On My Attempt to Become a Better Tennis Player By Reading Self-Help Books

When I was in my mid-40s, I had the opportunity to take my first sabbatical term off from work. I thought I had better take up a hobby that would help me fill the time in case I couldn’t figure out what to write. Then there was the fact that my father had just died on the operating table in a routine procedure, and I needed a healthy outlet for my anger. So I decided to take up tennis again; I’d played as a kid.  At first I played with angry jerks who were a lot like me. But later on I wanted to improve, and a friend suggested I read Zen in the Art of Archery. I found it incomprehensible. Coaches didn’t help either. Then I thought I might try to play with guys who seemed to have a Zen quality about them.

Having reaffirmed my lack of faith in coaches, I turned to my lack of faith in self-help books. Though I decided I couldn’t get the answer from reading, I did a bit looking for an answer. I read Timothy Gallwey’s The Inner Game of Tennis, which could have been titled “Zen in the Art of Tennis”—but was promisingly, it seemed, not written by a German in Japan just after World War II. I read John McPhee’s Levels of the Game (which is by no means intended to be a self-help book; it’s a highly literary work of journalism). I read Brad Gilbert’s Winning Ugly.

I actually purchased and read these books in their entirety. Buying and reading how-to books was slightly embarrassing; I’d never under any circumstances done it before. I needed help, no question. But I was a firm believer in the necessity of firsthand experience in helping yourself: you had to construct for yourself the nature of the problem to be solved. It was a testament to my desperation at this point that I was willing to take a step I so little believed in.

The self-help books didn’t help me much. I could understand what they advised. I needed to relax, yes—I had a thousand voices yelling at me to relax—but I had no idea how to do so in the context of a match. Gallwey talked a lot about “being in the zone.” It was where you felt like you couldn’t miss; the basketball hoop appeared as big as a whale’s mouth; the opponent’s side of the court seemed longer than an airport runway.

The zone sounded great—kind of like “You don’t shoot, the arrow does” did—but most of all it just sounded like an idea. I wanted to believe in Zen, in “the zone”—in a Zen zone. But wanting to believe in it didn’t mean I did, and it surely had nothing in common with experiencing it.

In his book, former player and coach Brad Gilbert suggested humming to calm yourself: that kind of worked, except sometimes I was so nervous I couldn’t remember how the tune went. And when I could, it made me only slightly less edgy. If the zone was real, I didn’t know how to gain entrance.

I also heard about the Zen-tennis connection from players. Maybe this intimate secondhand contact would be more fruitful. One of the few things I did understand in the almost entirely incomprehensible Archery was that the master insisted the art couldn’t be learned from reading about it. It could be learned only from a teacher.

There was a compact forty-year-old named Raj who talked about “oneness” and becoming “one” with one’s environment, and who I came to think of as “One-ball.” He was a strong rallier; he hardly ever missed. And he never lost his cool or spoke much above a whisper. Often it was hard to hear him. His pursuit of spirituality was so serious he was about to move to Nepal or Sri Lanka or his father’s ancestors’ homeland, India. This was particularly impressive because his dad’s family had been in the United States for generations and was thoroughly Americanized; seeing or hearing him, you would never suspect his background was anything other than blueblood WASP; his mother was from North Carolina, and he only spoke English; he knew no one in Asia and had never been there. He’d already given up his apartment and was temporarily staying with a friend.

Everyone at the UIC outdoor courts on the Near South Side knew him and respected his almost otherworldly consistency. Of course,  obnoxious Marco would have mocked him because he only rallied and never competed in sets, but Marco didn’t play at UIC. If I was going to learn to relax on the tennis court, as all the books counseled, I’d perhaps have to choose partners who were not angry assholes but instead spiritual nice-guy types.

One day, after a few sessions of just rallying with One-ball, which were indeed somewhat meditative (though also a little tedious), he suggested we play a special sort of competition.

I’d never known him to do anything but rally, and I thought, “Ah, now perhaps my real initiation into the mystery begins.”

What he proposed was a lot like a single game of tennis, but it was longer—the first to ten points won—meanwhile, there was no serve. The point commenced by rallying: once the ball had gone over and back, within reach and not too fast, it was a live ball, and the competition began.

I accepted the challenge. One-ball didn’t explain why he preferred this game to actual tennis, but I remembered that in Archery the master occasionally has the initiate undertake somewhat bizarre activities with the bow that fall short of archery itself—without any explanation.

A cynical voice in my head had a different reaction. It couldn’t help observing that this “special” game played to One-ball’s strengths—all he ever did was rally from the baseline. He never served or returned serve. This voice wondered if he preferred to whittle tennis down to his strong suit. But I told this voice to pipe down; to learn anything, I needed to be open-minded.

However, if One-ball chose this game out of a desire to dominate—the voice wouldn’t quite shut up—he’d failed to take something into account, which became evident from the first point. Once the ball was live, I was no longer hitting groundstrokes, nor allowing him simply to hit rally-type balls from his comfort zone: not only was I heading to the net, taking time away from his usual rhythm, but I was making him move off the baseline by hitting short balls. He was much less adept at coming forward, hitting approach shots or volleying the ball on a fly, since he never did these things.

I took the first game by a couple of points. We met at the net.

“Let’s do another one,” he snapped. I’d never heard his voice so clearly.

“Okay,” I said.

It seemed possible from his not exactly composed reaction that he thought the result of the first game was a fluke.

I quickly went ahead in the second game, and was a point away from another victory. Then suddenly One-ball was screaming at me.

Maybe he’d been stung by a bee. I once again couldn’t hear what he was saying. But this was because he was yelling from the baseline, where he apparently always remained unless driven off it. I could hazard a guess as to why his face was contorted in a snarl, but I really had no idea what he could actually be saying.

“What’s wrong?” I called.

He kept yelling, but didn’t move forward.

So I did.

“You’re only using one ball,” he was shouting.

“What?” I said.

“All the balls are on your side, and you keep picking up the same ball to start a new point.”

I turned around and looked toward my backcourt. There were two other balls back there. “You’re right,” I said. “So what?”

“Why are you using only one ball?” Did he think the one I was using was somehow “loaded”? A trick ball?

“I only need one,” I said. Because there was no serve or second serve.

“Why aren’t you picking up the other balls? They’re sometimes closer.”

Was this guy for real? “You want the other balls?” I barked. “Okay.” I went to retrieve them.

By the time I turned around, One-ball—as I, at that moment, and forever after, thought of him—was packing up his gear.

“I’m not playing anymore,” he squawked.

I stood at the net. I didn’t even bother saying it: was the problem really my use of only one ball, or was he angry about losing—and finding a way to stop the thing, and save face, before I won again? After all, he was sure he was the better player and could beat me, and he wasn’t going to let a little thing like the fact that I was winning the idiosyncratic game he’d devised stop him from believing this.

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From Firsthand by Keith Gandal. Copyright © 2024. Available from University of Michigan Press.