Playing Ball: The Outer Game

While we were playing mini-tennis to start our warm-up, John told me about the vacation to France he had just taken with his wife.

“I definitely recommend getting out of Paris,” he said as he patted a backhand over the net to me. “We loved just walking and biking through the small towns there.”

“And eating,” he added with a laugh.

On a changeover, as we stopped to take a drink, Dave described what happens when he hits slice backhands to his daughter, who is a high-level junior.

“She hates it,” he said, laughing. “If I slice the ball and she misses it, she’ll yell at me, ‘Nobody hits those old shots anymore, Dad!’ I mean, I guess she’s right, but hopefully she’ll thank me someday.”

As we waited for our court to open up, and she stretched out her hamstring, Abby regaled me with tales of the “surprisingly OK” single life she’s been living since the end of a long-term relationship.

“I never thought I’d find myself back in Williamsburg,” she said, referencing New York’s hipster ground zero. “And I never thought I would want to go to a debate party at a bar, either. But it was fun. Every time Trump said ‘loser,’ we had to drink.”

These are just a few of the many things I’ve learned while playing tennis this year. The list could go on.

Don told me what it was like to go to Lew Hoad’s camp as a kid and see the great man play. “He was older then,” Don said, “but he was just ripping the ball.”

Liz spent the summer updating me on her torturous journey through Roberto Bolaño's epic novel 2666. It was worth it, she said, in the end: "There's one point when the story finally becomes clear, and you're like, 'Wow, he really is good.'"

Another day Ed let me know how bittersweet it felt, as he turned 75, to still be playing as well as he had at 55. “There aren’t many guys left who still come out here now,” he said sadly of his peer group. Then, seeing the upside, he flashed a smile: “But I can beat a lot of them now that I could never beat when we were younger.”

In the self-help 1970s, tennis was celebrated for its inner game. Playing it was a way to get in touch with your deepest self. And that made sense: When you’re on court, you spend the vast majority of time alone with your thoughts. In 2015, though, tennis seems to me to be more notable for what its outer game can do for us. At a time when so much socializing takes place at a distance, through email and Facebook and texts and tweets sent and read from halfway around the globe, the tennis court closes that distance and brings us face to face again.

This isn’t an aspect of the game that’s typically extolled, or promoted, or even mentioned. We play tennis, we’re told, to compete, test ourselves, and learn a skill; to exercise, lose weight, and relieve stress. We play this individual sport, in other words, for individualistic reasons.

But there’s evidence that the biggest benefit we get from tennis comes from its social element—from the bonds we form while we play it, and the beers we have with our opponents and partners when we’re done. For many of us, the courts are one of the few places where we can leave the demands of work and family life for a few hours and interact with people in an environment where a little less is at stake.

The paradoxical fact is that the (faux) competition involved in tennis offers a brief respite from the (real) competition of everyday life. As Timothy Gallwey, author of the Inner Game of Tennis, says, “It’s a sport where, for a few hours, we pretend that what happens to a yellow ball matters, even though we know all along that it’s just going to go back in the can when we’re done.” Yes, you compete against your opponent, but its the cooperation that counts for more. In a match, opponents work together to make the experience worthwhile, and, hopefully, bring out the best in each other. The cliché says that “winning is everything,” but the person we want across the net isn’t someone we’re going to beat every time; it’s someone who is going to “give us a good match.”

Experts say that the key to making the most of tennis’ cooperative benefits is to keep the socializing going even when the ball is back in the can. The beers afterward, or the once-a-month dinner, or the breakfast gathering to watch the Wimbledon final, or the Saturday BBQ at your club, are just as essential for our well-being as the match itself. In the past, of course, tennis clubs have represented exclusivity, and for much of the 20th century the sport was held back by its reputation as an upper-crust preserve. But as someone who plays it in the (hopefully) less exclusive 21st century, and who lives in a big city, the tennis club can feel like the small town I left behind. It doesn’t provide exclusivity; it provides a relief from anonymity.

Whether or not you go out with your opponents afterward, every match is an implicitly social event. As with our friends, different opponents bring out different sides of our personalities. With some, who aren’t as competitive, I may simply savor the chance to run and sweat. With others who take it more seriously, I may play as if it were the final of the U.S. Open. The sport’s challenges also change from one opponent to the next. Against a steady baseliner, I try not to beat myself, to stay patient enough to hit one more good shot. Against a big hitter, though, the challenge changes; now I need to go beyond my norm. When a match is over, you might even be able to tell who you played by how your body feels.

You'll also know who you who’ve played from the nuggets of information floating around in your head. As you drive home, you may think about the things you discovered as you waited for your court, as you warmed up, as you changed sides between games. For me, this can mean finding about what it’s like to travel in India (“You never know what's coming next,” Ken said), how a long-suffering loyalty to the Mets might have originated ("I grew up a Brooklyn Dodgers fan and could never stomach going over to the Yankees," Tom told me), how it feels to spend an extended Thanksgiving with family in Stonington, Conn. (“It's so quiet I feel like honking my car horn just make some noise on the street,” Paul says), what it's like being a cricket fan from South Africa (“We never win the big one,” Michael says), or what it was like to follow the Grateful Dead in the '70s ("What I'm really grateful for is being alive," Charlie told me). Like a short story, these fragments of information shed a little bit of light on a world outside my own, and inspire the imagination.

Sometimes tennis’ rewards go far beyond winning or losing. This summer I played with a friend who had struggled with health problems a few years earlier, and who may have wondered if he would ever get on a court again. As we stretched out beforehand, he told me that not only is he back on the court, his young son is often out there with him.

“He can’t get enough,” he said. “It's all he wants to do.”

That was better than any tennis tweet I read this year.