Over the entrance to the great centre court at Wimbledon, England, and also over the marquee steps to the stadium at the West Side Tennis Club, Long Island, are identical signs. They carry two lines from Rudyard KipIing’s “If”:
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same
. .
In those two lines, KipIing gave the perfect picture of what a great tennis player must have, and both tennis associations, British and American, recognized it. It is a long but effective way of saying one word-Courage!
When I use the term “courage” here, I do not merely mean that wonderful quality that is part of courage, known colloquially as “guts.” Certainly that quality is also needed by a champion, but it is momentary, perhaps fleeting, and but an infinitesimal part of the entire picture of courage.
Courage embodies patience, philosophy, and the vision to lift your eyes to the goal far ahead. It is the ability, in spite of discouragement, disheartening disappointments, even apparent failure, never to lose sight of that goal, or belief in yourself and your ultimate victory.
It takes five years to make a Tennis Player and ten years to make a Champion. If you set out to be champion, you must have the courage to look ten years ahead, and never waver or hesitate, even during those awful periods of growing pains when your game seems to be getting nowhere. You will lose to players you know you should beat, and all your best friends either look the other way when you play or tell you bluntly that you are just a dub and always will be. Every great player goes through such periods.
I know I did. I wish I had a dollar for every time I definitely made up my mind at night that I’d give up the game forever. Many were the evenings when I burned my racquets in imagination, only to be out on the court the next day,just as full of enthusiasm, confidence, and love of the game as ever. Perhaps that quality isn’t courage, only pigheadedness, but whatever it is, a person must have it, if he is ever going to become a real Tennis Player.
Progress in tennis is usually slow and not very easy to see. There are long periods in the development of every first-class player when he feels he is standing still. Do not look for improvement on a day-to-day or week-to-week basis. If you’re lucky and going up fast, the quickest visible improvement is month by month, but it is more likely to be a seasonal one.
It takes patience and philosophy to get you over this hump. The sounder and more carefully you lay your foundation, the better grounded in technique your strokes during your early years, the slower may be the progress. You may get some terrible lickings from flashy naturals who have played only half as long as you have, and whose strokes look like windmills. You may find yourself wondering why you waste all this time on correct form when, in a short time, some dub with no idea what he’s doing can beat you.
“Perhaps,” you tell yourself, “I’m crazy and I’d better give it all up.” That is the time your courage must come to your aid and keep your eyes on that distant goal of perfection. It can keep you plugging, and if it does, about a year later, you run into the same dub and you make a remarkable discovery-now he’s a walkover. You beat him so easily, you wonder how you could ever have lost to him. Actually, during that year, all you did was to gain mastery of what you had, but had not been able to control, a year before.
Every stroke that you gain control of, so that it is really dependable, takes at least six months of hard, intensive work in actual match play. If you make the mistake of attempting to work on too many shots at a time, you will gain control of none. The service and ground strokes can be learned and worked on together, but for your first year you should not attempt anything about the net game beyond learning the mere mechanics. The next year you can afford to start going in a great deal. In fact, turn for a while from a baseliner to a net player, and then gradually blend the two styles. The third year you can start to mix in the backspin shots, and soft volley. The fourth, you should take to work on variation of strokes and variety of spin, speed, and pace.
Finally, you add the half-volley and drop shot, and if you have reasonable control of all these, you have become a Tennis Player, instead of just someone who plays tennis. You can see that patience, determination, and vision of the ultimate goal are required to carry you along this sort of road. An added difficulty is the fact that each new shot you start to learn upsets to some extent the ones you have already mastered, with the result that each year you will suffer some unexpected and discouraging defeats.
Once the technical mastery of all these shots is yours, then experimentation in match play is needed to show when and where each will serve you best. It will take you several years to gain the knowledge that you will need to meet all players and all situations. During that time you will still lose matches to players you know you should beat, but you will have the inspiration of a few upset victories over stars who are as surprised as you are at the result. Those victories are merely the signposts of your regular game of the future, and you should treasure them to boost your courage for the long road to tennis heights.
Do not make the mistake of considering that one or two good wins means your job is done. They are merely indications of what is to come in the next few years. Many young players get delusions of grandeur after their first few big victories. They suddenly realize that they are God’s gift to tennis, that they know all there is to know about the game, and right there they start down the path to tennis oblivion.
Confidence and belief in one’s self are almost essential to success, but conceit is the one certain poison to kill all chance of it. Take your victories and defeats in your stride, and keep your feet on the ground and your head a trifle smaller than your hat. Success is a dangerous wine, particularly to the young. It can make you as drunk with your own importance as any liquor. It is during the time of your first successes that the philosophical quality of your courage must come to your aid. All those good old bromides like “The bigger they come, the harder they fall” carry real truth. Take your game seriously and regard it with respect. Play it always to the best of your ability, but for heaven’s sake don’t believe your publicity and start taking yourself too seriously. Conceit and fatheadedness can ruin your physical condition, your match temperament, and your future in an incredibly short time.
One of the early symptoms of conceit is an attitude of disparagement toward one’s opponent and his game. This is a growing attitude today among the juniors, and a most distressing one. I have watched so many kids recently who seemed to take a good shot by their opponent as a personal insult instead of giving it the admiration that was its due.
Instead of saying “Good shot!” sincerely, as a true sportsman would, they say “Good God!” meaning “How dare he hit such a shot at me? Doesn’t he know who I am?” I see these same juniors barely get a racquet on a passing shot by making a great effort, for which they deserve credit, and then cry in anguish, “How can I miss an easy shot like that?” when actually it would have beaten any player in the world. All these things are outward manifestations of an ingrowing conceit that will ruin these kids, unless caught and restrained by themselves. Unfortunately, these offenders hate to admit any other person’s equality, let alone superiority. The present crop of alibis for defeat is the greatest of any period in tennis history. Perhaps this is due to the tremendous amount of publicity that results whenever there is an upset, or a remarkable match is played. If so, the attitude is wrong, for it is based on fear.
Franklin Roosevelt put his finger on that fatal disease when he said, “All we have to fear is fear itself.” Behind much of conceit is fear, rooted in an inferiority complex and camouflaged by the swagger and the boast. There are many dangerous, regrettable examples of such conceit in the tennis world. One finds the player who, having won a good match, avoids his defeated opponent thereafter whenever possible, afraid to give him another chance, but he always lets the world know he won the last time they met. There is the reverse situation where the player, once beaten, tries to stay away from any event where he might meet his conqueror again, afraid of another licking. There is the great practice player, the man who hits like a demon when he is playing for fun, but who, when the chips are down in a match, ladles everything and loses ignominiously.
Yet he always tells of his great victories in practice, and invariably forgets his tournament record. All these players are on the wrong foot. They are afraid! Play tennis without fear of defeat and because it’s fun and you enjoy it, or don’t play it at all. There is no disgrace in defeat. The only disgrace lies in quitting in or “dogging” a match. There is no disgrace, no blot on your escutcheon, in admitting that there are players who can beat you, either in a match, a set, or on any given shot. You don’t have to try to prove it was an accident.
In the first place, nobody believes you, so you simply appear ridiculous, and in the second place, nobody cares but you, and you know the truth. All these alibis and explanations take your mind off the really important thing, which is, or should be, your match. if done to excess this sort of thing will destroy your concentration and bring about the very thing you fear, defeat.
There is no time in any hard-fought tennis match for your mind to wander if you want to win. Conceit makes you ton self-conscious and is apt to set your mind thinking about how you look, or what the gallery is saying about you, when it should be centred on your tactics and your opponent. There is a great difference between confidence and conceit, but many players never find out what it is.
The knowledge of what you have in your own game, the sincere belief that it will win, provided it is played to the best of your ability and the limit of your physical resources if necessary-that is confidence, and it will carry you far.
The attitude that you are so good you need not try, that you are so great that your opponent must fear you, and that you are past the point where you learn anything more is conceit. That will beat you consistently and if it becomes a habit will completely min your game. The dividing line is very thin, and extremely easy to cross. You should be on your guard at all times against the insidious inroads of your ego.
Once more, you must call on the vision of the distant goal to keep your balance. Believe me, you are never as good as they tell you you are, when you’ re winning, and never as bad as you think you are in defeat. A player plays as well as his opponent allows him to play. If you recognize the fact that many of your errors are due to the cleverness of your opponent and not just to your being “off your game,” you will be able to stay in your match and fight much better than if you’re stewing in your own juice because you are attempting to explain your errors to the world. Conceit makes you far too conscious of your own mistakes and makes you dwell on them.
Confidence allows you to take them in stride, forget them, and play the next point. There is a turning point in every player’s career where he reaches the peak of progress and, after a period at the top, he starts downhill. The beginning of that turn is very hard to detect. The period at the peak of one’s game may be long or short, but once that strange little turn comes, the decline is apt to be steady. The turn is completely psychological, and quite apart from a physical decline due to a definite accident, injury, illness, or age. The exact moment a player passes his peak is when he no longer plays to win, but only not to lose. In other words, it takes place when the possibility or probability of defeat is always in his mind, and he plays only to ward it off.
Once more the spectre of fear is haunting him. Many young players take years trying to overcome this, and their progress is retarded. If they do not rise above it, they never become real Players. There are even more youngsters who have so strong a natural belief in their ability to win that they never know what it is to expect defeat, and are surprised each time they are defeated, as they so often are, in their early stages. Still, that optimism is absolutely necessary to progress, since, if you are to go forward, you must always play to win, expect victory, and fight for it to the end. If it doesn’t come, surprise is natural and healthy.
Before you can really “dish it out” in tennis, you have to learn to “take it.” Only by going through the mill of many defeats can a player gain the experience needed to show him what shot to play, and when and where to play it. Champions are born in the labour of defeat. It takes all phases of courage to go through the years when defeat is your portion a large part of the time, and realize, amid all your discouragement, that you are steadily forging ahead toward your goal. If you learn something of tactics or the psychology of match play in a losing match, as you should if you analyse it afterward, you have taken another step toward the complete mastery of your game.