When I played on the tour in the amateur era, I loved almost every aspect of the sport. Tournaments held the initial promise of victory, and practicing was a joy because I saw it as a pathway to winning. Besides that, I just liked hitting the ball, competing, and the camaraderie of the players. There was only one terribly unpleasant element: losing. After a defeat, especially if it was a close match and I had blown chances to win it, I was in agony. I didn’t want to talk to anybody and usually hid in my room, brooding. I relived every crucial error in excruciating detail; the misery lasted for hours, sometimes days. Even now, though I play only for exercise and enjoyment, I still hate losing.
Was my brooding helpful? In some ways, yes. It helped me identify weaknesses in my game and motivated me to practice harder. It also kept me going in long, hot, difficult matches, because I knew what awaited me if I gave up. At the same time, obsessing over losing was destructive. It increased the pressure to win, which made me more likely to choke. It amped up the overall stress and turned what should have been a game into a mixture of great pleasure and excessive pain. In hindsight, I see that my reactions were, on balance, counterproductive. The costs far outweighed the benefits.
All losses hurt your confidence, but the more emotion that’s associated with a defeat, and the more you highlight it in your mind, the more damage it will do. You must black out the loss as soon as you can. This can be difficult because tennis matches feel more important than they really are, and losses linger as players naturally tend to blame themselves. The best way to counter this is to get your mind off losing. You could be proactive and hit the practice court to work on your weaknesses. Or you could take a page from the great Australian champions of my day, like Roy Emerson, Fred Stolle and John Newcombe: Go out with your pals, have a few beers and laughs, and forget about tennis.
When trying to cleanse yourself of a particularly horrible defeat, it helps to have a better understanding of errors. They are reactions to an immediate situation on court, not products of thought. It’s not as if you planned to hit the net or the doubles alley; your shots go there at times because you simply mistime the stroke. You don’t decide to miss; you miss because it’s impossible to be error-free. In such cases there’s little benefit in endlessly replaying your errors. Get over it and move on.
Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t learn from your losses. One small benefit of losing is that your weaknesses are fleshed out. They happen under the stress of competition, and afterward you can see what worked and what didn’t. Even if you can’t drill your weaknesses into submission on the practice court, you can spend a few moments considering changes in strategy. For example, if your backhand let you down you can plan to run around it more to hit forehands, or come to net more often. Your overall approach here is to take something useful from your losses rather than beating yourself up over them.
Most important, the next time you play a match, be prepared to exert a little extra emotional discipline to offset any drop in confidence. Stay positive, because there is one thing to like about losing: It makes your next victory that much sweeter.
Former Wimbledon quarterfinalist Allen Fox, Ph.D., wrote The Winner’s Mind: A Competitor’s Guide to Sports and Business Success.
Originally published in the May 2010 issue of TENNIS.