I will begin by confessing or declaring my love of tennis, which I have played on and off for nearly forty years, and which is a clear contender for the most beautiful sport that exists. I am also deeply enamored of soccer, which it makes more sense to call football, as most of the world does. Tennis is a game that takes the dexterity of the hands and arms to its utmost extension, while football takes that of the feet. Yet while football requires a squad, the purest tennis is played by a single player on a single side of the court. Within the domain of tennis you can witness the full continuum from dancing to combat.
Anytime that we are engaged in athletics we are in the realm of movement: the arena of the sympathetic nervous system. The same autonomic power that undergirds fight and flight is beneath the mobilization required to run, jump, pivot, stretch, and swing. Motion is sympathetic. Pretty much anyone can learn to hit a tennis ball. Swinging a racquet through the air, be it a tennis racquet, a squash racquet, a pingpong paddle, or a pickleball racquet seems to convey with it a primal satisfaction. There is something about striking a moving projectile and reversing its course that is deeply satisfying. The crispness of a clean strike of the ball is glorious. And in the back-and-forth of a rally, we have the call-and-response that our nervous systems love. This is a form of dancing, really, with a net between us, back-and-forth, to-and-fro. As soon as call-and-response happens, we are in the realm of ventrality. Back and forth is the rhythm of regulation, a cadence of relationship. And so tennis, in its movement and its rallies unites two neural systems: the connection system and the sympathetic nervous system.
If you practice tennis for any duration, you begin to understand that the higher the level of play, the more refined the movements become. And that, exponentially so. At the game's most elite levels, the highest professional levels, the ball is moving with astonishing velocity and nearly unimaginable accuracy. Serves are coming off the racquet sometimes at 140 miles per hour, traversing the 78 feet of a tennis court in less time than it takes to blink twice. Forehands come screaming across at 100 miles per hour. When you do in fact strike the ball, it is in contact with the strings of your racquet for merely a micro-second, and today's high-tech racquets, made of moulded strips of graphite, with extremely technical strings, amplify the force of the player's whip-like motion so greatly that the standard stance for hitting shots has completely changed in the past twenty years because of advances in racquet technology. Today's game is lightning fast. You can watch professional tennis on television without getting any real sense of the speed at which modern play happens. This is because the purview of the televised game is giving you a view of the court's total action, which means that you are watching generally from high above. But if you are actually standing on or beside a court with elite players, you have a totally viscerally different understanding of the speed and timing required to play at this level. Today's professional players are bludgeoning the ball. The tuning of the reflexes required to respond, with precision, to these levels of speed is unprecedented.
Elite tennis is a game of millimeters and micro-seconds. At this year's Wimbledon, which is the world's most prestigious tennis tournament, the most royal of all the Grand Slams, the human line callers made errors with such regularity during the first week of play that these incorrect calls altered the course of at least three matches. Stationed at intervals around the perimeter of each court are an assemblage of linecallers, all reporting to the chair umpire. Hands on knees, leaning forward, uniformed in buttondowns that contrast with the green of the grass courts, they scour a particular line with their eyes, calling out like a defense attorney objecting in court if a ball misses the line. But when the forehand is struck at 100 miles an hour, and it catches merely a millimeter or two of a two-inch chalked sideline, deforming and rolling as it makes contact, you can imagine that even finely trained eyes might get it wrong sometimes. Balls were called out that were not, in fact, out. Balls were called in that were actually out. At a tournament like this there is an electronic line-calling system, and no match at this level is played without, at some point, one of the players challenging a call, and the umpire and stadium pausing to watch the electronic replay. When we watch these replays we can see that the ball doesn't make a circle on the line. The kiss of the first point of impact is twinned with rotation and deformation. The ball compresses, skids, and rolls across the point of impact, smearing across the line. (Here’s a literal book about this.)
The greatest players ever, Roger Federer comes to mind right away, had such extraordinary precision that they could aim for the outside of a line. From 80 or 90 feet away, as they were sometimes standing 10-20 feet behind the baseline, they could paint the outside edge of the line with a ball on purpose. For me this is kind of like watching Steph Curry sink a swoosh not from the 3-point line, from his own baseline. The level of precision required for this kind of play is almost unfathomable. And here is where this gets really interesting. Autonomic balance governs the tension in your muscles. Which is to say that the very specific mechanics of how you inhabit your body change as you shift across the continuum from relaxed to stressed. Which is to say that your ability to govern this is what makes the difference between that ball catching the back of the line, where you win a stunning point, and missing it completely.
If you've ever played any sport competitively in your life, you know that the way that the shot feels during practice is not the way it feels in the middle of the big game. This is, for many people, a common performance problem. We often practice a sport in contexts that are fairly relaxed, and quite different from where we compete. For example, most of us generally practice without an audience. But if you compete, it is often in front of an audience. And when 10,000 screaming people are watching you play, it is unlikely you feel as relaxed as you do on the practice court. The higher the level of stress–sympathetic activation–the more tension your muscles carry. The bigger the stage, the greater the pressure, the bigger the stoke, the greater the adrenaline surge. So in a game where the distance between winning a point and losing it is millimeters, the balance of your autonomic nervous system, which literally tightens and loosens the muscles controlling your shot, matters a great deal.
The higher the level of stress–sympathetic activation–the more tension your muscles carry. So in a game where the distance between winning a point and losing it is millimeters, the balance of your autonomic nervous system, which literally tightens and loosens the muscles controlling your shot, matters a great deal.
I have written, in this newsletter, previously, about Novak Djokovich, the 23 time Grand Slam champion. Djokovich is known as a master of the mental game of tennis, a master of the mental constancy required to stay locked into the groove of elite performance on the world's biggest stages. But Djokovich, I would propose to you, as well as most of the world of professional tennis, and the way that it is coached, actually misunderstands what it is exactly that gives rise to the most elite of performance.
And this is where I turn my attention to the autonomic genius of Carlos Alcaraz, the 20-year old Spanish tennis phenom who, yesterday, defeated Djokovich in the final of the men's single's championship of the world's most important tournament, after being literally destroyed in the opening set 6-1. Alcaraz is giving us, through his play, a lesson about this, if we know what to pay attention to. About Alcaraz, who has just captured the Men's singles title, the youngest player since the preternaturally talented Rafael Nadal, my friends say: That kid must have ice running through his veins to stay that cool under pressure. But no, that's not it at all.
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