Going Out of Your Mind

*Even in hour four of his first match, Kukushkin still had a 36-year-old bounce in his step.*

Mikhail Aleksandrovich Kukushkin doesn’t need to be doing this. Over the course of his career, he’s played in all the tennis “Grand Slam” tournaments. He’s played the Olympics and Davis Cup for Kazakhstan, has won tour events, has reached the rank of #39 in the world. He’s made more than $7 million as a professional tennis player.

But those highlights were a while back. On this day he is 36 years old, playing in Cary, NC, halfway across the world from his home and wife and young son. This is the tennis minor leagues — what is called the “Challenger” series. He’s playing against a kid who is barely half his age and looks younger. The match, if you factor in rain delays, is entering the third set and the fourth hour. If Kukushkin wins today, he’ll just cover his airfare.

As I and 11 others sit watching him, all I can think is: “Why the heck is he doing this?”

Two days later I’m standing in front of a ball machine that’s firing 75-mile-per hour balls at me once a second while I try to volley them away. The machine is whining. The sun is shouting. A bruised rib is screaming. And I am gasping: “Why the heck am I doing this?”

My decision to try to become a competitive senior level tennis player wasn’t an obvious one.

I’d played a lot of tennis, on high school and college teams, into my early 20’s, until one day an epiphany came to me with crystal clarity in the middle of a match: this is probably the best tennis I am ever going to play. I already knew I was going to be better at jobs that were mental, not physical. I knew I was going to put in a lot of hours at work. I was hoping to get married and have kids. And all those things meant that, realistically, I was not going to have enough time to get much better at tennis before my body slowed and spread and sagged. This moment, this very one, was probably going to be my zenith as a player.

That thought process broke the spell of my semi-greatness that day. I tanked and lost the match.

And looking back on it, I was probably right. Over the next 40 years, I had a series of fascinating jobs that activated my brain and made me feel useful. They also sucked up huge amounts of time. An amazing marriage and children and volunteer work and church time consumed the rest of my hours. Any time for tennis was on the margins.

But as I stepped back from work a couple of years ago and the kids got closer to launch, I was left with a big new chunk of time. I wondered, if I really tried, could I get good enough at tennis that I could play in national tournaments?

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to figure that out (for other reflections see here, here and here). I’ve learned a few things about going out of my mind and more deeply into tennis:

*Playing tennis at age 64 is even harder than at 36 (photo Adrian Etheridge)*

It hurts: As we get older, our lung capacity declines. Our percentage of “fast twitch” fibers – the ones that help us explode in one direction or another – declines. In our 60’s our heart is typically only 70% as efficient as in our 30’s. Our prefrontal cortex – the brain part that helps us concentrate and decide – has been on a relentless shrinking spree for 40 years. Vision fades. Balance teeters. Our muscles and tendons get increasingly inelastic. Over the past two years I’ve sprained calves, hamstrings, groins and shoulders playing tennis. Some days I find myself wearing more wraps and compressions and bandages than clothes.

*The best of the best seniors get...a ball made of actual gold (it is only slightly larger than this).*

It feels selfish: I was incredibly lucky during my brain-forward life (another senior player, Gerald Marzorati, in a fun memoir on his tennis life, calls that phase “cephalocentric”) to find or create a series of jobs that I found interesting and that I believed were “useful” – I always had in the back of my head that what I was doing was helping other people. I was just as lucky that those think-heavy jobs enabled me to make a living and support a family. By contrast, my focus on tennis feels self-absorbed. Turns out that it takes an incredible amount of time to actually get better at something. There’s time spent on cardio, strength, quickness, agility, not to mention actual practice on the court. There’s the expense of racquets, balls, lessons, court-time, and (inevitably) rehab. There’s flying or driving to out-of-state tournaments, staying in a hotel room, eating out. The reward for the best possible outcome? Those who win national-level tournaments (I am not one of those) may get enough prize money to pay for their hotel room. Those who win national championships, the crowning achievement, are rewarded with a tiny gold tennis ball. Is any of my flailing making the world a better place?

Competition at this age can seem really silly: It occurs to me sometime around the start of the second set of any match I’m playing to ask myself: does it actually matter if I beat this person? For at least the last thirty years of my work life, I wasn’t really competing with anyone – I was competing for the success of an idea or a policy. There were opponents of the ideas I was working on, but even though the actual stakes were sometimes high, it rarely seemed personal. In tennis, the stakes couldn’t possibly be lower (on my deathbed, will I regret losing in the quarterfinals of the East Arcadia Open?) but the competition is deeply personal. So there I am an hour in to a match, exhausted, trying to figure out how to outwit, outthink or outlast some other geezer — to defeat this very visible fellow human across the net from me. It can be pretty easy to argue that it REALLY doesn’t matter.

So why am I doing this? Health isn’t a bad argument. In spite of all the injuries, I’m 15 pounds lighter and more fit than I have been in years. And the biggest study done on the impact of sports on longevity finds that playing tennis adds more years to your life – +9.7 -- than any other sport (in case you are curious, that’s 50% more added years than #2 badminton and twice the benefit of #3 soccer). The Danish theologian Soren Kirkegaard once wrote to a friend that “Health and salvation can only be found in motion.” And he was a pretty smart guy.

It’s also kind of cool to be able to see myself getting deliberately better at something at my age. For years I’ve been cheering on the value of “kaizen,” the Japanese philosophy of gradual but constant improvement, in the workplace. But tennis is also a place where I can see tiny improvements over time. On the physical side, a new grip gives me improved accuracy in my forehand; on the mental side practice with concentration drills leads to fewer squandered points. If I work hard enough, that means that even as my body deteriorates, I may be able to decline more slowly than others my age. “It can be humbling,” Marzorati writes, “to understand that a desire to learn something new, develop a passion, get good at something so late in life, is not going to ultimately thwart that stalling and diminishing [of your body]… You compete against it anyway.”

But even that’s not it. Tennis has always been the thing that takes me to my happy place. Twenty years ago, when I was working as hard as I ever have and parenting as much as I ever would, I was something close to clinically depressed. I went to see a “spiritual guide” in hopes of finding a way out. Her prescription? Start hitting tennis balls again. It worked: it gave me oasis of deeply personal joy.

Now, without depression as a motivator, I’m returning to tennis to find out what else it might give me. The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne suggested that when we are done with all our striving and “doing,” that’s the best time to seek self-knowledge. Montaigne was pretty smart too. Maybe in some weird way I will learn more about myself with this tennis experiment.

It’s hard to know what’s going on in Mikhail Kukushkin’s head this week (I could manage only a fractured conversation with him). Maybe this body-centered job he’s done for the past 18 years is all he can imagine for himself. Maybe he’s hoping for one more big run. He’s one win from tying the all-time record for Challenger titles – sort of the Crash Davis (see “Bull Durham”) of minor league tennis. Or maybe he really thinks he can get back to the majors: “In tennis,” he told a reporter recently, “Age is not as important as before. At age 36, Novak Djokovich is still number one in the world. It doesn’t mean anything but obviously it’s not easy to stay in shape. It was much easier to play when I was younger. That’s why I am working really hard now.”

That resonates with me. And maybe that hard work is paying off for Mikhail too. Some four hours after taking the court that Monday, he walks off with a win over the kid. Another win over the tournament’s 5th seed in the following round brings him to the quarterfinals. He gets drubbed there by a 24-year-old, but creaks away from the Cary tournament with $3690 in prize money and 10 ATP ranking points -- he’ll move up from #121 to #117 in the world rankings.