the agonies and glories of losing

tennis is kinda therapy

Hello friends—

I have some events coming up in New York. On 9/28, I am reading as part of the launch for the new issue of BOMB Magazine at NYU. On 10/10, I am speaking to Paul Yoon about his new collection The Hive and the Honey. On 10/11, I am in conversation with Jhumpa Lahiri about her new book of stories Roman Stories (I AM FREAKING OUT, OMG OMG OMG). On 10/19, I am reading with Allegra Goodman and Darin Strauss as part of the NYU Salon Series! I will read from my new novel in progress.

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Today was the second week of my intermediate tennis class. Last week was so hot that I left roughly half-way through the two-hour session. I felt very dizzy and unwell. My blood sugar was in the toilet because I hadn’t eaten beforehand. I hate eating before I exercise. It makes me feel barfy. But in this case, I should have eaten the oatmeal. Today was a different story. The temperature was in the high sixties, climbing to the low seventies by the time we finished warm ups. It’s a new group, a new coach, so there’s always some anxiety about fitting in and building a rapport. The coach asked us what we wanted to work on. This struck me as being very different from the beginner lesson I’d taken in the spring, which was much more directed by the coach. He wanted to hear from each of us what our goals were for the session and for the long term over our five or so weeks together. I wanted to work on my backhand. I want to feel confident that I can rally with that shot. I always feel rushed and nervous, which leads to a lot of shanks, and bad foot work. The coach had us go back and hit some drills, probing each of our professed weaknesses in a way that revealed still more weaknesses.

He told me that the preparation for the shot was good. I was doing everything right before I struck the ball, right up to the contact point and then I seemed to lose my mind. Not staying with the ball, not leaning into it. I was opening my shoulders rapidly to compensate for the lack of follow-through into the ball. This more or less fit with my own impression of the shot, though I was surprised that he liked my preparation. He told me to think of my forehand, where I feel like I have all the time in the world to hit the shot. Stay with it, he said. So we all went back and did more drills and I tried to remember that. To hit into and through the ball. Not so hard, but to let the mechanics be fluid and to let the power come from the technique and the timing of the shot. I did feel myself get a little better on that wing, but it will take some time because at bottom, this is an issue in my mind more than an issue in my body. The shot is sound. But my lack of confidence causes me to ruin it. I lose time because I feel I must rush.

Toward the end of the lesson, he had us play live balls. He’d feed a person a ball and then we’d play points from there. At first, we took it in pairs to eleven. Then he had us do singles to six. Then we did a game of twenty-one. I lost every set of live points we played today. Every single one except the last, to twenty-one. I didn’t mind. I know why I lost them. Part of it is footwork. There were a lot of short balls. There were a lot of non-optimal high balls. I wasn’t moving my feet crisply to get into position. So they would whack a winner right off the feed. I didn’t mind. I don’t mind losing. I think this is probably a good mindset to have in life but a bad one to have in sports. Watching those shots zip by me, I wasn’t annoyed that they’d hit a winner. In fact, it made me really happy when they hit a winner. There’s something really gratifying about somebody really connecting on a shot and unleashing a totally unplayable ball. I think what frustrated me about my play today is that I wanted to move at a non-competitive pace, smoothing out my strokes and getting every ball into play. And my pod-mates wanted to win. As they should. We were in a game that had been constructed to be won. It’s more a matter of my own mindset.

This is not news to me. When I was very young, I was very competitive. I grew up with a brother and a lot of boy cousins. My primary playmates through the first and most formative years of my life were big, physical boys whose only ambition in life was to become a professional athlete. All of our games were ritualized slaughter, and your popularity was a function of how viscious you could be to other boys. But the thing is that my cousins and our playmates in our broader community had been trained to compete with all this intensity that they could then shut off. They had learned it in formal sports play on peewee football and tee-ball. They learned it from the teams they played on. They knew how to, even in our frontyard games of two-hand touch, how to unleash all the strength in their little muscles and to try to rend one another, and then at the end of the game, to drop the ball and play and laugh and sprawl across each other to watch Dragon Ball Z. I did not go out for sports as a kid. At first, I was too young. And then I was too shy and had no interest. So my own competitive energy had no formalized outlet. It just grew and turned into hateful resentment. I didn’t know how to end the game. So whenever we lost a game of two-hand touch or baseball or kickball, I would stomp and fume and pout. I was a sore-loser. My aunts and my mother called me vengeful-hearted, grudgeful-hearted, jealous-hearted.

They tried to beat it out of me. Literally and figuratively. Very often, I’d be playing with my cousins and we’d turn a little rough the way it can when kids play, but whenever I got a little rough, I’d be hauled off and told sharply, You don’t know how to play. You take things too far. And I’d look at my cousins in the eye and see fear and I’d feel so bad. And I’d feel angry. And I’d think, yeah, I’m bad. I don’t know to play. So I started to let them beat it out of me. Whenever I got slapped in the back of the neck, I’d slap myself too. I’d say, be better, be nicer. I stopped playing. I sat on the grass and watched them get better and better at sports. I got worse and worse. And I stopped trying.

Sometimes, it would flare up, this competitiveness in me. I am not proud of it. Sometimes, it used to flare up toward other writers. Or toward people I admired very much. But I think over the years, I have mostly stopped competing. I feel no competitive impulse. Because I don’t want to be accused to playing too rough. Of hitting out. Being told that I’m vengeful-hearted because I don’t know how to stop competing when the game ends. This has had the effect of making my life much easier. When people succeed, I find it very easy to clap for them. Even if I don’t like them very much. The success of my enemies bothers me only because it implies a level of bad taste in the world, but I wouldn’t want them to be less successful. When I started doing sporty things again in my early twenties, I realized that somehow over the years, the very competitive part of myself had died. Gone out of use and therefore become defunct. This became most obvious to me when I started playing table tennis. My favorite thing in table tennis is hitting the ball back and forth for hours, trying not to miss. That is my favorite game in the whole sport. Just hitting the ball back and forth. Not even hard. I’d be content to loop it back with some pace. I love practice. The slow perfection of a stroke.

I struggle a lot when it comes to point play because to me, the point of live points has always been to make the rally feel like a conversation. I see what could be done rather easily to win a point, but I don’t take it because that could make the other person feel bad or to think that I think I am better than they are. So I just try to rally deep and even. I try to be steady. Not defensive. Just steady. Implacable. That is the trait I admire most in life. Implacability. I don’t want to cut someone’s legs out from under them the way we used to when we played football growing up. I don’t want to knock someone’s racket out of their hands. I want to hit balls to the right place over and over and over again. I’m not talking about being a pusher. I’m talking about the fact that for me, whenever I play tennis, I am still in practice mode. Nice and easy is the thing I say to myself the most as I hit balls. Nice and easy, up the line, nice and easy.

Today, watching my pod mates hit winners, I thought, oh wow, that is a beautiful shot. I wish we could just rally. But I know that the point of the exercise is not to rally. The point is to get comfortable hitting balls that are not ideal. Tennis isn’t just ideal feeds at ideal speeds to the ideal hitting zone. Tennis is loops and random shots and things landing on the line when you least want them to. Tennis is backing up even when you’d rather haunt the baseline. It’s moving forward when you’d rather not. Tennis is never convenient. Really, you’re trying inconvenience your opponent even at the same time you’re trying to set yourself up in the most ideal way possible. If you’re hitting perfect feeds to your opponent, you aren’t really playing tennis. You’re practicing. You’re a ball machine.

I guess my problem is that being a ball machine doesn’t sound so bad. It doesn’t sound awful, endlessly hitting the ball at your opponent. Getting them on the off-foot. Stuff like that. I kind of love that. What I want from my tennis game is consistency and depth and pace. I want to be able to hit deep and with precision and to move my feet more crisply. I also want to be able to fire myself up without being afraid that I won’t be able to turn it off again. I guess I need to learn a lot. About tennis. But also about being a competitive person. I don’t want to go through life just letting things happen to me. I want to be able to feel like I’ve got it on my own racquet, that I’m the one who can make my own destiny. That’s how it is with the best players. When they step up to the line, they aren’t just waiting for the opponent to miss (I mean, some players are like that). But the players I love most: Serena, Roger, Wawrinka, Nalbandian, Agassi, Safin, etc. Those players have it on their own racquets, you know? They are going to live and die by their own aggression and their own choices. Not just smothering the other guy and hoping they miss.

I have a lot of thinking to do. About tennis and about myself. About why I am the way I am. What it would mean to change. How I might change. How my comfort in losing might have been the cause of the losing in the first place. My inability to go for my shots.

On the train back down from Central Park, it occurred to me that all of this stuff is really just a fear of doing my best. A fear of hitting out and trusting my stroke, trusting my swing, trusting that it’s going to dip in. I have this fear of letting myself open my shoulders. Both literally and, I suppose, figuratively. Because for a long time, I was afraid of taking up space. Being mocked. Being called out. I was afraid of doing what I know I can do because for a long time, it felt like it didn’t matter. It didn’t seem to matter because for so long, my own feelings or the quality of my actions had no real bearing on the reality of how I was received. It’s a thing that’s been true my whole life and in every aspect of my life. That the real me passes in the shade and wake of the me that’s been constituted in the social space. Why bother doing anything if it won’t be judged fairly or clearly. Why bother showing my best or my true self when other people will just decide for me who and what I am.

But what I have learned from growing up and thinking through these matters of tennis strokes is that being afraid is okay and normal but it doesn’t have to be the only thing you are. Fear doesn’t always have to predominate. And I should do things not because of how they will be judged but because how doing them will make me feel. I have been undervaluing my own prospective happiness out of fear. I have been stealing happiness from myself. And honesty from myself. Out of fear. That is not an easy thing to admit. That is not an easy thing to think about oneself. But it is true.

My goal for next week’s tennis lesson is to hit the ball as well as I know I can. Just to try. And to go for my shots. To be a little competitive. With myself. Put up a little fight.

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