Do you bring your shame to the tennis court?
An important question for consistently inconsistent players
Last week, my friend and main hitting partner, Nick, sent me this message from his vacation in Toronto:
For just three economical sentences plus one expletive, this message had everything—drama, pride, uncertainty, excitement, hope, sheepishness!—and neatly encapsulates how mind-bending this sport can be.
Before I begin to excavate these feelings, anyone uninitiated must know that a ‘tweener’ happens in a valiant God-mode moment, usually after you’re lobbed at the net and you have to run it back turbo. You’re facing away from the court; blind to your fate; possessed by a force that defies language. You say, come what may, bitch, and you launch the ball backward between your legs
Nick pulling off a tweener winner heralding APPLAUSE is cool and impressive but not surprising. Nick is very good at tennis. Nick forgets he’s good at tennis, though. The crescendo of his text—“Am I good at this sport again? Fuck”,—tells us everything we need to know. And so it goes: tennis plants seeds of doubt in its disciples. Tennis gives us so much, but it also TAKES… a toll on our confidence.
Nick forgets because the Nick I saw before he went to Toronto—and I say this with love—couldn’t have landed such a shot. To my own discredit, I couldn’t have either. I regret to admit we played a mixed doubles quarter-final together in a low-stakes local tournament and our opponents won convincingly—not because they’re incredible players, but because we each brought our deep reservoirs of guilt and shame to the match. Together, we overthought and overhit and underperformed.
Nick and I practice together pretty often, and have each played for more than half our lives. If you were to glimpse us hitting, you might perceive two players with form that’s pretty dialed. This is perfectly in step with the reality I present to you on Instagram; cropping out the flubs and sharing 15-second stretches of goodness. But if you were to sit yourself down and really marinate in the fullness of our output during a match? I’m not sure if you’d see brilliance or mess. Lately, both are true for both of us. Catch us vacillating between honeyed groundstrokes and balls that sail both long and wide; or constructing gorgeous, cinematic points, earning a short ball and blowing the easy put-away. Like toiling away on an elaborate cake, only to find the birthday girl is on Ozempic. Put simply, we’re consistently inconsistent.
That is, until we’re not. Some new day, not far beyond the day we were volatile, one or both of us will be incredible at tennis. Just show up and start hitting like a newborn adult, unmarred by childhood traumas or the anxieties of yesteryear. I suspect that’s what we’re on about here: the ability to stop talking shit about yourself in your own head long enough to remember that you can actually play.
Thinking less—and conversely, feeling the ball—might be the answer. From this carefree vantage point, thoughts are abstracted, including ones that take aim at yourself. At least that’s what they say. One such they is Timothy Gallwey. In his dusty (published in 1974; fifty literal years ago) and beloved (by people such as Bill Gates) self-help book, The Inner Game of Tennis, he claims, “the first step is to see your strokes as they are. They must be perceived clearly. This can be done only when personal judgment is absent.”
Advice like this can feel inert, like telling someone with anxiety to remove stress from their life, or a porn addict that the real thing can feel good. The notions are true, but the road to there is paved with condescension. Annoyingly, Gallwey is not wrong—judging thyself on the court bears only fruit that is rotten; results that are lacking. So, why can’t I stop? Is it because the opposite of judging is… positive affirmations? Or more horrifying still, manifesting? I thought we all agreed that manifesting isn’t real, but some of you seem to have healthy on-court attitudes so drop a mantra in the comments I guess?
For me, things can break down in one of two main ways.
In the first scenario, trust that I start as I mean to go on! That is, with such unbridled confidence that I storm the court, big dick racquet swinging all the way through the ball, my body weight moving forward, locating the sweet spot with such ease it feels the size of the sun. I am even-tempered and light-footed. I glide. I wield great power but not without great responsibility; convincingly hitting not only my favorite shot (down-the-line backhands), but also my most fraught (crosscourt forehands). This state endures until doubt eclipses it. Until I miss some successive shots, and promptly sentence myself to the death penalty for the crime of fucking sucking. What follows is a fairly formulaic regression. A tale of threefold tentativeness:
I decelerate. Hitting a groundstroke without throwing your body forward or driving with your legs is like trying to flirt without eye contact. Lazy, feeble, a job halfway done.
I slice and drop shot. Something tells me I should start hitting more of these two shots; neither of which I practice often; both of which reveal the collapse of my ego.
I miss easy shots. When you’re dealt a short ball that sits up just so, it’s as if the wind has blown a crisp $50 bill into your path. Just reach out and take what’s rightfully yours! Instead, I recall something embarrassing I did 17 years ago and blast the ball into the back fence.
Il San Pietro di Positano, the historic 5-star hotel on the Amalfi Coast. Photo by Federico De Cesare Viola.
To review: whether I’m up 4-1 or down 2-0, I need only look at myself the wrong way and things fall apart. It’s always fuck shit cunt and never this too shall pass like my manifesting contemporaries.
You might be thinking unwieldy PTSD is to blame for my lofty standards and subsequent breakdowns. If I were consistently blowing up my relationships or setting fire to work opportunities, you might be onto something.
So why does this sport have the singular ability to reduce me, and maybe you, to a bumbling infant? Why, rather than trying to correct my errors in real time, does my mind insist I dive nose-first into concrete? Timothy Gallwey in his godforsaken book is like, hey now champ—have you tried deep breathing? Lol, the audacity.
At this year’s U.S. Open, Paola Badosa lost her semi-final match to Emma Navarro after being up 5-1 in the second set. Badosa reasoned in a post-match interview, “I never had the momentum in this match. It was 5-1, but I never felt myself on the court.” It might seem uncanny to lose a set you’re leading so convincingly—but as Badosa alludes, some days brain and body don’t talk. I guess the breathing thing didn’t work for her either.
Scenario two is somehow worse. It involves my rickety serve owed in large part to my otherworldly (derogatory) ball toss. There is less to say on this matter: If I can toss decently that day, I have a fighting chance of not falling into the ugly traps outlined above. If the tosses are trash, we are going to be having a weird day.
Actually, there’s more! Between tosses and second serves, sometimes my brain will neg me with, “DON’T DOUBLE FAULT!” as if conjuring a grim scenario will stop it from materializing. Could it be that I’ve been manifesting (incorrectly) this whole time? Gulp.
Regrettably, there’s no way to wrap this mess up and tie a neat bow around it.
Tennis routinely invites masochists to play. It’s a game with hoity-toity criteria; a game that asks you to assemble many techniques at once. One that trips us up and bamboozles us and makes us contemplate abandoning atheism for something more rigorous.
What’s startling for pros and plebs alike is how abruptly shame can creep in. Will you locate that precise moment and squash it? I hope that you do, because the poison spreads fast.