Yellow ball. Black net suspended resignedly betwixt cold steel. White lines delineating a green battleground. Shoulders, knees, and a panoply of joints, ligaments, hopes, and dreams lie strewn about the lawn.
Tufts of felt are jettisoned towards the azure sky as the opening shot is fired. Strings pop, shoes scream, the net shudders.
Time is drawn out in a procession of service breaks, sets, and ultimately matches. This is all the tennis player knows of time. Just as a heroin addict measures time as the interval between needle shots, the tennis player looks at time as the distance separating evanescent personal victories.
What does the ball truly look like? What are the exact dimensions of the court? Well, why do those things matter? The mathematics of the civil engineer are irrelevant at "luv-forty". An artist's imagination cannot produce a running backhand that skims the line for a clear winner.
Food and water supply the chemical energy needed to fire off lateral and calf muscles in unison at just the right moment. Sleep eases the strain on the eyes and mind brought on by the endless pursuit of that yellow-clad fugitive.
The singles player is the gladiator. Spartacus perfected feints with a short sword, and McEnroe schooled himself in precise thrusts of the racquet. A mistake saw the gladiator to drop to his knees in the sand with a pierced lung. Similarly, an errant forehand leaves the singles player alone before the unforgiving net, a solitary portrait of ignominy.
The doubles specialist is the legionnaire. His power comes from precise coordination with the partner. The two together form an impenetrable phalanx which harmlessly deflects the volleys of the opposition. They live and they die as a single unit.
While the gladiator is driven by visceral self-defense, the doubles champion carries a different demeanor. The cool tactician will rise to the top, because simply maintaining formation is enough to frustrate the unsophisticated adversary.
The tennis player knows two worlds: on-court and off-court. Off-court is the place to stop and think about how to win on-court. The sole objective is the gratification which comes from hearing your own name, preceded by "Game, set, match." Off-court is the place to bolster the physical and mental self to react more efficiently in the reality that is on-court.
Everybody is falling. The body decays as it stumbles from point to point in life. Despite our extolling of "rational man", we are fundamentally animals. We agonize inside our tired husks of flesh, grasping blindly for relief. The tennis player is an elegant encapsulation of such animalism. There is no time to think. If you think, the ball is already behind you. On-court, there is only carefully-tuned reaction, honed through decades of conditioning. Whether the venue is the All-England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club or the Westminster Kennel Club, proper training pays dividends.
