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.

This week it was Joe D.’s turn to take me to the cleaners.  He opened with a big serve against which I hit a good deep return.  On his next shot I created a good angle, which took him beyond the doubles alley.  He covered it but could only generate a short ball in the middle of the court.  I sidled up to that ball near the T and — with the court open — clipped the net and watched the ball fall onto my side.

Thus, on the first point, I established the tone for the whole set: hit good offensive shots and take the weak reply and either make an unforced error or neutralize my own advantage by hitting a shot that allows Joe back into the point.  Ugh!  Another 6-1 shellacking!

Now, here’s the thing.  I think Joe would tell you, if you asked, that I gave him a workout.  He had to fight to hold his serve and he had to fight to break mine.  Most games were close, and I put enough pressure on him to force quality play.  So why couldn’t I break through?

One word: commitment.  It’s not that I don’t want to win, but what hit me when I walked off the court is that I am not fully committed to winning every point.

I am committed to my marriage — and so is my wife.  That’s one reason it has lasted 21 years.  Do we fight sometimes?  Sure.  Can we make each other miserable?  Absolutely — and only as two people who love one another can.  But when either of us ventures too close to the abyss, we step back.  We may be miserable at that moment, but we don’t want to be miserable forever.  We just won’t go to that dark place where losing marriages reside.

Because of our commitment to making the marriage work, we don’t let the occasional disruption lead to a general state of unhappiness or frustration.  In the context of things, we view any argument as a speed bump on a road that we’ve committed to travel together.

This firm commitment is what makes our marriage work.

There are other points of commitment in a life — points with regard to work, family and important relationships.  One can view the tennis court as a place to find relief from the tensions these commitments sometimes bring, but if that’s the only way I look at tennis I’m not going to win much against hungrier opponents.

Wanting a good marriage means nothing without committing to put the effort in almost every day.  Wanting to win a tennis match means nothing without committing to put the effort into almost every ball.  There’s no shortcut to beating a quality player.

So I’m going to try, for the rest of this year, to commit myself to every shot in every point in every game in every set in every match.

We’ll see what that does for my winning percentage.  Fortunately, my marriage doesn’t depend on my forehand.