Tennis Meditations

EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT THE WEATHER — NOW YOU CAN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: ESCAPING THE BONDS OF LANGUAGE

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: WHAT TENNIS TEACHERS ROUTINELY GET WRONG

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…
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Today’s Meditation: You Are Who You Play With

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.…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: RIDING THE HORSE THAT GOT AWAY

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…
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Today’s Meditation: Transition Game

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…
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Today’s Meditation: Less Is More

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: PIGFEST!

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: SMACKIN’ THE OGRE UPSIDE THE HEAD

A core psychological issue keeps me from being my most uninhibited self on the tennis court. It revolves around fear of rejection by the group. It’s a deep and ancient issue for me — call it my personal demon. If I could excise it —…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: BEYOND THE RULES

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: A THOUGHT OR THREE ABOUT OVERTHINKING

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: THE COLORS OF COURAGE

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…
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TODAY’S MEDITATION: A VISITATION FROM SELF TWO

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…
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