To win, you need to win.
When I was a kid, I played a lot of tennis. We did a lot of practice and learning how to win.
To win tennis, you need to get the ball back. There’s nothing else you need to do. You need to get the ball back forever. If you can do that, you will win (eventually). It doesn’t matter how hard you hit it or how good your technique is if you can [just] get it back.
Yes, I’ll always remember our coach and all the lessons he taught us. One of the most memorable lessons / The one that stuck with me the most was the one about “how to win”.
Tennis is a hard game. You have to learn how to do all sorts of hard things. You need to develop your strokes: all your strokes of different kinds, like groundstrokes and volley, open stance and closed stance, smash and serve, and all the rest, slice, lob and so on blah blah blah
And you need to learn all the right footwork too, all the positioning and positions, ready position and the grips, forehand backhand chopper grip blah blah blah, and how to achieve different spins, top spin and its effect compared to flat or slice or even side spin and when to use them and where to hit the ball in the first place.
And the tactics of it, how to keep your opponent uhh or to wrongfoot them um— on the defensive, and what it means to be aggressive and play from the baseline, and what it means to approach or serve and volley or be an all-rounder and how the different surfaces lend themselves to different styles and what kinds of shots do on them and the playstyles that etc etc etc
But despite all that, our coach said:
“Imagine a hypothetical situation”, he said. “Imagine there’s a robot— there’s a tennis playing robot.”
And we all leant in and listened.
“And all that robot did was— no matter what, every single time you hit the ball to the robot, all it does is—”
And he brought us in further as if he was about to say something he shouldn’t say.
“All it does is run to the ball and it does the worst hack lob shot you’ve ever seen. Every single time, it hacks an absolute sitter that lands bang in the middle of the tennis court. No power, no spin. The easiest shot to score a winner off. It would do this every. single. time.”
With our teenage enthusiasm, we all concluded that “the robot would lose! it would be too easy to do a winner against it!”
But no. “The robot would win”, our coach said.
And we wouldn’t have it. That’s ridiculous. “You can’t win by doing bad shots. You need to do winners. You need to hit deep, just like you tell us to, coach!”
“That’s not true. You don’t need to hit winners to win tennis. You [just] need to get the ball back.”
And something clicked for me that day.
James (not his real name) was a better tennis player than me, on paper at least. He hit it harder, he had better technique, more accuracy, more endurance, a bigger bag. But I knew how to beat him!
I knew he had a bit of a temper on the court. He often became angry with both himself and his opponent while playing. And I know that there’s nothing more infuriating than someone else being much less infuriated than you. So I made sure that I was extremely calm and jolly every time we interacted. Every time he asked me to pass him a ball I happily obliged with a smile and an annoyingly happy “sure thing James! here you go!”
When you play tennis without line judges, you have to be honest about when things go out or not. Sometimes there’s disagreement between the two players. The typical thing to do in this situation is to play the point again. It’s no big deal usually: it’s standard practice. But you can make yourself really infuriating by offering the point to your opponent instead. It’s a sick status game where you raise your own status by being even less bothered than your bothered opponent, who then gets into their head more and more, and you remain aloof and unaffected. In the short term, you sacrifice some points. In the long term, they crumble, and you win.
“Luke Wilson is the nicest guy off court, and the biggest cunt on court.” - James, 2010
anyway, I won
I couldn’t believe it. I got drawn to play James for the second day in a row, and I knew I couldn’t do it again. I mean, I could. I knew exactly how to win (by getting under his skin). But I knew I couldn’t win because then James might end up hating me off the court as well as on it.
I threw the match. Winning at losing was much easier than winning at winning.
either way, I won
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