “Did you see that? I –“ gulp for air –“I almost made it. I read that shot perfectly, all I needed was a little bit more speed.”
“Oh?”
****
The tennis is (partially) made-up. If Konomi can do it…
But Ryoma’s strings are low-tension, you can see it in the way he bends them with his fingers. Physics says he’ll have to convert most of the incoming momentum himself -- I wonder if his rackets are heavy -- so he should have more control at point of contact, more time at point of contact, etc.
Probably. ^^;; my impromptu coach is leaving for Pennsylvania today, so from now on I’m on my own (again). How much tennis can I learn from watching PoT, do you think?