Issue 07: The Right Lighting

What Tennis Teaches Us

Few sports can be played in as many ways as tennis. You can play it socially: leagues, round robins, a standing doubles four, a long lunch after. Or you can work on your game almost entirely on your own: the wall, the ball machine, a basket of serves, a private lesson where every ball that crosses the net is yours to hit. Watching splits the same way. Some people make a tournament a day out with friends. Others go alone, wander the practice courts, and barely speak to anyone all day. Some of my favorite tennis days have looked exactly like that — alone but not lonely — and I've come home feeling whole.

The game doesn't turn you into someone new. At its best, it gives you the conditions to be more of who you already are.

How do you like to play, and how do you like to experience the game?

An Idea Worth Borrowing

Susan Cain's Quiet is about the power of introverts in an extroverted world, but its most useful idea applies to everyone. She writes about a culture that quietly rewards one way of being — the outgoing, spotlight-ready kind — and asks everyone else to perform it. Her answer isn't to change who you are. It's to know it, and choose accordingly:

“The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk.” And then she gives permission: “Spend your free time the way you like, not the way you think you're supposed to.”

Tennis offers both kinds of lighting. And there's no one set way to do it — whether we're on court ourselves or watching our children find their own way into the game.

What Caught My Eye

Maria Sharapova has spoken about being an introvert and how that part of her personality helped her succeed in tennis. In her autobiography, Unstoppable, she recalls an early sign of how her natural disposition worked to her advantage:

“For whatever reason, I had this ability. I could hit that ball against that wall for hours. It was not my skill people remarked on. It was my concentration — that I could do it again and again without getting bored.”

Her first coach, Yuri Yudkin, called it toughness. He didn't mean aggression. He meant the ability to stay locked in when you're asked to do the same thing a million times. Most children, he believed, try something once or twice and then drift off. To be great at anything, you had to be able to put up with an enormous amount of boredom.

Years later, Nick Bollettieri described their first meeting to her: “You didn't have all the moves at first, you didn't have the strength, but you did have the mentality. And that can't be taught.”

She went on to win five majors and was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame last year. The picture worth keeping, though, is the earlier one: a girl who could spend hours alone hitting a ball against a wall while the rest of the world vanished.

See you next Monday.
— Simona