Hoisting the Trophy

I began playing tennis when I was 10 years old. In a few days, I will turn 49. I have played in many tennis tournaments in my life. I have just won my first tennis tournament. It took me 39 years to accomplish this goal.

Most of my life, most of the tournaments that I have played, I have lost. Some of these were major tournaments. I competed in the state level championships when I was in highschool, where my double’s partner and I placed 5th in Missouri. I competed in many USTA tournaments. I have made it to the finals before, just never won. Until now.

I have been losing at tennis for so long. It is sometimes hard to keep doing something you are losing at. I have friends who play tennis who get very bent out of shape about this. Tennis is a sport that can be frustrating at a level that is almost in-comprehensible to people who do not play. You watch Novak Djokovic, one of the greatest players of all time, bash his racquet into one of the blond ash netposts of Center Court at Wimbledon during the men’s singles final, leaving a sizeable dent, and destroying his three hundred dollar racquet, and you think – Get a handle on yourself, man, but when you know the level at which you can play, and then you do not play at that level when it matters…it is extremely frustrating.

Tennis is a very physical sport, and so it is tempting to believe that losing is a physical experience. And yet while this is not false, tennis is as much a mental and physiological sport as it is physical. It is intensely mental. It is like playing chess on the run. It is a game of angles, and spins, a game of strategy. Punch and counter-punch, offense, defense, reversals. It is also intensely physiological and autonomic, because the autonomic nervous system, as it shifts in micro-increments to manage the pressure of a match– of your opponent, the crowd, the money at stake– changes how your body moves and reacts, your timing, the tension of your muscles, how it feels to be in your body. And when the ball is moving at close to a hundred miles per hour, and computerized replays are required to determine whether a millimeter of the ball contacted the service line and the serve is an ace (point won) or a double fault (point lost), the involuntary changes in the tension of your striking arm because you feel a bit more confident, or a bit less confident, actually change the trajectory of how the ball travels and will determine whether or not that ball is in or out. Tennis is a triumvirate of the mind, body, and autonomic nervous system, which is the neural architecture of the conduit that links the two. It is a perfect sport, a sublime activity. Frustrating as fuck.

Given that I am 49 years old, and just hoisting my first trophy, the odds of me ever playing in Wimbledon are very long. It seems unlikely. I think if I had very good seats, like in the Royal box, I could exact a level of vicarious pleasure from the experience that might rival playing there.