Playing Small

One interesting and under-appreciated aspect of sports is the degree to which — all things being equal — success flows from the strategic occupancy of space. Think about the over-rotation of a baseball defense to an extreme pull hitter. Think about what goes on in a football game: linemen and linebackers (in addition to all their other tasks) creating or filling passing lanes. Think about a good singles tennis player recovering to the area where his opponent is most likely to hit the next ball.

So why do many otherwise competent club doubles players begin so many points out of position?

Pain and Possibility

I had hoped, when I began this blog, among other things to report on my progress through the USTA season. This plan has gone down in a sea of distractions...my upcoming novel (Primacy) and the weekly column about it for The Nervous Breakdown, among them. But mostly the problem is that my season never got off the ground.

A few faint elbow issues had been haunting me for some time, nothing that a good warm-up couldn’t overcome, I thought. When I changed rackets it got a little worse, but still after fifteen minutes of hitting I'd feel fine. That was then.

My first USTA match was 4.0 First Doubles with John J. back in April. The weather was cold and raw. Though the captain moved our match indoors, my elbow never warmed up. Every shot hurt.

Forced Errors

I’ve been thinking that professional tennis commentators talk all day about unforced errors and winners, but the majority of points are forced errors, especially at the amateur level.

We hackers know. We know how hard it can be to hit the open court, for example, against a jackrabbit opponent who fetches every ball, even when you get him on a string. Maybe you don’t miss your shot because you suck — even though that’s what you probably tell yourself — but because your opponent forced you to attempt a too-difficult (or perfect) shot in overcompensation for his speed.

Chunking It

Well, o.k., my commitment to shot commitment hasn’t worked out so well yet.

In the parking lot after another drubbing from George W., he said, not unkindly, “You overanalyze too much.”

At first I presumed the redundancy was unintentional (overanalyze, too much?), but on reflection…

Oh, hell.  The guy is right, but why does it matter?  Why can’t I brood about why I hit that last shot too short while I’m waiting for the next serve?  Or tell myself how badly I suck after missing that easy volley?

Here’s why: chunking.  Or, more to the point: unchunking.

Tennis Vows

How is a tennis match like a marriage?

No, this isn’t the entry point to an off-color riddle.  It’s an attempt on my part to understand why, lately, I’ve forgotten how to win.

For the past two months, I’ve been losing a lot of tennis matches.  More than a lot, in fact.  Most.

Partly I can attribute this drought to the fact that I’m hitting against the same three guys, and all of them are tough competition for me.  One (Eric H.) is a solid 4.0 player who could compete at 4.5 and has competed a great deal at 4.0 singles, winning most of his matches last season.  Another (George W.) is a former teaching and hitting pro who in his salad days occasionally hit drills with Ivan Lendl.  The third (Joe D.) is a young teaching pro with a fairly big game.

All of these guys are winners, and I’m the big loser.  I give them a run on any given point and in any given game, but I’m having a great deal of trouble taking sets off of them.  Sometimes I lose very badly, and the occasional set that I do win is almost never lopsided in my favor.

The Pickle-Ball Pickle

Paddleball.  Paddle tennis.  Racquetball.  Squash.  Table tennis.  Tennis.  Pickle-ball?


Just when I thought I’d at least tried every sport involving hand-eye coordination, a ball and a plate-like object (i.e. a paddle or a racquet), along comes pickle-ball.  This strange new permutation of tennis resembles paddle tennis but without the platform or the tightly fenced enclosure.  And here’s another distinction: it involves a perforated plastic sphere more like a whiffle ball than a tennis ball.

Maybe I’m late to the pickle party, but I only found out about this game last week via a short video on the front page of my iPad Wall Street Journal subscription.  The title of that piece was “Move Over, Tennis, Pickleball Is Here!”

On Gratefulness

I‘ve had a racquet of one sort or another in my hand for most of my life. Growing up, my friends and I would knock the tennis ball around from time to time at local parks or at camp — not tennis camp, just camp. There was also the very occasional tennis lesson at the country club or on vacation. For a time in my teens we got into paddleball, now a lost art, it seems, in which one smacks a lively little ball against a concrete wall. In college I hit the tennis court and the squash court once in a while, but only just enough to convince myself I hadn’t grown bookish. And when I lived full-time in Manhattan, I went through a period where I regularly played racquetball at a downtown health club called The Printing House.

Through all these permutations I usually had enough talent and eye-hand experience to hold my own among equally unskilled decent athlete, but I never stood a chance against a serious tennis player. Then, in my late twenties, we moved to Bedford Hills in northern Westchester County and joined a facility in Mt. Kisco called the Saw Mill Club.

I hacked it around there for a few years at the sub-3.5 NTRP level, playing my usual uneven game of one impressive shot spaced between half a dozen mediocre ones and a dozen flat-out lousy ones. Yet my opponents had similar games, and you could dine out on the one great shot of the set and have a good time so long as you didn’t take winning too seriously.