All in all, it’s not a bad system—except for one thing. What if you want to thread a needle, tie a shoelace or play the piano and the mind is behaving as if you were being chased down an alley by a couple of Neanderthals? Why should the mind behave thusly? Mainly because a big part of the mind’s job is not only to respond to danger but to anticipate it. Frequently it goes overboard. It is 3 a.m. and the ringing of the phone
mind and the phone rang at 3 a.m.? You would sound an alarm, of course. Flood the system with adrenaline.
And if the call turns out to be a wrong number—well, cest la vie. Better cautious than dead. In the meantime, however, the neural troops have all donned their battle gear. Sleep, for the time being, is out of the question.
Which brings us to tennis. In some respects, the phone is always ringing at 3 a.m. on a tennis court.
That is to say, the mind is forever priming the body for responses that frequently have no place in tennis combat. Tennis is a sport requiring a combination of co-ordination, precision, quickness, clear thinking, and concentration, not to mention a healthy lung capacity.
A certain amount of adrenaline is indispensable to fuel these activities, much like a dollop or two of tabasco sauce puts the blood in a bloody mary. But an excess of adrenaline can—and usually does—generate a state of hyper-arousal that makes it difficult to meet the game’s more specific requirements.
A similar dilemma is at work in most sports but there are differences. If your name is Mean Joe Greene and you are richly compensated for the dismantling of other human beings, the more agitation and excitement the better. Adrenaline and aggression are congenial bed-fellows. But if your name is Jack Nicklaus and you are paid to tap a small ball into a small hole, the last thing you need is a surplus of behavioral juice.
The problem with tennis is that it asks you to be part Joe Greene and part Jack Nicklaus. The overall physical demands of the game—the running and the quickness and need for sharp reflexes—create a need for a healthy level of arousal. But if the arousal gets out of hand, the phone starts to ring at 3 a.m. and the precise demands of the game lose out.
There’s another factor involved here as well. If it were only the physical demands of the game that the mind had to deal with, the delicate adrenaline balancing act that is a prerequisite for successful playing could probably be handled by most players. There is, after all, a stop and go rhythm to tennis, opportunities to catch your breath and clear your head. But the mind has other things to concern itself with—namely, the mental pressures of the game.
And mental pressures there are—in abundance. The fact that the brain is being called upon to marshal a series of rather specific responses every few seconds is pressure inducing. The fact that these responses have to be made in a one-on-one, competitive situation is pressure inducing. The fact that the inability to make
68 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War these responses can generate frustration and anger is pressure inducing.
There’s more: the added pressure we bring upon ourselves when we introduce to the tennis playing situation implications which involve not the game itself but, rather, the significance we attach to it. Technically speaking, it is no more difficult to produce a down the line backhand at match point in the Wimbledon finals than it is to produce the same shot if you’re working out on a ball machine on a local court, but the actual difficulty factor between the two can only be measured in light years. Julie Heldman once described her own mental struggles with tennis as “a constant battle to trick myself into thinking that it didn’t matter.” She adds that she was rarely successful at it. And Bob Lutz summarizes the feelings of nearly every professional player
I’ve ever spoken with.
You do your best to keep telling yourself that a match is just another match and a point is just another point, but the realization always seems to creep in anyway. When you're a point or two away from winning, it’s very difficult to convince yourself that it’s just another point. How do you get yourself to believe what is, isn’t?
How, indeed? Asking the brain no to anticipate the excitement of a big win, or not to sound the alarm when it senses that you’re about to lose control of a situation you desperately want to keep control of is like asking for a rewrite of evolutionary history. Originally a hunter, man, remember, was not to the tennis court born. Our gut responses are better suited to the jungle than to the tennis court. Shoot first, ask questions later.
Not that I’m trying to paint a hopeless picture. To say that tennis presents the mind with barriers it is not in-herently equipped to overcome is not to say these barriers are insurmountable. Many players—the more successful players, to be sure—have learned to manage the emotional and mental pressures of the game in ways that minimize, if not entirely eliminate, the choking reactions that are more or less endemic to the game.
And while the methods used by these players are different, the approach has generally been the same. What the more successful tennis players have learned to do is to control the most volatile—but also the most controllable—agent in the choking process: anxiety. Til get to how some of these players do this later in the chapter. For now, though, let’s have a look at anxiety itself the better to see just what produces it and what damage it creates on the tennis court.
BECAUSE it is a subject unto itself, I don’t intend to get too deeply immersed in the dynamics of anxiety, except to clarify the role it plays in determining the level of inner excitement on the loose in the budy at any given moment in a tennis match, We've already established that the mind has its own method of monitoring the energy demands of the body, and that the inherent nature of tennis creates arousal in its own right. So, things being how they are, the mind could get along very nicely, thank you, without the additional arousal kicked up by anxiety. Anxiety only serves to increase
70 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War what is already an almost overflowing stream of adren-
enemies.
That a sport in which the danger of physical injury is slight should generate anxiety may seem illogical on the surface. But tennis produces anxiety because players attach to it a symbolic meaning that transcends the tennis court. “It comes about,” Julie Anthony says, “when we begin to evaluate who we are with what we
In the professional game, of course, anxiety has understandable roots. There is generally something tangible at stake, apart from winning itself, whenever a professional tennis player competes.
If your livelihood depends on your ability to win tennis matches, there is always a little of yourself on the line every time you go out on a court. Winning has the effect, symbolically, of making everything easier for you and your family years in the future. Losing has the opposite effect.
The event, the amount of money at stake, the setting, the opponent—all of these things affect the anxiety level of professional players in different ways. Wimbledon, because of its historical significance and its prestige (not to mention the economic benefits that accrue to its champions ), almost invariably spikes the anxiety level in most players—so much so that Sherwood
Stewart recalls that the first time he served at Centre
Court at Wimbledon, he missed the toss entirely. Davis
Cup competition is, for most players, a much more emotionally trying experience than regular tournament play. “What does it,” says Tony Trabert, “is the realiza-
of people.” Playing in front of a hometown crowd is a problem for many players, among them Manuel
Orantes, who reports that while he can deal with his own disappointment when he’s not playing well, he can’t deal with the disappointment of his countrymen.
And it has only been recently that Chris Evert has been able to take the court against Evonne Goolagong without experiencing a nervous stirring that is noticeably absent when she plays everybody else.
Then there are the idiosyncratic anxiety patterns that characterize many players. Virginia Wade, for instance, admits that the nervousness she experiences on a tennis court is related not so much to whether she wins or loses but to how she looks doing it. Linky Boshoff says she has no anxiety about losing but does worry, on occasion, about being humiliated on the court. Cliff Drysdale admits that there are one or two players on the tour with whom his personal relations are so strained that he invariably tightens up. And Gene Scott says that when he was competing, he was always more anxious when he was playing somebody that he felt he should beat than when he was playing someone who was a notch or two better than he was.
youre up against a top player, you figure you have nothing to lose by losing and so you don’t worry
you should beat, then you have to deal with how youre going to feel about yourself in the event you do lose.
72 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
It needn’t be stressed that the presence—or absence —of anxiety in a tennis situation is very much related to personality. How you feel about yourself, how important—or unimportant—it is for you to win, how
responses you will make under pressure. And let us not forget the importance of basic talent in this process. Ilie
Nastase, by his own admission, is almost always anxious in big matches, but his talent reservoir is so vast that the effects are not as costly to him as they would be to a less nervous, but less talented player, like, say, Harold Solomon. For the bottom line, remember, is not so much what sort of nervous reactions you're having on the court but the effect these reactions are having on your game.
But is there a substantial difference in the anxiety levels of professional players? You bet! But the differences are not always easy to discern. First of all, you can’t always pinpoint anxiety as the culprit behind a technical lapse that occurs in a pressure situation.
Harry Hopman notes that players who appear to be choking are often being victimized by a favorite stroke that happens to have a small margin for error. Roy
Emerson’s tendency to choke, Hopman points out, disappeared almost overnight once Emmo began to hit his forehand with more topspin, making it a safer shot.
Hopman also defends the rash of double faults that cost
Dennis Ralston a victory over Rod Laver in the 1969
U.S. Open Championships at Forest Hills.
Ralston was a prime example. of a player who had a shot that left little margin for error. It was his service. At Ralston’s peak, he possessed a serve that barely skimmed the net and struck deep, almost on the service box line. But when he tried to do more with it, there was no room for improvement, only room for error.
Everybody has what I like to call a choking margin. There were certain strokes in my game—my return of serve, or my backhand—that I never worried about choking on because I felt so comfortable with these shots. Even if I did tighten just a little,
I still had plenty of safety margin. But then I'd get out there against a guy like Don Budge, who was so sound in every way, and I knew I had to make perfect shots in order to win points, I didn’t have that ability, and so I missed. It wasn’t a question of choking, it was a question of trying to do what I knew I had to do if I wanted to win—and then not being able to do it.
Another thing. You don’t necessarily have to tighten up to choke. The symptoms of anxiety vary widely from player to player. Fred McNair says he gets slightly dizzy when he’s nervous. Rod Laver experiences a vague sense of remoteness, as if he’d just been dropped into a hostile environment. Margaret Court loses her timing.
And Arthur Ashe has trouble breathing.
Ashe, from Portrait in Motion:
I may never look like I'm choking, but that can be very misleading. Right now, when I'm nervous on the court, I have actual difficulty in breathing. And the problem is compounded when I try to run. My legs move stiffly, and soon my whole body offers only the most deliberate movements. It’s as if I've
74 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War lost all my instincts for playing tennis, so that my mind must try to explain repeatedly to my body what it already knows how to do.
Few professionals have ever described choking reactions more candidly than Ashe, but it would be wrong to conclude that Ashe is any more susceptible to choking than other players on the tour. Ashe points out, for instance, that many “calm” players choke in their own manner.
be choking. Maybe he’s resigned himself to losing, which, to me, is a choke. Maybe he didn’t train the way he should have for the match. Maybe he didn’t go to bed early the night before. When you come down to it, anything you do to give yourself a reason for losing is a choke.
Something else, too. The choking of many players frequently goes unnoticed by tennis spectators. Instead of committing glaring errors—a double fault at a key point—certain players will, in certain situations, shift their games into a lower gear. Their groundstrokes won't go out but they won’t land as deep. Their volleys will lose their customary bite. Their serves will land more shallow than usual. Stan Smith once told me that even when Rod Laver was playing his best tennis, you could tell when he was getting a little nervous because he would start to chip his backhand. Roy Emerson re-members that in the early 1960s some of his opponents would sense his anxiousness through his tendency to rush in between points. “What a lot of players started doing,” Emmo says, “was to deliberately stall, and this
Yet there are—and have been—professional players for whom anxiety, in most instances, is simply not a problem. Ham Richardson, a top rated amateur player in the 1950s, is one example.
The only time I can ever remember nerves really getting to me in a match was when I was eighteen and playing in Europe. I managed to beat my opponent but not until I'd lost my serve three times in a row. It might have been the unfamiliar surroundings—I don’t know. I do know that I always went into a match with a pretty realistic idea of how I fared compared with the other player. I never cared that much about being the best player in the world, so I was mainly concerned with doing what I could do best. And if I won, so much the better.
I mention Richardson specifically here because his sentiments call to mind some of the attitudes exemplified by contemporary players who are judged by their colleagues as being fairly immune to the consequences of anxiety on the court. I'm thinking in particular of players like Bjorn Borg, Harold Solomon, Chris Evert,
Evonne Goolagong, and Sue Barker, all of whom seem notably less prone to nervousness than the average touring pro and all of whom bring to the court, apart from everything, an attitude untainted by the fear of losing.
Goolagong, in particular, takes winning and losing remarkably in stride, insisting that she can be this way only because she “enjoys the tennis and not the win-
76 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
a question,” she says, “of really enjoying what you do. If you're enjoying yourself, then you’re not worried about how well or badly you're doing.” And Chris Evert, although she is more competitive and goal-directed than either Goolagong or Barker, insists that a fear of losing has never been a factor in her mental attitude.
A lot of it really has to do with the way I was raised. My father was very careful to react pretty much the same way whether I won or lost. When he was critical, it was never because of the out-
may not have done right. But he was never harsh.
react if I lost.
Borg and Solomon have similar points of view— neither enjoys losing but neither overly worries about it—but they have an advantage that other players don’t enjoy. Their games are basically defensive and highly physical. Which is another way of saying that if they've trained well enough there isn’t too much that can go technically wrong with their strokes. They are Volvos in a world of Porsches. It has been said of Borg that he was so good so young that getting nervous never occurs to him, although there have been defeats in his career that came about not because he was nervous but because he became frustrated and upset and simply stopped trying. A choke, by Arthur Ashe’s definition.
Solomon’s uniqueness, on the other hand, seems to lie in his ability to analyze his defeats logically.
One of the big differences between me and a lot of players is that I really know my strengths and weaknesses. There are very logical reasons why I have trouble with certain players like Borg or
Vilas, It’s because they're too strong for me to outlast from the baseline, and I’m not sure enough of myself at the net to pressure them. Being worried about it isn’t going to help. What I have to do is strengthen my game.
Being able to view yourself objectively and to take your lumps philosophically are useful traits to have no matter what your line of work is but there is a fine line between having a realistic appreciation of your own capabilities and underestimating yourself. Butch Buchholz is one former player who admits that he was never able to view his losses within a logical framework, yet, feels that he was a more successful player because of it.
Looking back, I can see that I kidded myself a great deal because there were weaknesses in my game that I refused to acknowledge. I took my defeats hard because I couldn’t understand how I could lose. But on the other hand, I probably won a lot of matches I wouldn’t have otherwise won if I hadn’t gone in with that attitude.
So much for anxiety as it relates to the professional game. Plenty of choking goes on in recreational tennis, too, never mind that there is rarely anything tangible at stake beyond the outcome of the match.
As Ted Solotaroff, a writer, editor and tennis addict, once put it in a New York Times Magazine piece:
78 2, Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
My main trouble is not stamina but imagination.
Like Henry James, I have the imagination of dis-
than it does for tennis. In general, imagination is the neurotic tennis player's substitute for concentration. Concentration means that you are following a clearcut set of orders: “Move to the ball, get your racquet back, set your feet, see the ball,
racket, follow through,” and so forth. But my imagination can’t be bothered with such mundane matters; it’s usually too busy adjusting my play to the image I happen to have of myself at the mo-
rors in a row, my imagination appears on the scene like a doctor in the house to announce that my backhand has suffered a relapse, and my following strokes will be timid with dismay and caution. I have just hit a forehand smash down the line in a close match and my opponent has somehow gotten it back, imagination raises the deadening question of what do I have to do to win a point.
Or if Iam coming in for a weak return, with three-fourths of the court sitting wide open, my imagination will turn grandiose and suggest a really decisive smash or a class drop-shot. This is also known as the death wish.
But why? Why should a perceptive, intelligent man like Solotaroff come apart so on a tennis court? And why should I, for instance, choke in a match against an opponent I know well and like? Why does my game take such a nose-dive if I find myself in a foursome that
I'm not especially comfortable with?
I really don’t know. Psychologists and psychiatrists
I’ve interviewed tell me that much of the anxiety recreational players experience is rooted in the fear that we will prove ourselves unworthy of the players we're playing with and thus invite the prospect of rejection.
I suspect there’s more to it. I’ve noticed in my own circle of partners, for instance, that players who have played a lot of competitive sports as younger men tend to do better under pressure than non-athletes, forgetting for the moment how well they play tennis. Which leads me to theorize that players who are unfamiliar with athletic pressure in general are at a slight disadvantage when it comes to dealing with the pressures of tennis. One of the better competitors on the celebrity tennis circuit, for instance, is actor Jerry Orbach, a pool shark in his youth. “I don’t think I hit the ball better than most of the people I play,” Orbach says. “But I do know I handle the pressure of competition better.”
No matter. Whatever the reasons behind the anxiety
—fear of losing, fear of winning, fear of being disgraced, low self-esteem, the need for approval, fear of flying, ad infinitum—the fact remains that it must be controlled if you’re going to deal effectively with the mental pressures of tennis. A look at how the professionals deal with the problem might give us some insights.
LET us retrench. We have already established that the intrinsic physical and mental demands of tennis create the need for a certain amount of inner
80 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War arousal but that if this arousal gets out of hand the body cannot operate at peak efficiency. We've established, too, that any number of factors—personality, ability, etc.—have a bearing on how well you perform in pressure situations. ‘ What seems to be at work here is a threshold phenomenon—a point at which arousal changes uniforms, switching from ally to saboteur. If the arousal is too far below your threshold, your play will lack the necessary sharpness and intensity. If arousal is over the threshold, you may play too tightly and tentatively. Not that it’s a fixed point, however. It will vary from player to player and from individual players in different situations.
You are playing the club champion in the first round of your club’s singles championship. Nobody, including you, gives you much chance of winning. You normally go into a match with a lot of anxiety about winning, but on this day, because you don’t give yourself a chance, you're not worried. You've given anxiety the day off.
Now the match starts and you find yourself concentrating well, hitting the ball crisply, playing each point one at a time—in short, doing all the things the books tell you to do without worrying about whether it’s going to work out or not. There is inner arousal, sure, but it is comfortably within your threshold range. You’re not choking.
And what happens? Before you know it, you’re up
4-0 in the first set and it’s your serve. Suddenly it dawns on you that you are not only in this match, you have a good shot at winning! Enter the brain. It immediately conjures up an image of what it’s going to mean to you once word gets out that you’ve beaten the club’s
No. 1 player. Your body, of course, responds to this image. It gets excited. The valve that had controlled your anxiety opens up and—whoosh—Niagara Falls. Your threshold is suddenly swamped, You play the rest of the match like a scarecrow.
I quote from Alvaro Fillol, Jaimie Fillol’s brother, after he had lost to Rod Laver in an early round at
Forest Hills.
I played well in the beginning of the match, but when I started to win, and I realized who I was playing, I got a little nervous. I just couldn’t make the same shots.
Don't be so hard on yourself, Alvaro. There’s another side to this threshold business. It has to do with what’s going on in the other guy’s nervous system. Go back to the original situation. Look at it from the club champion’s point of view. Because you have never been able to win more than two games a set from him, he is not exactly quivering in his boots at the prospect of playing you. And because his “anxiety of winning” machinery isn’t all that operational, his level of inner arousal is well below his threshold, too. Probably too low. Consequently, he’s not playing with normal consistency, finesse, or power. He’s not pressuring you.
It soon dawns upon him that if he doesn’t get his act together, he is going to lose to one of the biggest turkeys at the club—a possibility that doesn’t please him. His brain conjures up an image, too, and his body reacts to it—but in this case the nervous energy that’s released doesn’t surpass the threshold, it simply approaches it.
As his level of inner arousal increases, so does the pro-
82 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
better.
I’m the sort of player who needs a challenge if 'm going to play my best. I've always been something of a slow starter, but once I get a little nervous about the possibility of losing, I start to concen-
Manuel Orantes, after coming from behind to beat
Hans Pohlman in an early-round Forest Hills match in
set neither one of us was really that serious. We were playing drop shots back and forth and that sort of thing. But pretty soon he won the set, and then he broke my serve in the first game of the third set. There’s always the danger of panic in this
games and told myself what I had to do to win— how I should play him—and I won the next six games.
The scenario won't always work out this way. Had you and the club champion been more equally matched, and had you been better able to control your inner arousal (and had he controlled his a little less effectively) the stress factor might well have made the difference in the match. For the key to dealing with nerves is not so much to eliminate them from your game but to manage them in a way that works best for your particular threshold level and in that particular situation.
This situational aspect of nerves ought not to be dismissed. Orantes, for instance, is a player whose touch game can be devastated if he becomes too aroused.
Even so, he can allow himself more arousal against a player he knows he can beat than against a player who has given him trouble in the past. He can use the arousal more productively in that situation because his threshold level is, presumably, higher than normal.
So it is that on some days, and against some opponents, it will take more (or less) in the way of inner arousal to approach (or exceed) your own particular threshold than on other days and against other opponents. The way you happen to feel physically on a particular day, your frame of mind, your personal feelings about your opponent and whatever subconscious influences may be working on your psyche—any one or all of these things can tip the scales in one direction or the other.
It’s a hard thing to explain. On some days, you get out on the court and you can be very keen to win and youll play super. Other days, you can go out with the same desire, but you don’t play with the same abandon.
Yes, it is a hard thing to explain. The main reason is that most of us are unaware of the factors that affect the ever-changing relationship between the threshold level and the arousal level. I once allowed myself to be wired up to a biofeedback machine, which measures what psychologists call GSR—galvanic skin reaction. It’s a measurement of inner stress. A dial on the machine went up when the GSR was high and down when it was low. The weird thing about the test was that
84 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War when it registered higher, I was not consciously aware of any anxiety.
chologist in Australia that there were certain players who were getting to me on a subconscious level. The psychologist would simply mention players’ names. Some triggered a bigger response than others, and this surprised me because I wasn't consciously aware that my reactions to these players were any different from my reactions to other players.
Most experienced players have a general grasp of their own stress reaction patterns and have jerry-rigged ways to deal with them. Indeed, most players maintain they need this inner excitement to hone their reflexes.
“Without these feelings,” Chris Evert says, “it’s tough to get started. You feel flat and sluggish.”
Early in my career I read an article that quoted
Ted Williams as saying, “I never overcame nervousness.” That statement stuck with me throughout my career. I got to the point where I actully wanted my mouth to feel a little dry. I wanted to be aware of my heart pounding. It gave me the little edge I needed to play my best.
It's important that we not confuse what Seixas describes here and what we might normally think of as nervousness or anxiety. To be nervous before a match is not necessarily to be worried, although the distinction is sometimes difficult to make.
I was always a little nervous before a match, but there was nothing specific I was afraid of. It never entered my mind, for instance, that I would double fault at a big point. It was more a general feeling.
I'd go out and warm up and think to myself, this guy is hitting so great, how am I ever going to beat him. But this was good for me because it really forced me to look for weakness and develop an idea of how I should play in order to beat him. Eventually, once I got into the match, I'd stop worrying about whether I was going to beat him and concentrate on doing the job.
Fortunately for Mulloy, he could pull off what he’s just described. Most players can’t. Most professionals get rid of their “butterflies” once the match heats up, but their minds still remain vulnerable to periodic attacks of steel elbow and related miseries. Knowing this, they have devised their own ways of coping. Wendy
Overton, for instance, has learned that if she doesn’t come down too hard on herself in the beginning when she misses shots, she doesn’t get as nervous as she used to get early in her career.
The mistake I used to make was to get so angry with myself as soon as I'd muff a few shots that by the time the match was halfway through, I was totally discouraged. Just learning to be nicer to myself helped my game tremendously.
Another player with a regrettable tendency to get down on himself when his shots aren't falling in is
86 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
years that if he can keep his mind calm and focus on what he has to do to put the other player under pressure, he can keep his nerves under control.
One of the things I've learned about myself is that I can’t think about or even watch tennis before a match. What happens when I do this is that I become all stirred up inside. I do my best to keep
soon as I do that my whole game will fall apart.
For Ingrid Bentzer, letting her mind drift during the break to a subject that has nothing at all to do with tennis (“My little girl, for instance”) can often relax her when she feels she’s getting too tense for the good of her game. Brian Fairlie is one of many players who advocates deep breathing whenever tension starts to seep in. Billy Talbert says that when he felt himself getting nervous in the middle of a match, he’d try to imagine that he was practicing and he insists it worked most of the time. Tony Roche has a habit of shaking his arm down between points. (“Just to keep it loose.”’)) Marty
Riessen will do knee bends or jump up on his toes.
“Keep the body loose,” he says, “and you can sometimes fool the mind.” John Newcombe amends Riessen’s theory by suggesting that you smile whenever you feel yourself getting too tense. “It’s tough to be tense and to smile at the same time,” he says.
If none of these suggestions is of any help to you, you might consider Rod Laver’s advice.
The thing that has always worked best for me whenever I felt I was getting too tense to play good tennis was to simply remind myself that the worst thing—the very worst thing—that could happen to me was that I'd lose a bloody tennis match. That’s all.
The one thing I've learned about tension on the court that’s really helped me is something I got from Pancho Gonzales. He told me once that if you can somehow learn to relax in between points, the tension won't build up in a match the way it does if you try to concentrate every second. Just as physical fatigue can make you mentally tired, mental fatigue can get you physically tired. Whatever you do to minimize the tension will make serious choking much less likely.
Forget about the match and the point and the other player and just concentrate on watching the
to shrug them off. You can’t tell yourself enough times: it’s just a game.
And, finally, a word from Vic Braden:
You have to groove with it. Really. You feel yourself getting all nervous and aroused and the worst thing you can do, really, is fight it because it’s gonna surface, anyway. So what you want to do is
88 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War tell yourself how great it is that you're feeling this excitement. Get used to the feelings. They can't hurt you.
Braden’s advice is particularly worth noting because it’s the ability to follow it that seems to separate the super great players from the routinely great. Most tennis players deal with their emotions and nerves by keeping them in check. The brain plays the role of
a more conservative style of play. Choking is taking place but its effects are not great because there is more choking taking place on the other side of the net. Then there are the players who manage to keep their nerves and emotions under control but in a way that enables them to maintain the same level of play regardless of the situation. Borg is such a player. So are Chris Evert,
Harold Solomon, and Ken Rosewall. Each of these players is known for being able to play the “big points” well but I wonder if we're not being fooled. What seems to happen frequently in big points involving these players is that their opponents are playing the big point poorly.
Not that it makes a difference in the outcome. Borg, for instance, has expressed on many occasions his philosophy for playing big points, which is to keep the pressure on but not to unnecessarily risk an error. His game doesn’t come up on big points; it just doesn’t go down. On occasion he pays the price. Most players who watched the Borg—Connors Forest Hills final in 1976 feel that Borg could have won the tiebreaker in the third set (and probably the match) if he had played more aggressively when Connors faltered and fell behind
2-4. He didn’t. If anything, he played a little safer, wait-
Antidote to Nerves: Confidence 89 ing for Connors to take the initiative, which Connors, of course, did.
Against most players, whenever I need only one more point to win the set or to break serve, I can hit the ball fairly shallow because most players will not go for a winner off that shallow shot. Theyll tighten up a little, hit the shot safer and give me a chance to win the point on the passing shot. But Connors doesn’t play it safe, he just hits out.
Indeed Connors does. For he is one of those athletes blessed with the ability to lift the level of his game when confronted with pressure. Gonzales could do it.
So could Laver in his prime. And Newcombe. And Billie Jean King. Granted, each of these players has extraordinary ability, but there is a special dimension to this ability—a dimension that can be called, for lack of a better term, confidence.
WHAT penicillin is to pneumonia, confidence is
—the sequence of psychological and physical events that produces choking on the court is simply not going to happen frequently enough to make a negative difference in your tennis. You will choke on occasion, like everyone else, but you will do it less than most—and rarely when it really counts.
90 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
But how do we define a concept as vague and as fleeting as confidence? More importantly, how do we get a real handle on it?
Roy Emerson: .
The whole thing is to have a positive mental approach, You can see it in a player like Newcombe.
confidence across the other side of the net. He’s not worried about the ball going in: he’s just blasting away. The worst thing you can do on a court ts to say to yourself: “Do I hit this serve with everything I have, or do I have to get it in?” You can't think in these terms. You have to make up your mind that yowre going to hit the bloody serve and go ahead and hit it.
Okay, that describes confidence, but we still haven't pinned it down. Confidence is basically nothing more than a feeling—a belief that you can do a particular thing—but it shares with concentration a frustrating elusivity. You can be confident one moment and bereft of confidence the next. You can be confident in one set of circumstances and not in another. Roscoe Tanner, for obvious reasons, feels more confident on a fast surface that adds thunder to his serve than on a slow surface. Eddie Dibbs feels more confident on clay than he does on asphalt. It depends a lot on whom you're playing, too. Marty Riessen, for example, suggests that a big reason American players tended to do better against
Rod Laver in Laver’s prime than Australian players was that Americans weren’t as overwhelmed by the idea of playing Laver, “It always seemed to me,” Reissen says,
Antidote to Nerves: Confidence 91
“that most of the Australians conceded defeat even be-
Let’s not overstate the case. In and of itself, confidence is not a form of behavior. Only when it is overlaid with some specific activity does it make its presence noticed. And even then, it can take you only as far as you are physically and technically capable of going. The most confident runner in the world isn’t going to do a mile in four minutes if the lung capacity isn’t there. The most “confident” tennis player isn’t going to get very far if he spends too much time getting his head into gear and too little time on his tennis game.
But what confidence can do is eliminate mental barriers that prevent you from performing to the outer limits of your capability. There is probably a finite limit to how well you can play on any day with confidence, but there is no limit to how poorly you can play if you lack it.
The difference between feeling confident when youre playing and not feeling confident is that you never hesitate to go for shots and you're not giving your opponent the extra opportunities you give him when yowre not feeling confident and you're just trying to keep the ballin play.
When you're not confident, it affects nearly everything you do on the court: the way you move, the way you hit the ball, the way you think. You let winning opportunities go by, you tighten up on easy points. It’s the catalyst to your entire game. When it goes, your game goes.
92 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
Gottfried and Smith, of course, are talking in absolute terms. As Dennis Ralston reminds us, confidence can be as elusive as concentration, even more so.
. It comes and goes in a match. You can serve a game and have a feeling that you can close your eyes and get every first serve in. Ten minutes later, you've lost it and you’re worrying about losing the game on double faults.
Confidence feeds upon itself. A series of events seem to take place within the brain at one minute that determines how you will feel about the same series of events two or three minutes from now—or even two or three weeks from now. Perhaps in anticipation of the re-markable potential for self-deception that exists within the human spirit, the brain appears to have been endowed with its own accounting system. When the time comes to make a judgment on whether you will or won't succeed in a particular task, promises and salesmanship will only go so far. If you have double faulted each of the past three service games at game point, the next time there’s a game point there is very little you can do to persuade the brain that it doesn’t have anything to worry about this time.
one big shot you can really count on, it tends to carry over to the rest of your game. One of the
men players than women players is that a lot of men players have tremendous confidence in their
Antidote to Nerves: Confidence 93 serves. So when the serve is working, they figure the worst they can do is stay even. Most women don’t have that luxury.
Not that the brain isn’t receptive to a logical, well presented argument. Two weeks after he beat Jimmy
Connors in the finals of the 1976 North American Zone
Davis Cup finals, Raul Ramirez admitted that before the competition began he did not feel very confident about his chances. By the time he took the court against Connors in the finals, however, his mental attitude had changed.
A very strange thing happened. Even though I didn’t give myself much of a chance against Connors, when the newspaper reporters and everyone
down to Connors and me in the final) I had to tell them that, of course, I thought I was going to win.
So they started asking me why, and I started to think up reasons, And the more I thought about the reasons—especially the fact that I had Davis
Cup experience and Jimmy didn’'t—the more I began to realize that I really was going to win.
And when I finally went out on the court, I was very confident.
a mental block about something, sit down and list all the reasons the mental block shouldn’t be there. It can work—providing, you are able to mount a strong argument.
But in many situations where mental blocks exist, the mind is resistant to change, often unreasonably so.
94 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War
Here it’s been at least six months since you’ve double faulted at a big point, and now you find yourself suddenly starting to worry about it. Try to explain to the brain that what happened six months ago is past history. The brain is likely to-remind you that history has a habit of repeating itself. It will even show you film clips.
I once lost a match to Sandy Mayer when I double faulted at game point at 5-3 in the final set.
Months later, whenever Id find myself in that same situation—where I was ahead in a close match on my serve—Id think back to that point, and I'd worry about it. This is not the way to win tennis matches.
You get into winning or losing patterns. A lot of it’s getting the breaks. If you win a lot of close matches, your attitude when you get into close matches is, “No sweat, I've been here before and
Pll be here again.” But if you start to lose a lot of close ones, or you get ahead in a match, then the whole picture changes. The other guy starts to catch up and you start to think, “Oh, oh, here it comes again.” Basically, I think this is what happened to Stan Smith. He lost just enough of the edge so that the close ones he used to win he began losing, and that changed his entire attitude about his game.
Many players have trouble keeping negative in-fluences from infiltrating the mind. If Virginia Wade
Antidote to Nerves: Confidence 95 isn’t hitting the ball smoothly, she'll get impatient with herself even if she’s well ahead, a trait shared by any number of players for whom looking good on a tennis court is as important as winning. Players who play very controlled tactical styles are often thrown off when the unexpected happens.
Certain players have an idea in their minds that tennis is a very logical game, and that if you do
A, B, and C, then X, Y, and Z will happen. Usually, it will work out this way, but there’s a random element to tennis, too, and certain players simply cannot cope when the predictable things don’t happen. This is why I say that thinking too much on the court can get you into trouble.
If the brain does indeed base its judgments on past performance, it’s logical to wonder why it doesn’t use as a frame of reference one’s good days and ignore the bad days? A capital suggestion, except for one thing:
negative experiences in most cases seem to make a stronger impression than positive experiences, rather like a bank that is more curious about the time you went bankrupt than the ten times you created a successful business. Ultimately, negative experiences create a fallout whose residue appears to seep into the subconscious.
The presence of these negative memory tapes deep within the subconscious is probably the principal barrier to a feeling of genuine confidence. The problem is, you can’t really get to these memory banks through conventional means. Often, the minute your conscious mind tampers with the brain’s memory bank, the brain
96 2. Emotions on the Court: The Mind at War rejects the new data—without your consent or awareness.
There seems to be two solutions to this dilemma. One is to stockpile a succession of positive experiences which, by their sheer weight, eventually work their way past the brain into the subconscious. There they can eradicate the negative tapes, or at least quiet them down. “I’m winning now because I’m confident,” Brian Gottfried said in the midst of his hot streak during the early part of 1977. “But the reason I’m confident is that I'm winning.” Torben Ulrich has a habit of slowly going through the motions of a stroke two or three
you accumulate in your life never leave you,” he ex-plains, “and sometimes, without any real reason, they'll surface. What you have to do is put them back in their place by grafting the proper habits over them.”
The second solution to the dilemma, and a more adventurous one, is to go right to the core of it. You circumvent the brain altogether in order to reprogram the subconscious—i.e., you undergo hypnosis or a related experience. More athletes than you might imagine have sought the help of hypnotists to restore confidence. One such resource is a Los Angeles man named
Arthur Ellen, whose subjects have included hundreds of prominent performers and athletes, among them
Harry Belafonte, Jackie Jensen, Maury Wills, Don
Sutton, and, reportedly (no one will say for certain),
Stan Smith. Ellen contends that when an athlete goes into a slump, the reasons are nearly always subconscious in origin.
Hypnosis, Ellen is careful to point out, cannot imbue you with physical skills you do not already possess.