Failing Better: On The Tennis Player and The Writer

The summer I graduated from college I started freelancing and took up tennis. The first venture was understandable—I wanted to be a writer, a still viable if inherently unstable profession in 1974—while the second was not so obvious, as we were still a few years away from America’s tennis boom. A Swede who looked like a Norse-god-turned-rock-star had won the French Open that spring, providing a hint of what was to come, but Björn Borg was not the reason people gravitated to the three public courts in my new Washington, DC, neighborhood. Most came for the exercise and the camaraderie; those courts were the only ones I’ve ever found that you could go to alone and find someone to hit with. Often, people playing singles would invite those waiting to join them for doubles.

Writing and tennis became my two passions. Both require intense concentration, in order to be any good, and diligent practice, and both make use of imagination—which in tennis takes the form of anticipation—and creativity. And back then they each employed a soon-to-be-obsolete tool: My wooden Slazenger made hitting winners difficult in the same way that my humming Selectric made rewriting sentences cumbersome. Unlike tennis players, writers can correct their unforced errors.

There are other differences of course. Writing is a solitary, sedentary, indoor activity while tennis is a social (certainly at those Quebec Street courts), active, outdoor pursuit. It produces sweat while writing has been associated with blood. (“Just sit down,” Red Barber explained the process, “and open a vein.”) In fact, writing and tennis sometimes seemed more conflicting than complementary; I was often on the court working on my backhand when I should have been at my desk developing my voice.

Tennis took off in this country in the late 70s with the emergence of attitude, which replaced, or at least challenged, the old decorum. Martin Amis, writing years later about this phenomenon in The New Yorker, confessed that the word “personalities”—when used in sentences like “Modern tennis lacks personalities”—translated in his mind to one that also serves as a synonym for anus.

Prominent among these were John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, whose mutual loathing and on-court confrontations brought to mind—at least some minds—the televised clashes of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. On the women’s side, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova began an intense rivalry that could have made them the Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman of tennis if not for the fact that they became good friends.

The writing I lost to playing tennis suffered further from my watching tennis. Though, with some of the big servers, in those serve-and-volley days, I could at least catch up on my reading as only the last few games of a set, and the tiebreakers, were essential viewing. I was heartened to learn, from a magazine profile of Samuel Beckett, that he too wasted hours watching televised matches. Good thing there was no Tennis Channel then.

In 2011 my two passions merged when I got an assignment to cover the US Open for a now defunct online magazine. Arriving at the media center, I picked up a request form for player interviews. Roger Federer, I figured, would be unavailable—which was ok, as he’d already been dissected by David Foster Wallace—so I wrote down the name of the only other player I really wanted to meet: Andrea Petkovic, the buoyant German whose favorite writers, according to her website, were Goethe and Oscar Wilde.

I got the interview, but was joined by two other writers who, unfortunately, were more interested in tennis than literature.

In recent years, changes in the game have distanced it even further from writing. The top players now have teams—coach, hitting partner, physio, nutritionist, sometimes a psychologist—which lessen their lonely crusader status. They lose a big point and gaze up imploringly at their boxes. Writers also experience frustration—blocks, editors—but have no one to turn to for support. Though some now look to ChatGPT.

Technology is no stranger to tennis. Graphite rackets have contributed to more virtuoso shot-making, which has increased the opportunities for showboating (a plus for lovers of “personalities” now that automated line calls have eliminated the most common cause of on-court outbursts). A player will hit a spectacular winner and then half-fold one ear with his forefinger (it’s only the men who do this, the women apparently are less needy), eliciting even louder applause, a greater acknowledgment of his greatness. I could parade around the room after writing a brilliant sentence, but it would be a silent, unseen strut.

This year’s Wimbledon, however, reawakened me to the abiding, fundamental connection between writers and tennis players. It was during the ladies’ singles final, or, more accurately, the award ceremony following it, when Iga Świątek joyously lifted the silver salver. Świątek had been having, by her standards, a miserable year, winning no titles, not even the French Open, which had become her master class.

As she stood on the worn grass of the world’s most famous tennis court, her face alight with an exultant smile, all the year’s losses faded away.

Writers watching felt some kinship. Few of us win a Nobel (writing’s Wimbledon), but most of us eventually do get published. And, like tennis players with their championships, we achieve this after months, sometimes years, of failure. The fields are lush with talent. Of the dozens of players who enter a tournament, all but two of them end it in defeat; the odds for freelancers are even more grim. We submit our work and the overwhelming majority of us get shot down. It’s as depressing as it is inevitable. We have an off day, we get outplayed, an editor—it happens!—makes a bad call.

But then one says “yes,” and everything changes, life fills with sweetness. All the rejections that came before are, miraculously, rendered meaningless. Writing, like tennis, allows for remarkable reversals of fortune.

This is not to discount the value in making one’s peace with failure. The great Irish tennis fan Samuel Beckett wrote: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” The great Swiss tennis player Stan Wawrinka had the words tattooed onto his forearm.