Kong Linghui's backhand serve
Serving
Shripathi ramakrishnan Asked 12 years ago
hi alois and jeff,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hRnJq2dchM at 0:45
kong does this different serve...he cuts the ball on the other side compared to standard bh serve.
what is that serve? it seems to be effective as even players like rosskopf wladner or persson had trouble recieving it?
thanks!!
ps. thank you for making a video about my question on lunge step it helped a lot! :-)
Alois Rosario Answered 12 years ago
Hi Shripathi,
Kong used to use this serve a lot. It didn't look like he had a lot on it, but he used to serve it slow and low enough so that his opponent couldn't attack him. If they did attack him, he knew what return was coming off it and could counter it. You see even though Schlager makes a reasonably strong attack, Kong blocks that ball easily.
It was also a different serve that most players didn't get to return often so Kong has more experience playing a rally starting with that serve.
Thoughts on this question
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Ji-Soo Woo Posted 12 years ago
One of the players in my local club had a serve that looked pretty much the same. His serve had a surprising amount of top spin on it and many players would read mostly sidespin with a bit of backspin and would pop the return up and long.
Alois Rosario from PingSkills Posted 12 years ago
I think it is the same as the tomahawk and the Punch serve. They are quite difficult to read because you can get a variation of spin with just a small change in the angle of your bat.