“You know what you need to do an article on?” my opponent, Don, asks me as he bounces the ball at the net before we begin our match. “Excuses. You need to give people tips on the best excuses to have ready when you lose. It’s the only thing you can get better at when you get older.”
“Most guys I know don’t need any help in that department,” I tell him.
Last week, in paying tribute to Roger Federer’s 15th Grand Slam title, I mentioned that the psychological difficulties of tennis are exacerbated tenfold by the fact that the sport wraps skill and luck so tightly around each other. If you’re playing someone even vaguely at the same level as you, unless that person aces you nonstop and belts outright winners on returns, there’s no legitimate way to excuse a defeat without implicating yourself in it. Even when your opponent plays well, you let him play well. Each win and each loss is a comment on what’s inside you, not on the circumstances surrounding you.
Most tennis players say they like it this way, that we’re individualists and meritocrats by nature, and we don’t need any teammates to bail us out. But then bankers used to say something similar once upon a time. In reality, taking responsibility for your defeats does funny things to people. Namely, it forces them to search for extenuating circumstances—i.e, base and cowardly excuses—for their failures. This search, if conducted on a regular basis, can take a man far and wide. Let me give you a few examples.
—I’ve played tennis and squash with four or five different communities of players over the years. Each consisted of 5 to 10 guys of similar levels who rotated pick-up matches with each other two or three times a week. The one common element I’ve found within these groups is that no one ever lost to anyone else.
Rich, to me: “How do I do against Jeff? I don’t think I’ve lost to him in three years.”
Jeff, to me: “It’s weird, but I’ve never had much of a problem with Rich. My game just matches up well with his.”
These kinds of logical impossibilities are so common that they seem to be almost codes of conduct in tennis and squash—it’s simply understood that you’re not going to admit defeat, or at least not without a reason attached. Whenever I’ve tried to break this code by simply stating that I had beaten by another guy, I’ve felt unnecessarily sheepish and even ashamed about it, as if I’ve just revealed that I’ve been fired from my job. Sometimes, the person I’m talking to will help me by making an excuse for me. “Well, you’re just getting back into it, right?”
—The saddest, but perhaps most effective, excuse I’ve received: As a college kid I beat a guy maybe 10 years older than me in a tournament out west. After screaming at himself for the entire hour, he shook my hand limply and said, “I haven’t been able to play much, my wife’s mother is dying.” I just nodded. How low can someone go to rob you of the satisfaction of beating them?
—Here’s a favorite infantile maneuver of an old squash partner. Every match that I won somehow, for no apparent reason, “didn’t count.” We’d play three out of five sets, I’d destroy him in the first three, and he’d say, “OK, another one, this is the one that counts.” When I beat him nine or 12 or 15 straight times, he’d say, “That didn’t count. One more game for a beer, so this is the one that counts.”
—I used to play a tennis opponent who hit his second serve as flat as his first. Because of this, his second delivery routinely hit the tape and bounced long for a double fault. After I would beat him, he would inevitably ask me, as if he honestly wanted to know the answer, “How many second serves do you think I hit that hit the tape and went out?” I wouldn’t answer, of course, because he didn’t really want to know. He wanted to point up his “bad luck.” I refrained from telling him that this wasn't bad luck. It was the reason the rest of the world spent the time to develop a kick serve.
—Another old tennis partner didn’t know how to eat, apparently. One time he lost to me and said, “I could barely move out there, I ate too much for dinner.”
—One time I beat an opponent who was a bigger but more erratic hitter than I was. I’d been more consistent, but hadn’t tried to do much with the ball. As we shook hands, he looked at me, shook his head, and said, “Too much junk, just too much junk.”
—I beat a squash opponent in a match in which I was the beneficiary of a number of “nicks.” A nick is when the ball lands exactly where the wall meets the floor and subsequently doesn’t bounce—at lower skill levels, this is a plainly lucky shot; at higher levels it can be done purposely. I didn't do mine purposely, but they were still the result of well-hit shots. The next time we played he beat me. As he was doing it, he looked at me and said with a malevolent grin, “Not so easy when you’re not getting all those nicks, is it?” (He had apparently forgotten the 10 other nick-less times I’d beaten him.) At that moment, if it had been legal to kill a man . . .
—Last year I beat a high-quality tennis opponent in three sets. I had decided to go for my shots from the start and I ended up hitting a number of abnormal winners. When I broke him in the third set with a passing shot that clipped the sideline, he sat next to me on the changeover and said, with phony calmness, “You’re hitting a lot of lines today.” This was not the compliment it may seem to have been on the surface. What he was really saying was, “You’re so f---ing lucky.”
—As a kid, I used to play a very fit Irish weightlifter who had no serve. How did he get around this rather crucial flaw? Naturally, by claiming that baseline games were the true test of a tennis player, and that the serve wasn’t what the sport was all about (he never specified why). He would only play me in baseline games, which he often won. Then he would sit on the sideline next to me and brag about how I would never beat him and that I was “nothin’.” After that, he would get into his Trans Am, put on his sunglasses, and drive home singing along to the same song every time: “People Out There Turning Music into Gold,” by Gary Stewart.
This, obviously, was a very funny guy who regularly smashed his racquets into little bits and cursed in the most creative ways imaginable, so it was all forgivable. If we hadn’t played in a couple of weeks and I saw him around town, he would say, “You’re duckin’ me, lad.” Sometimes I would try to avoid playing him just so I could hear him say those words.
You may be starting to wonder, after all these tales of my victories, if I’ve ever lost a tennis match. I have, of course, hundreds of them, maybe even thousands of them. But as I’ve gotten older I’ve discovered a simple secret to avoiding them: Schedule most of your matches against guys you can beat. Like everyone else, I don’t like to lose. The feeling I have when I do lose is the way I imagine I would feel if I were swindled in a pyramid scheme. I feel like a child, an innocent, a dupe, as if my opponent knows something about how tennis, and thus the world, works that I don’t. I'm willing to bet that I've blocked out plenty of the excuses I made for my losses as a kid, but these days I try my best not to make them, simply because I hate hearing them so much myself.
What’s the best excuse you’ve ever heard? I’ll give you mine.
At a junior tournament in Philadelphia, I watched a friend go up against an older, better, and much crazier player. My friend pushed his way to a lead in the first set. Upon losing his serve, his opponent felt his leg and said, with seemingly genuine concern, “I think it’s broken.” He hobbled to the sidelines. After a few minutes he was back up and running around. He won the first set.
My friend again grabbed a lead in the second. This time his opponent began to rub and pick at his eyes, as if something were in them. He eventually covered his eyes completely for a good five seconds. When he uncovered them, he stared straight ahead, blinked a couple of times, and yelled, “I’m blind!”
Needless to say, he won the second set.