Roscoe Tanner Thundering Tennis Serve

Roscoe Tanner had one of the biggest serves of all time. How does it compare to today's serves? His serve was clocked at 153 mph in 1978 in a match in Palm Springs against Raul Ramirez in the final.. That remained the record for 26 years when Andy Roddick served one two miles an hour faster. But, in Tanner's day, the serves were measured at the net. Modern serves are measured as the balls leave the racquet. Supposedly, there is a fall-off rate in speed from the baseline to the net from between 10% to 30%, depending on whose research you use. If Tanner's serve had only a 10% fall-off, his serve would have been 170 mph by modern standards, far exceeding the fastest serve ever officially recorded. If the fall-off rate were 20%, his serve would be over 191 mph. He served without jumping into the air or using a complicated body motion, and the racquet he used, a PDP (Professionally Designed Products) Open, was made of aluminum. It was very similar to the Head Professional aluminum racquet known as The Red Head, but it had none of the advantages of today's modern racquets and strings.