I’ve always resented challenging weather conditions. The wind disrupts my rhythm, the sun messes with my serve, the high sky downgrades my overhead to a sometimes thing. I prefer to play indoors. It makes the game simpler and more straightforward — the elements don’t mess with my timing. Recently it dawned on me that it […]
Our capacity to absorb language is little short of miraculous. It’s an ability that’s not unique to our species — the Google tells me that a chimp named Panzee has acquired 125 words, and that ‘super dogs’ can learn up to 250. We humans are levels above that, though, not only in the quantity of […]
The orthodox approach to teaching tennis is antiquated and unsophisticated — it’s as if the entire industry got caught inside a circa-1955 time bubble. My evidence is as follows, Your Honor. First, none of the teaching pros I know routinely use video technology despite its being immensely helpful (although usually quite sobering). Second, most health […]
Earlier this year, I had the good fortune to hit for an hour with my friend John Tashiro. We’d met during our travels on the senior tennis circuit and gotten along well enough for him to give me a blurb for my book Tennis as a Wisdom Practice. John has had serious tennis training and […]
Tennis is a game of virtuous and vicious circles. I hit a great forehand and that emboldens me to hit another great one. I miss badly, that renders me insecure, and so I execute my next shot tentatively and screw up even worse. Up the good ladder, down the bad one … Today my practice […]
In tennis, ‘transition game’ usually means shots from midcourt where you turn defense or neutrality into offense. You get a short ball and switch to the attack. That’s not how I’m using the term here. I’m using it in this context: I’ve come to recognize a painful truth. I’m a very different player when I […]
You probably know the expression, ‘Less is more.’ It applies to tennis and much more. Today I asked myself: In what ways is this true for tennis? Because we can probably agree that the game is like the proverbial onion that you can keep peeling, layer after layer. Beneath all that, though, it ultimately reduces […]
Since we launched Tennis for Good a week ago or so, we’ve added six new retail partners. Many of the names will probably be new to you. One of them surely isn’t — it’s Amazon! We are now an affiliate partner of this online marketing giant.What this means: If you ‘bounce’ to Amazon using the […]
Although I’ve taken a break from focusing on tournaments, I continue to work hard at improving my technique. Yesterday I identified a sort of trick — not quite the right word, more like a piece of mental sleight-of-hand — that helped immediately. I made a conscious effort not to watch the ball. That’s right — […]
After I lost my quarter-final match at the New England Slam a couple of weeks ago, I headed off to a nearby cafe and treated myself to a modest repast of two pecan squares, a piece of raspberry-crumble coffee cake, and an iced latte with no restrictions on the sugar other than its being Sugar […]
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