Tennis has some basic rules. Hit the ball before it bounces twice so that it lands on or inside the lines. That’s basically it, with a lot of fine-tuning (serving rules, net cord rules, double-hit rules, and so on). Beyond these rules, tennis is what we make of it. A select few pursue it for […]
A practice partner once said to me about playing tennis: “If you’re thinking, you’re stinking.” Was he right? When you’re playing tennis, is thinking, by definition, overthinking? Or are there shades of thinking only some of which are a problem? I’ve tried to get at a useful answer by compiling the sort of things that go on inside […]
I have always considered tennis as a combat in an arena between two gladiators who have their racquets and their courage as their weapons. -Yannick Noah What does courage look like on the tennis court? We can start with another quote, this one from Arthur Ashe: “You’ve got to get to the stage in life […]
I am an admirer of Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, and I am also a skeptic. He broke important new ground — his discovery of the inner game is to tennis what Columbus’s discovery of the New World was to Europeans. Wow! Who knew? I find his approach a bit on the simplistic […]
