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Aday after my forty-third birthday, I met a friend at a municipal tennis court in Berkeley. The Bay Area had just suffered through a few weeks of wind and rain, which meant that tennis addicts like me had to squeeze whatever play we could into small pockets of sunshine. If surfers turn themselves into amateur oceanographers, tracking how a storm in Japan might affect a north-facing break in San Diego, tennis hacks are self-fashioned hydrologists, predicting exactly what time of day a neighborhood court will dry out. My friend and I know, for example, that, after a night of rain, Court One at the Rose Garden will be playable at around 11:30 a.m., when the sun finally starts to shine on the southern baseline. Court Two, which is higher up a hill, takes a little longer because of the shade cast from Court One. Live Oak Park—two blue courts down the hill from the Rose Garden—sits longer in the morning sun, but it also has a puddle issue.
A wet court is dangerous for two dudes in their forties, but so is a sedentary life. Courts are crowded in Berkeley, so you really want to show up at the exact moment that the last drop evaporates. That day, we took our chances with the puddles and chose Live Oak. After about twenty minutes, I attempted a drop shot, and my partner charged toward the net, slipped, and went down in a heap. It ended up being one of those injuries that affect middle-aged men: the doctor can’t really say what it is, and suggests getting an MRI, but is really trying to say that you should maybe calm down a bit. (I am also currently injured, and am doing physical therapy for a frozen shoulder and a torn labrum.)
I stuck around and practiced some serves after my partner limped off. Before long, an older man poked his head through the fence and asked if I wanted to hit around. He was a type often found throughout California, stalking outdoor courts in constant search of some action. These men dress in what amounts to a uniform: commemorative T-shirts from fun runs, old nylon shorts, baseball caps with a decade’s worth of sweat baked into the brim. Their arms are all sinew and tan; their legs are thin and often hairless.
This one was seventy years old and a poet. We started up the creaky squeezebox of amateur tennis warmups, which involve a lot of apologies and running after errant shots. Having seen my partner go down, I wasn’t too keen on doing anything but lazily swatting the ball back and forth, but it was clear that the poet was after something else, angling his low forehand into the corners.
He asked if I wanted to play a set, and I reluctantly agreed. I could already see what was going to happen. I play what could charitably be called an optimistic, aesthetic style: I hit every first serve as hard as I can, chip my drop shots exactly two inches over the net, and torque my forehand to maximize topspin. What this really means is that I end up sending most balls either into the net, off the frame, or high into the air—there is nothing quite as dispiriting as watching a framed ball flutter twenty feet over your head, or a good five feet past the baseline. The poet, on the other hand, returned my efforts with his signature flat, low shot, which always seemed to find its way in bounds. I was going to unforced-error myself to death.
There’s no real reason to describe the events of the next half hour. Just know that I lost the set, 6–2. The poet calmly placed his shots in the corners, and told me about his prowess on the seventy-plus circuit. All the really good players, he said, lived around Sacramento, and he went looking for matches there when he really wanted a challenge. After he finished me off with yet another smartly smacked ball, he thanked me for playing.
I’ve thought a lot about the poet since then. What I’ve realized, with a kind of existential resignation, is that I could play every day for ten years and still would not be able to beat him. The poet is what coaches call a “competitor”—someone who compulsively seeks out matches, and tries his best to win, because he sees competition as its own reward. I try to play tennis every day, but I almost never win, nor do I ever really believe that I will. What meaning can be drawn from this seemingly innate difference in temperament? And what does all my losing say about me?
In the past nine months, I have played around a hundred tennis matches and lost roughly ninety of them. The tally is far more brutal than just the win-loss record. Each week, I spend about ten hours on the court, and at least three hours watching YouTube tutorials that cheerily tell me how I can fix my serve with the aid of a towel or a set of small plastic cones. Then I take a few more hours to browse Instagram ads for racquets, shoes, or polarized sunglasses that promise to be the last tennis sunglasses I will ever need to buy. Despite these commitments, I lose to all skill levels and styles—U.S.T.A. 2.0s, U.S.T.A. 3.5s, pushers, serve machines, young and old—at the same rate.
When I’m losing, I try to meditate, channel my rage, and take it one point at a time. I talk to my right arm, coaxing it through the proper forehand motions: palm down on the backswing, hips rotate, full extension, explode through the ball on the front foot. Nothing works. If I’m up 5–2 in a set, I almost always melt down and lose. On the rare occasion that I actually win a set, I lose the next one 6–1, and then put up an uninspired fight in the third, like an exhausted child arguing for a later bedtime. Then I succumb to fate: usually a 6–3 loss, and a racquet tossed against the ground, net, or fence—not enough of a slam to cause real damage, but hard enough to show that I’m actually mad that it happened again.
The other regulars have never expressed any displeasure with my streams of self-directed profanity, but I’m sure they have their thoughts, all of which are justified. I am not proud of my behavior, but I also find that I can’t quite control myself when I inexplicably whack a sitter into the bottom of the net, or when I stupidly try for a slice shot while my opponent is standing right at the net. The outbursts—usually some variation of “Why the fuck are you like this?”—happen without my consent.
Which is all to say that, although I am not a particularly ambitious person, all of this losing has started to weigh on me. Tired mantras about things like “the clutch gene” have grown into a bramble in my mind.
Istarted playing tennis seriously about a year ago, when I was directing a film about Michael Chang, the Hall of Famer who won the 1989 French Open at the age of seventeen. The film spends a fair amount of time discussing Chang’s childhood as an unlikely tennis prodigy. There he was in 1984, rinsing a kid from Texas to win the under-twelve national title. Then again at the Orange Bowl at fourteen, in a red T-shirt and tight white shorts, moving back and forth along the baseline with a metronomic and almost predetermined rhythm, as if he had already played this exact match before. At sixteen, he demolished Jim Courier in straight sets to win the U.S.T.A. under-eighteen national championship. That gave him an automatic bid to the U.S. Open, where he would become the youngest man to win a match in the main draw.
Chang’s success on the court came from two things: his foot speed, which allowed him to get to more balls than the vast majority of his opponents, and his ability to embody everything that I apparently cannot, like mental toughness and an indomitable will to win. These are sportswriting clichés, but they carry a special weight in tennis, a sport in which you’re often playing without teammates, and you can’t just build up a lead and wait for the clock to run out.
Prodigies like Chang typically don’t overpower their opponents, even in the junior ranks. Preternatural physical talent eventually makes itself known, but, as with Roger Federer, it sometimes requires a few years of seasoning before it translates into big wins on the pro tour. What actually separates the tennis prodigy from just a very promising junior is what they don’t do. Why don’t they seem to feel any pressure from the enormity of the task before them? How do they not get intimidated by their older opponents? Why do they never panic?
Any parent who has gone through the indignity of youth sports has probably seen some version of this child: the one who, even at the age of five or seven or ten, goes about their play with a studied, unnervingly mature demeanor. They do not celebrate when they score goals, nor do they cry when they lose. Competition, instead, appears to be a nearly unconscious experience. My six-year-old daughter is one of those children. It is thrilling to see, but where might that quality go as she gets older, when the realities of talent and athleticism catch up? Maybe, in later years, it will find itself in the kind of blind hunger that animates the seventy-year-old poet who wiped me off the court.
In an essay called “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” David Foster Wallace expresses his frustration with this impermeable kind of play. Austin was another prodigy—she won the U.S. Open at sixteen—and her rise up the ranks in the late seventies coincided with Wallace’s own youth-tennis career. She became a point of fixation for him because she embodied something that he, even in adulthood, couldn’t quite understand. Reviewing Austin’s autobiography, Wallace writes:
When he realizes that Austin isn’t going to give him what he wants, he starts to pillory the book, a move that feels pretty unfair, especially given that his conclusion is what all of us scrubs, especially the former sportswriters among us, already know: you can never really describe the genius of a Tracy Austin or a Michael Chang. That’s why we always return to the clichés.
When I was watching Chang’s youth matches, I also watched Austin play Martina Navratilova in the 1979 U.S. Open semis, against Chris Evert in the 1980 semis, then Navratilova again in the 1981 final. I could see similarities to a young Chang—things that a jealous old veteran might write off to the ignorance of youth, but which I see more as a Zen state, in which the pressure of competition clears away the brain’s clutter and allows the athlete to devote their full attention to the task at hand. We often think of prodigies as having God-given “gifts,” but, watching footage of Austin and Chang, you see a palpable determination. Their faces are blank. They do not go through the forced routines that every player learns in order to calm themselves down, but they do have their rituals. In Austin’s case, it was wiping her brow with her wristband.
Precocious children, in general, are not really my thing. But, watching Austin and Chang, I sometimes found myself on the verge of tears, not from any joy or sadness but from that odd and exceedingly rare feeling that some innate logic of the universe has been exposed—that the normal linearity that we associate with human capabilities, in which we start as novices and improve through practice, grit, and failure, was proved irrelevant. This effect cannot be triggered by children who can shake out a passable Tchaikovsky concerto, or recite a poem by heart. It comes instead when that young person seems to possess a maturity in their performance that should be accessible only through life experience. Joey Alexander, a child-prodigy jazz pianist from Indonesia, played “ ’Round Midnight” at the Lincoln Center at the age of ten with the patience and expansive curiosity of someone who had spent decades learning that song. When Alexander performed with adults, they invariably broke into a smile that suggested something more profound than admiration or even wonderment. What Alexander signified, and what Austin meant to Wallace, is the possibility of a painless existence, one in which all the hard-earned lessons of life are actually ingrained, and the path to winning doesn’t require all that losing.
After the day’s film-editing tasks were through, I would head straight to the courts, determined to emulate Chang and Austin’s steely resolve. It generally lasted a few games, at best. The moment something went wrong—an opponent’s shot clipping the net and plopping down on my side, or an ill-timed double fault—I immediately fell back into my usual negative-feedback loops of rage, self-soothing, and further rage at myself for needing to be soothed, before I finally accepted defeat.
There aren’t that many great tennis books written in English. My personal favorites are John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game,” which details a 1968 U.S. Open match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner; Andre Agassi’s memoir, “Open”; L. Jon Wertheim’s “Strokes of Genius,” which takes McPhee’s formula and applies it to the epic 2008 Wimbledon final between Federer and Rafael Nadal; and “String Theory,” a collection of Wallace’s essays on the sport. All of them are mostly about the mental side of tennis—McPhee famously invited Ashe and Graebner to a hotel in the Caribbean to watch the match with him and explain everything that was going through their heads; Agassi talks about persevering in the sport even when you absolutely hate it; Wallace meditates more on what separated him, a promising junior, from legends like Federer, or even professional journeymen who play the qualifiers in mid-level tournaments.
But, although these books are expansive in their imagination, none of them fully explain what makes a great tennis player. This isn’t because of the writing or their authors; it’s because nobody really knows the answer, including the players themselves. In his memoir, Agassi describes the hours he spent with the ball machine as a child in Las Vegas, his father’s obsession with raising a champion, and the abusive and coercive culture around youth tennis. But he can’t actually articulate why, despite these trials and his hatred of the sport, he was so much better than all the other miserable youth hackers, most of whom also had rabid, delusional parents.
If anyone understood Agassi, it would have been Brad Gilbert, a former No. 4 player in the world who coached Agassi during a comeback that he made in his late twenties. Gilbert’s credibility on the subject of tennis greatness comes from his deficiencies on the court. He was often derided as a “pusher,” someone who just swats the ball back over the net and waits for superior players to make errors. This reputation was amplified by the spectacle of Gilbert in action—a slow-moving jumble of elbows, high socks, and curly hair that made every point wheeze with great effort. According to Gilbert, John McEnroe once screamed, “You don’t deserve to be on the same court with me,” during a changeover. After McEnroe lost the match, he abruptly announced his retirement from tennis during the postgame press conference. “When I start losing to players like him,” he said, “I’ve got to reconsider what I’m doing even playing this game.”
Gilbert’s secret, which he lays out in a highly entertaining book called “Winning Ugly,” came from his willingness to “get ugly” by using subtle opportunities to gain an advantage. Rather than seeing tennis as a balletic competition, in which graceful athletes like Federer simply overwhelm their opponents with greatness, Gilbert sees the sport as a fluid series of questions, each of which has a right and wrong answer. When you were driving to your match, did you visualize points you’ve played in the past? When you were warming up, did you watch your opponents’ strokes to find their weak spots? While playing, did you figure out a way to feed an endless supply of balls straight at that weakness? Did you remember to breathe?
What “Winning Ugly” offers, then, are steps you can take to approximate the greatness that can’t be explained. You will never develop Pete Sampras’s first serve or McEnroe’s hand-eye coördination, but you can learn from their preparation and watch their adjustments. You can “unfreeze your strokes” to maximize your warmups. You can win the “hidden ad points” that your opponent might be willing to give away because he doesn’t understand their importance. God and genes have determined that you are not Carlos Alcaraz or Steffi Graf, but you can still eke out wins like Gilbert does—by grinding, and paying attention to the most unglamorous parts of the game.
There is some value to these mental tricks. Every time I get up 5–2 in a set, I see the giant choke barrelling down on me. Gilbert would say that this is a good time to assess my opponent’s flaws and focus on specific shots.
He writes:
I am all the bad parts, but not because of nerves or fear. What I lack is a belief that the outcome of a tennis match is within my control. This is the second time I’ve written about losing—the first time was a decade ago and about poker—and I don’t know if I’ve gained any insights. The difference between winning and losing may originate in my mind, but it resides in the dormant spaces that stay dark and mysterious on a brain scan. In the moments in which Gilbert sees opportunity, I can focus only on my imminent demise.
Perhaps Gilbert’s rituals work for many players because repetition helps them prod the parts of thought that seem inaccessible: a mantra alchemizes bad to good, a repeated reassurance unlocks that competitive quality that I see in my daughter. Such transformations are certainly possible; in his youth, Federer melted down so often that there were real questions about whether he should play at all. But most losers are more like me. The barriers in my mind are opaque, smooth, and seemingly impenetrable.
Ihaven’t finished telling you about the poet. Before I packed up my racquets and left, we talked about writing. The form, he said, was in bad shape these days. He seemed particularly aggrieved by the current poet laureate of California and wondered, in ways that I also sometimes find myself wondering, if the value of writers’ words had been replaced by an almost algorithmic prediction of who might make the best celebrity. I assured him that I had never heard of the poet laureate, so he didn’t need to worry about the celebrity part. This didn’t seem to satisfy him, which makes sense. We talked a bit more about the publishing industry. Then, sensing his impatience with any topic other than the over-seventy Bay Area tennis scene, I said goodbye.
I saw him again about a month later at the Rose Garden courts. I didn’t have a partner that day, so I ended up at the wall with two other hackers, and we started up the rhythm of ground strokes, errant shots, and apologies. Suddenly, I heard a voice, and looked up to see a familiar tanned head poking around the green wall. “Hey, Court One is free. Do any of you want to play?” The other two agreed, and went to join him. After I was done, I hiked up the hill among redwoods and looked back down at Court One. The poet was standing at the net, explaining the rules of some three-player variant of tennis. I knew I would see him soon. We are after the same thing, he and I.
That night, I read some of the poet’s work. It contains beautiful descriptions of sunlight, which illuminate a series of small scenes: a young couple walking to a general store in December; a group of friends sharing a meal in the back yard; a man reminiscing about his family farm. The poems are nostalgic in tone, and seem to reach for something that has long since passed. It was tempting to wonder if this apparent loss of childhood was what drove the poet to stalk the courts of Berkeley, looking for games. But I know enough about both writing and losing to tell you that the two are wholly unrelated. ♦
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