get good

my training arc at the tennis camp

Hello friends—

Last week, I flew to the Côte d’Azur for five days of tennis training at the Mouratoglou Tennis Academy. I booked the session two months in advance when I realized that the NYU academic calendar designated my Wednesday class meeting as a Friday class meeting the week of Thanksgiving, meaning that I had the week off. So on the evening of Saturday, November 22, I flew from JFK to CDG and after a brief transfer and lay-over, I flew from CDG to NCE. Then it was an approximately twenty-minute drive from Nice to Biot.

The Mouratoglou Tennis Academy is based just outside Biot, a small town just outside of Antibes, a larger town sandwiched between the two much more glamorous cities of Nice and Cannes. I did not go to Cannes. I did not go to Antibes. I did not really go to Nice, outside of the airport. My experience was centered on the academy and its adjoining resort. I say resort, and you probably imagine something sprawling, massive, chic, and star-studded. Mouratoglou Hotel & Resort is a resort only in the most technical sense, in that a resort is a location-driven tourist complex that centers on immersive, all-inclusive experiences. Resorts emphasize convenience and generally tend to be oriented toward longer stays. They are self-contained worlds where you can find dining, recreation, transport, and a variety of other attractions and amenities. I thought it would be convenient to book a stay in the resort because it is connected to the academy.

From my balcony, I could see a kind of stepped terrace comprising the turf on the roof of the floor below me, and just beyond it, the actual sloping lawn of of the resort. This lawn ran to some trees, which provided cover, and through those trees, I could see tennis courts. At a greater distance, rising in the hills that fell away from me toward the horizon, there there gorgeous, modernist houses. Each seemed made from interlocking white cubes of stone and glass, and they spread in rising terraces in the hills until the hills stopped to make way from the white impressions of the mountain tops. From my window, I could see the resort pool (shaped like a tennis racquet) and its white chairs set out all around it. And from there, I could see more of the academy grounds, including another terrace that I would later visit during some of our mental training sessions. At night, I propped the balcony door open because I am a very warm sleeper and the air was bitingly cold. Even at 10PM, I could hear action on the courts below. The pock-pock-pock-pock of rallies. Rising voices in triumph or anguish. It seemed quite competitive. And the court lights were cold and bright through the dark of the resort. A couple of times, I went out onto the balcony in the middle of the night and peered into the white haze through the trees, and watched the shadows of the balls swing back and forth over the net, little streaks of darkness in the white field of light glowing under the branches.

You are probably wondering why I would choose to spend the week of Thanksgiving at a tennis academy rather than at home surrounded by family and friends. I do not have a family. And I do not have friends. In fact, I started playing tennis at a point of intense social isolation while living in New York. I’ve told this story so often now that it feels like a bit, but it’s true: one afternoon, I felt so incredibly, intensely lonely and isolated that I looked out my window and thought, if I don’t find a solution to this feeling, I’m going to kill myself. At the time, I thought I had friends, but it was becoming clear to me (and has since only become even clearer) that the terms of friendship in New York among literary people are not terms I find sustainable or even particularly life-giving. At one point, I had what I thought were friends, and at another, seemingly overnight, no one spoke to me or tried to see me, and what I had were in fact reciprocal story likes on Instagram. Anyway, I thought, I can either kill myself or pick up a tennis racquet. I chose the racquet. Still, I don’t do holidays. I haven’t for years. Not really. That’s none of my business.

That answers the “why Thanksgiving?” of it all, but not the other part of the question, “why a tennis academy in the first place?” After all, I could have spent the holiday break at home reading or wandering around the city reflecting on how none of the people in the literary world or community care or think of me at all. I could have spent that time feeling isolated and feeling bad for myself, liking pictures of all of the friendsgivings no one thought to invite me to. Yes. I could have done that. I could have played the clown role that’s always been set aside for me to play, the supporting character in everyone else’s happiness, the implied audience of all their posts and stories. That’s still in the “why Thanksgiving?” part of the equation. Let me try again.

Many months ago now, I was on a run of 30 consecutive days of tennis lessons when one of the regular coaches asked me during pick up, “What are you goals for tennis? What do you want to do?” And I said, “I want to get better.” He told me to stop coming to the Advanced Beginner classes I was taking just to be able to hit and to instead hit on the ball machine for an hour or two each day. It would be a better use of my time. But his question got me thinking a lot about why people do things like play tennis for six, ten, fifteen hours a week. See, during the summer, when I was taking a lot of group lessons and doing a lot of liveball, there were these people who I ran into all the time. Older people mostly in their sixties, seventies, who were also doing tennis basically every day, every evening. I’d show up and stretch and shortly before the session began, here they would come, the same five or six guys. One of them was learning tennis or picking it back up as people do, and it made think, well, why do people do this? Why do they get serious about tennis in this way? I knew that I myself was getting serious about tennis in part because I didn’t want to jump out of my window out of sheer social alienation and isolation. But it seemed rather silly to suspect that these guys were also suicidal. I don’t mean to imply that it was only guys. There were also women regulars during that period of the summer, people working and grinding quite hard to get better at tennis. You could feel it in their strokes and in the frequency of their attendance.

At the same time, there were other kinds of regulars too. These people had no interest in getting better. They were happy with their game, or if they weren’t happy with their game, they had accepted their game for all that it was or was not. You’d see these people at liveball or drill & play, and they’d have the ugliest strokes you’ve ever seen, and they’d be out there just hitting the ball and having a good time, not working on anything, not even listening to the instructions for the drills, just happy to be chasing the ball. These people played once or twice a week, always on the same day and always with the same core group to which we drop-ins added to fill out their ranks to the full eight member groups for arranged doubles. You could always feel when they had been playing together a while. They had their preferred rhythm to the sessions, their preferred drills, and any deviation prompted rolled eyes and sharp intakes of breath. I felt myself distinct from them in that I was not happy with my game and thought if I am playing like that at their age, I would rather quit. I measured myself against them constantly and made myself a little crazy, thinking, how am I going to get better against this homemade ass game they are playing. I yearned to sharpen myself against the lethal, precise shotmaking of someone who had been trained and had given up substantial parts of their life to tennis and only to tennis. I didn’t want to practice against hobbyists even if I was a hobbyist.

You will think that I am a snob (I am), but there are technical challenges to playing against the homebrew tennis player. For one thing, they don’t know how to warm up. Warming up in tennis consists of short-court or mini-tennis, where you stand at the service box and practice hitting the ball short with control and precision into the service box on your opponents side again and again, back and forth, just warming up the muscles and the eyes, focusing on your timing, and your aim. The homebrew player does not know how to do this. They do not realize that this is a collaborative exercise whose goal is to put the ball in reach of the other player so they can put it back to you, and so on. The homebrew player wants to win the warm up. Or worse, they don’t know how to control the ball. The next phase of the warm up is to move to the baseline and hit the ball back and forth. Here, you can hit the ball a little harder, but your goal is not to win. Your goal is to give the other player a nice ball they can hit so they can start warming up their muscles and their timing. Their goal is to give you a nice ball to hit. But the homebrew player wants to hit the back of the line on the warm up. Or they want to draw you short so they can hit a winner. They don’t know how to feed. And so the warm up devolves into chaos and nonsense.

Trying to do drills against or alongside the homebrew player is also challenging because, again, they hit everything short or in the wrong part of the court so that instead of practicing the cross court approach into volley combination, instead, you’re getting poached off the first ball (which is supposed to be free) and blocked at the service line. They blink at you and the coach in confusion when the drill is re-explained. And they argue, “I would never do that in a match.” The homebrew player has no concept of what a drill is. They arrive at the drill & play, thinking its just a points session, when in fact, there’s a whole pedagogical dimension at play that they…simply refuse to acknowledge.

Listen, trying to do the drill and messing up is a part of life. It is in fact the point of the drills. You should be messing up because it means you are trying. You are failing toward understanding. It’s when people…don’t commit to the structure of the session (a common issue of the hombrew player) that I find irritating.

After many months—years in fact—of playing against homebrew players, I thought to myself, I wish there was a way I could just…go to a tennis academy and learn there. I was watching videos of Patrick Mouratoglou, a famous coach who has worked with (most famously) Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka. He also has coached Stefanos Tsitsipas and Holger Rune. When she was young(er), Coco Gauff spent a brief time at his academy training on clay. Patrick is a fascinating figure in the tennis world. Yes, he has coached some of the greatest players of all time. And some men, too. But he’s found a way to parlay that into a brand. He is the tennis coach. His videos fill Instagram and YouTube, where he is known for giving intuitive explanations that shy away from the hypertechnical that you typically find in that space. You won’t find him drawing lines and indicating angles and doing slow-mo breakdowns. Instead, he says things like, “throw it away” and “you must always see me when you are swinging.” He makes adjustments seem natural and organic, and you can often see immediate improvement in the videos he makes with students. As a coach, he has a reputation for technique, but not being technical. And, well, he coached Serena Williams!

He also has a reputation for self-aggrandizement, narcissism, and fame-hunger. Most coaches—the Toni Nadals, the Magnus Normans, the Juan Carlos Ferreros, and the Severin Luthis of the world—eschew fame and the spotlight. But Patrick Mouratoglu is a generational salesman. He makes Brad Gilbert look like a self-denying friar. Never has there been a more brand-conscious, savvy, and camera-ready tennis coach in the history of the sport. But then again, he is French, so…I mean, what can you expect.

I was watching videos of Patrick teaching forehands again, and I thought, man, I wish I could attend his academy. A moment later, I thought, wait, maybe they have adult tennis camps. A short internet search later, and I was booking a five-day intensive tennis camp for adults in November, two months away. I was going to train, finally, get serious about tennis. But also, I was going to escape the homebrew players and their short feeds and their shitty warm ups.

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The days at the camp were long. Here is my schedule:

7:15AM-8:15AM: Private coaching
8:15AM-9:45AM: Fitness + Mobility
9:45AM-11:15AM: Tennis Drills
11:15AM-11:30AM: Stretching
11:30AM-12:15PM: Lunch
12:15PM- 1:00PM: Break
1:00PM - 2:30PM: Tennis Drills + Point Play
2:30PM - 4:00PM: Mental Training

Each morning, I woke up at 6AM to shower and stretch. Then I ate breakfast from 6:30AM to 7AM, at which time I went back up to my room to get my tennis bag and then I made my way across the parking lot under predawn darkness.

It was cold there. Very cold and very dark. Each morning, there was frost on the cars in the parking lot and frost on the clay courts that had been left uncovered in the night. It was so cold that when I arrived at fitness training after hitting for an hour, I could see the steam rising from my clothes. I’d be doing one of the hip mobility exercises, lying on my back, and just watching steam lift and curl from my shoulders as the sun pulled a low crawl across the turf, eventually warming all of us.

My private coaching unfolded under the watchful gaze of Manuel, from Mexico City. On the first day, he explained that he was there to be helpful. He had his own program planned, but if there were things I wanted to work on, he would be happy to help me and devise some trainings, but if I was okay with his program, then I’d benefit because it coincided with the program of the group lessons later in the morning and in the afternoon.

Our sessions began with mini-tennis. On the first day, I put a lot of balls into the net even during warm up. It’s okay, Manuel said. Everyone is always nervous on the first day. Then he looked at me and smiled and said, Do not be nervous. I do not know you and you do not know me. You do not have to impress me. I am not judging you. You are just here to hit and to get better. So do not worry about impressing me. We are strangers to each other, you and me. Okay? Strangers, mate.

It was true that I had been trying very hard to be clean. I wanted to hit a clean, pure ball. I am an inveterate teacher-pleaser. But his frankness and his warmth made me relax. Slowly, we warmed up, moved back, and we got into the lesson proper. That first day, he wanted me to practice on controlling the ball, putting it with good margin and depth into the middle of the court. He wanted me to get more shape over the net. So he moved some of the posts so that the net was higher and I had to accentuate my swing and get under the ball to bring it up over the net and then down on the other side with topspin. Just that exercise alone was worth the tuition because I’ve never seen my ball have so much spin on it. I was able to get so much arc and lift without swinging harder.

At a certain point, Manuel told me, Throw it away, mate. Throw away the racquet. If anyone has watched videos of Patrick Mouratoglou giving lessons on YouTube, this will be familiar language. I almost laughed when Manuel said it because, it’s like when you’re watching a movie, and one of the characters says the title line. It’s like that GIF from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when Leonardo diCaprio points. But I didn’t laugh because in some ways, throw it away was exactly what I had come to learn how to do.

I learned how to play tennis by watching YouTube videos and going out on court and trying to do what they did. And somewhere along the lines, I got the idea that one should never use one’s wrist. This is wrong, of course, but also…right, depending on the context. Anyway, I’ve had a very stiff wrist for a long time because of it, and I’ve always felt so envious of people whose forehands and backhands are fluid and crack like whips. I’ve wanted to be one of these gummy people for years now, but I’ve never quite been able to do it, and the coaches—the American coaches, I should say—that I have studied with have never really tried to make an adjustment to this bit of the technique. They let me get away with it even when I ask, like, hey, is there something I can do to get more fluid.

This was one of the main things I realized about American tennis coaches and European tennis coaches. American tennis coaches do not want to get fired. They want you to continue to pay them. And they understand something essential about the American personality—it’s essential vanity. The sort of American who is most likely to be taking tennis lessons does not probably, in their outside life, take well to criticism. Americans are mean, but fragile. Bullies, but babies. They are right, always, but also skeptical of every one else. The American is also probably taking a tennis lesson to win a tennis match. Purity of technique is not on the agenda. And so the coach has an array of constraints, pressures, and egos to negotiate as they give their feedback and set their learning goals for the sessions.

When I hit with my pro in Paris, he focuses on my technique, not my tactics. He wants to make sure that I can hit shots effectively. Not beautifully, but effectively. There is an emphasis on effective tennis. High margin tennis. Getting the ball over the net with shape and depth. Building a game you can play all day without redlining or hitting for the fences. For my Paris coach and for my coaches at Mouratoglou, this means emphasizing depth and spin. Clearance of the net. Nice, big targets. Foot work to get to the ball and create adequate spacing.

My American coaches focus on tactics almost to the exclusion of technique. They might make a small adjustment. But unless you’re hitting your forehands with the wrong grip, they leave you be and focus on when to hit cross-court and when to hit down the line. Mind you, they don’t really…teach you how to do those things, but they do emphasize the importance of the tactical distinction.

After our daily drill, Manuel had me practice serves. There are two broad categories of serve: flat serves and spin serves. There are two main kinds of spin serve: kick and slice. A flat serve tends to be struck without very much spin. Its main characteristic is its speed. Adding spin to a serve tends to slow it down, as some of the imparted energy goes into making the ball rotate. A slice serve cuts low and skids through the court. A kick serve lands and then kicks or jumps sharply at an angle either toward the opponent (body serve) or out of the box, away from them. At the pro level, American tennis is dominated by big servers who use their big serves to set up their plus-one, usually a forehand. The typical American pro plays a very Calvinist kind of tennis, almost ostentatious in its severity: big serve to draw a short reply ideally in the middle of the court as they are stepping around before it even bounces to put away with a forehand into the open court or, sometimes, even up the line behind the opponent who has rushed to cover the gap.

American pros have this reputation for being very bad at returning serve. They tend to let a lot of balls go by them. In fact, I got some insight into this at tennis camp when Romain (the coach in charge of my afternoon drill group) explained to us, “If I am training you, I am spending 70% of the time on your strength, 30% on your weakness because the weakness, frankly, never going to be your main shot. Never going to win you most points. It will help you not lose, sure, but to win? We maximize your strength!”

This explains how you end up with a Giovanni Mpstechi-Perricard having the worst return stats for a professional tennis player we’ve ever seen. This is the key to the existence of the servebot in general, I think. Because a player gifted by heaven with one of the great all time weapons is of course going to focus on that weapon to the exclusion of everything else. Why wouldn’t you work on building out your serve if you could hit 132MPH on your second serve? You know?

I do think this attitude is changing somewhat at the pro level. It used to be that you could win grand slams as a kind of one-shot specialist. Or one technique specialist. If you were really fast and had good defense. Or a great serve and a better volley. Or if you had a brilliant forehand. You could win your way to tennis immortality. In fact, before relatively recently, the tennis hall of champions was filled with specialists known for one shot or another. But things change. Technology changes. You get a situation like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic all existing at the same time that court surfaces are growing more homogeneous, necessitating greater athleticism and defensive capabilities, and what you get are, well, three of the greatest generalists to ever live. I know that seems crazy to say. Federer’s backhand is weak relative to the rest of his game. Nadal’s serve isn’t the best and he struggled on faster surfaces at first. And Djokovic’s forehand is weaker than his backhand, and he could struggle with offense early on. Okay, all true. But if you look at their games, these players, including Murray, were some of the most complete tennis players to ever live. Federer’s all-court brilliance and his underrated defense allowed him to create attacking opportunities that had never been seen on a court before. He combined offense and defense so elegantly that you sometimes weren’t even aware that he had been defending until the point was over with a flash of his forehand. Nadal didn’t have a huge serve, okay, but he worked that shot so incredibly well and in his mature phase, he was again, an incredibly solid player in all parts of the court. Djokovic…well, is Djokovic, whatever. My point is that they had very complete games. Sure, strengths or weaknesses, relative, okay, but you feed an off-speed ball to Federer’s backhand if you want! Like, you’re eating that ball for breakfast.

But I also think what made the Big 3, Big 4, Big 4 plus daddy Wawrinka so special, is that they didn’t simply rely on their strengths. They continued to change and refine and influence each other, attaining a general excellence before unseen in tennis. They had to get better. They had to become brilliant all-court players who could hit hard and also with variety. They had to do this in order to…beat each other. You see it also with Sinner and Alcaraz. You can see how they push and challenge each other to evolve and change and grow. They are forcing new dimensions in each other. Alcaraz’s serve. Sinner’s variety. Both of these seem to be in direct response to the challenges posed by their chief rival.

The other guys on tour, I mean, seem unwilling or unable to reinvent or change in much the same way. They are doubling, tripling down on their strengths, which, I understand, but it’s to their detriment. There comes a time when you have to realize that more of the same aspect of yourself isn’t always a winning strategy.

Anyway, that’s the pros. You do see some of the national character at the rec level as well. The guys I play against in New York all tend to have very hard first serves. They have clearly practiced that shot a lot. They learned the flat serve first. They had no kick serve, usually. At the higher rec level they do. I learned the slice serve first. I came to the flat serve too late for it to be natural. I also have this stupid pendulum toss I copied from the internet. Manuel was quick to correct it. He wanted me to toss the ball more into the court. And to generate more lift with a deeper knee bend. He also wanted more separation between my racquet arm and the tossing arm, so that my shoulders had more space.

Every day, I hit at least sixty serves in the morning. And many, many more in the afternoon. Every day, I felt my serve get a little faster, a little better. But also my shoulders hurt, which Manuel said indicated that I was using them too much and not enough of my whole body. It shouldn’t hurt if you are doing it right. So we went back to basics on my toss, my motion (which he said was good), and the leg drive.

It got harder to do the leg drive as the week went on because we had more and more fitness training and tennis training. By the end of the week, I felt like I could serve pretty consistently. But more importantly, I felt like I was more aware of what my body was doing during my serve, which is key to making changes. I now can tell exactly what I’m fucking up as I’m serving, and on the moments when everything lines up, bam, it’s so satisfying.

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After my session with Manuel, I joined the other members of my group at the multisport field for our fitness training. There were, I think, twelve or so of us total, men and women, younger and older, fat (me) and relatively fit (almost everyone else) and incredibly fit (like three or so dudes). Some of us had the private sessions and so were exempt from the warm up involving running to get the muscles going. Some of us started with fitness.

Once we were all gathered on the turf—sometimes, there was still frost in the shadows—we began each morning with mobility exercises. The first day was abs and core. The second day was, I believe, balance and reflexes. Then we had upper body day. Then cardio (which I skipped). Then lower body.

The goal of the fitness sessions was mostly to give us a sense of the kinds of exercises we might do in order to protect ourselves from injury as much as make our bodies more suited to tennis. It was informative and painful and, yes, very humbling to realize one’s physical limits. I also realized that I have muscle weakness on my left side. Everything is harder on that side. I hadn’t realized the extent to which I compensate and live with a kind of rightward cant or list. One of my main physical takeaways from camp was that I probably need to see a PT about this.

Another takeaway is that I have voided the physical aspect of tennis preparation. I work on my technique, but not the physical side of things, and I could feel an immediate difference in how I played with muscles activated versus not activated. In essence, I feel like I’ve been playing with one arm behind my back this whole time, working against my body rather than using it. No wonder I feel so sluggish and slow out on the court sometimes. My muscles are cold and weak! Who knew!

I booked a trainer with a gym so I can start training more seriously in the near term.

Over the five days, we had this accumulation of soreness and fatigue that made playing tennis harder and harder until we did a recovery session where they taught how to recover using cycling and the foam roller, and it was amazing the relief we all felt.

I remember on the fourth day, I showed up to my morning session with Manuel and I must have looked relieved because he said, Ah, you got past the pinnacle. It is much easier from here on out. And he was right. After the third day, it did become easier, though I don’t know that my muscles ever fully unclenched that whole week. Even with the Epsom baths I made every night.

It was struggle to stay awake past 6PM in the evening. I’d get home from tennis, make a hot bath, soak, and then crash immediately after dinner, wake up at 6AM to begin it all again.

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The morning morning tennis sessions were group lessons focused on drills and technique. I was paired with three other guys under Romain, who had a very different vibe from Manuel. Romain lived in Nice, but had lived in the United States for a while, playing at university and then coaching a college team. He called me New York. Romain was much more swaggering and swashbuckling than Manuel. He wore sunglasses and had the raspy voice of a smoker. He was a joker, but in the way of a parents’ mischievous younger brother. On the first day, he broke down the Mouratoglou Method, in part he said, because the report we would receive would articulate his feedback using the various components of that method.

Now…I love a method. I love programmatic things. Sign me up. When I found out there was a method and not just a vague “philosophy” or “mission statement,” I thought, okay, here we go. It’s not my method to give away so I won’t do that. I don’t want to get sued and I would like to go back to the academy some day. But I actually found the method very helpful to think about. Essentially, it prioritizes early preparation and footwork, to get you moving toward the net for offensive, attacking play. It’s sort of old school, with new words, but it was very helpful. He’d call out the various tenets whenever we fucked one up and we’d make the correction.

There’s nothing groundbreaking in it, but I don’t think the method’s efficacy lies in its novelty. Rather, I think the method works because it is easy to understand and put into action. Also, the different parts have these silly, but catchy names that are easy to remember, and so you catch yourself saying to yourself, “oh, Magnet Move” or “Ah, Weight Dispatch.” Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, I found it all helpful because it turned something quite hard to grasp about physical action and turned it into a tangible, legible list. Once we got the method down, I started to see how I wasn’t opening soon enough, how I wasn’t getting my weight going in the right direction. Almost by putting a name to it, the correction was making itself. I think if Patrick Mouratoglou is a genius at anything, it’s this, finding a way to concretely and succinctly communicate back to a person what their body is doing in space such that they can make changes. The Mouratoglou Method, as a rubric for understanding my own physicality on a tennis court, is kind of genius.

In my group, there was a guy with a good forehand and a good backhand and a good serve. And there was a guy who did not have the most elegant technique, but who had incredible hands and great anticipation and movement. In the morning, we had an older guy who lives in the Bay Area but who is Italian. His game was also kind of textbook homebrew. And then there was me. The level was pretty consistent, I think. Pretty even. Everybody had something they were good at. And something they were working on. The drills were interesting, not too complicated, but you really had to work at them, and you could see immediately how the drills were affecting our game, teaching us how to not just hit the ball, but to hit it with purpose and good technique. We couldn’t just abandon technique to win the scenario or the drill because coach would be like, “You forgot Weight Dispatch” or whatever.

We were encouraged to take a lot off all the ball, meaning to slow it down and to hit not just for the sake of hitting, but to hit well, on purpose, to get good reps. We ended each morning session with more serves. Then lunch. Then we had afternoon drills followed by match play.

I played a lot of sets. Won some. Lost some. Became incredibly frustrated at one point. I could feel my game going soft and getting worse. But really, I think that my game was reconfiguring itself because I was now trying to develop good habits. It takes a long time to develop good habits. And yeah you are going to suck as you give away your comforting bad technique to develop better habits that will serve you in the long run. You are at war with yourself, trying to let go of the ego and to focus on cementing the good habits when all you want is to show them that you do know how to win. I threw my racquet a few times. I’m not even going to lie. I got mad. I got irritated. I was cold and my body hurt and my backhand was worse not better. Everything was hard. Everything was so painful and hard, and I wanted to go home.

But then I’d pick up the ball and go to the service line and do my service motion and for a few moments, I’d be so concerned with trying to stay alive in the point that I’d forget how mad I was. So frustrated. So cold. So irritated. And then I’d get into my return position, ready for the next serve. It was not all happy times and good vibes. It seldom is when you’re working hard, trying to get better, grinding off all of your weaknesses, trying to turn them into strengths. It is not easy to do. Sometimes, it fucking sucks, and you gotta let it out. But then you pick up the ball and begin again. Some people are driven mad by this, the relentlessness of the effort it takes to get good at something. But if you can survive it, you will get better.

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Following afternoon tennis, we made the long trek from the clay courts through the show courts, up the steps into the academy’s main building and up the stairs inside, passing all of the black and white photos of Patrick’s prized pupils and protegees, into the sunlight on the terrace, which I could see from my hotel room. There, we had our “mental training sessions.”

On the first day, we learned about the importance of mental strength. We learned about why you shouldn’t bottle up your emotions but also why you shouldn’t let them control you. We learned about the importance of setting goals. But not giving too much importance to individual matches. At one point, the mental coach got very existential and said, What is a match? What is a match but an experience and what are our experiences if not ways to become stronger and to learn? Something like that.

The second day, we learned about tactics and strategy, the importance of forming a plan, being prepared, thinking through our game plan. The third day, we had a different coach, in that we learned recovery practices. The fourth day was yoga (I skipped), and the final day was just drinks. The mental training was general and non-specific, and I don’t know that I benefited as much from that as from the physical training. I do think that it helped me recontextualize some of my negative emotions on court. At one point, the coach said something like, If you are throwing racquets and being upset? Is that strength? No, that is weakness. And your opponent gonna use it against you, if they are smart, no? Do not be weak.

There was a hardness in his eyes as he said it, as if the hospitality training in him had gone momentarily offline, revealing something cold and brutal and true. I thought, yes, when I am upset, I am giving succor to my enemies. To vanquish them, I must show them nothing.

There were other curiously philosophical moments throughout the week too. As in Manuel was running me through backhand drills and he said, Your forehand, it means a lot to you. I am seeing you, when you miss sometimes, you are angry at yourself and you go backward, after you miss, it shows, you go back. But on your backhand, you are showing me your face, you are showing me, you are not going anywhere. But here too, you are going back. Make yourself forward, even when you miss, slap the back of your leg, as if to say, ah, forward. That is very important, huh? You must go forward.

Then he smiled at me and continued and said, You are shy, yes, okay, be shy, reserved, but in your tennis, you must express yourself, you must be big! Be proud! You must hit, and go boom, forward, forward, not back, huh? Forward.

He was entirely correct. I have a tendency to hit off the back foot. To hit falling backwards. But he was the first coach to link this to my disposition and to give me a specific psychic adjustment. To be hitting forward rather than backward. He explained to me that part why I get so frustrated with myself after a miss is because I’ve pulled back so as not to miss. And so the missing is doubly frustrating. But if I lean forward, if I go for the shot, if I hit it off the front foot, moving forward, with agency, then it’s okay to miss because I’ve tried to go for it rather than not miss. It was an astute psychological read. And it is true that when I started going for my shots, the misses hurt less. I got less frustrated because I was taking things into my own hands. Rather than trying not to lose, I started trying to win.

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While we were there training and practicing, there were dozens and dozens of junior players there. From older teens to younger kids, everybody was trooping about with their tennis bags. Sometimes, we did our after-tennis stretching alongside groups of kids and teens who had also wrapped their morning training. As we walked to our courts, we’d pass juniors training on the show courts, absolutely obliterating the ball. There were a couple of actual professional players training there too.

I felt that I was at a kind of tennis monastery. Tennis unfolding at all sorts of levels all around us. While we stretched indoors to begin our camp, there would be elite junior prospects warming up on the bikes. As we ate lunch in the cafeteria, there was a separate zone for kids and their parents. I marveled at this, these kids growing up playing tennis, growing solely to play tennis. Everyone made use of the same facilities. After each session, you had to sweep the courts, so I’d be pulling along one of nets and two courts over, two teens would be racing while doing the same. As my group exited our courts, two younger kids would be taking it over so that they could start their warm ups. When Manuel and I decamped from the outdoor hardcourts because of the cold, we’d be doing my lesson while a very talented teen boy was getting his morning lesson from his coach.

The academy has a boarding school attached. Sometimes, I’d be making my way to my group’s court and I’d pass the residence where I could see the laundry hanging from the balcony as kids played table tennis in front of the apartment complex. There were surly teenagers, of course. Boys walking with boys, talking behind thier hands as they cut their eyes at the girls. The girls were, frankly, not interested in them, spending most of their time laser focused on their tennis. There were unaccompanied teen boys. There were fewer unaccompanied teen girls, who seemed always in the presence of a coach or a parent or someone.

I started thinking about the social dimension of what it must be like to train at an academy year around. What it must be like to grow up there in this world of tennis and only tennis. The coaches all wore matching track suits, either tan or blue. I think there was some kind of system related to this. But even they had acquired their own mode of sociality. They greeted one another with clapped hands and daps. Their eyes flashed boyishly as they told naughty inside jokes or punched the air to warm their hands. In the morning, I’d make my way to my private session and pass the coach’s house just as the coaches were arrrving for the day and unlocking their carts and moving long to the row of practice courts. I could hear the wheels on their carts rattling behind me as they pushed along, sometimes with a little skip or a jump.

All of the coaches used Dunlop, one of the sponsors for the academy, and they all had matching Dunlop bags. It was enough to almost make me want to use Dunlop and maybe I will. But there was something to the way they all acted around each other that seemed so familiar to me but I couldn’t place it until one day, during stretches, Paul, one of the fitness coaches, put on rap, and it struck me like thunder: oh yeah, they’re jocks.

But I also felt, sometimes, watching the coaches a kind of melancholy. Coaching is a worthy profession. It is hard work. But in another way, you end up as a tennis coach when you have stopped being a tennis player. I mean, yes, you sometimes give lessons to support yourself during the summers if you’re trying to make a go of it at satellites and futures, etc. But for the most part, the coaches at the academy had stopped being pro players sometime ago. In some cases, decades. Or in some cases, they had never even tried to go pro.

Sometimes, the coaches said things like, When I used to play or Back when I played, etc, and you could feel that something important in their lives had come to an end, and that ending is what necessitated or made possible their being there to coach you in the first place.

I think there are some people who are born brutally close to being sublimely gifted, and for whom it is an exquisite and excruciating agony knowing that no matter what they do or how hard they train, they will never transcend the small mortal part of themselves. Tennis is an uncaring sport in this way. Cruel, even. Because you are keenly and deeply aware of your limitations. And you’ve got to make the choice to climb the mountain anyway. You’ve got to decide that you wan to get good even though you may never get great. Or become one of the very best. Do you try anyway? Do you persist even though you know you’ll never, probably, make it?

In one way, it’s frankly insane that I am dedicating so much of my life and energy and effort to tennis. I should probably be focusing on writing. I should probably pour myself into something that will accentuate my strengths and will allow me to reap some benefit from my gifts and talents. Why am I, at thirty-seven, trying to master a thing I will never be the best at in the world when there are other things I have a reasonable chance at mastering?

Why get good at all if I am never going to become sublime? Why spend the money and the time and the effort? Why not become like one of those happy people not trying to improve but just accept myself for who I am and who I am not? Why drive myself so hard? Why push myself so hard? Why am I trying to get good? Why? Why? Why? What is the point? What will I gain? I’m not playing tournaments. I’m not trying to get ranking points. I will gain absolutely nothing material from this. I will gain nothing but the satisfaction of a well struck shot or a carefully constructed point. The only thing to gain is, well, living precisely as I would like to live.

You know what I think? I think the coaches and those really talented kids at the academy and the pros who train there, and you, and me and all of the grinders at my local clay courts—I think anyone who tries to get good at tennis does it for probably the same reason. You get good because you want to get good. Sure, maybe, some of those people want to win slams. They have goals, they have dreams—long term, big picture goals that they push toward—but internally, I think they are driven by a desire to want to hit the ball a little better than they did yesterday, or an hour ago, or five minutes ago, or just now. And I think that’s enough. I think that’s a very good goal.

Would I do it again?

I’m already booking for Spring Break.

b