The Book That Changed My Life Part I: Playing the Inner Game
141 pages of brilliance
One of the great bits of luck in my life is that there’s no videotape of me as a young tennis player.
Trust me, it was ugly. The worst part wasn’t the mediocrity; it was the meltdowns. Think John McEnroe with all the anger and none of the artistry. I yelled. I cussed. I pounded rackets. I was miserable.
I was a tennis brat until…the book.
Until it all changed – with a book. The book was a birthday gift from my sister Mary: The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Gallwey. I’d read tennis books before, of course. Most of them were crammed with illustrations of the proper backhand grip or serving motion. The better ones were a bit more ambitious, discussing strategies for breaking down an opponent’s strengths or sharing insights on the most important point of a game (the fourth, I learned) or the most important game of the set (the seventh – of course!).
Into that landscape, The Inner Game landed in my 14-year-old world like a glitter bomb. The book had almost nothing to say about footwork, technique, or opponents; it was all about the head, heart and soul. And I’m not sure it was even mostly about tennis. Instead, it was a book about how Gallwey, a teaching pro in California, applied the principles of Zen Buddhism to the game he loved.
At that age my beliefs were closer to don’t-have-a-clue-ddhism, but I was desperate to find a way out of the misery of racket-bashing and self-loathing. I read the book in about a day, slamming it down every fifteen minutes, then picking it up again, riding jagged waves of anger, mockery and awe. Did this thing really have the nerve to call itself a “tennis book” with ideas like these?
Observe, don’t judge. Rather than banging my racquet against the ground/fence/head after I sent a return into the bottom of the net, Gallwey asked that I simply notice what happened. The shot was not “good” or “bad”; it was just a shot. My reaction: This was absurd of course; any idiot could see how horrible a shot was. And its suckiness was worthy of remarking on to others, even those standing a zip code away.
Live in the present. It is easy to dwell on what just happened or to worry about what might happen next on the tennis court. Gallwey said I should instead focus on what was happening in the present and allow myself to be there for it. I thought: He had no idea how embarrassed I was by that last shot or what people would think if I lost to this guy.
“The ball seems to get hit through a process that doesn’t require thought.”
Trust your instincts. Gallwey said my head was preventing my body from knowing what it needed to do to hit the shot. I needed to get my head out of the way and unleash my unconscious self on the court. I needed to let my body do the right thing. “When a tennis player is ‘in the zone,’” he said, “He’s not thinking about how, when, or even where to hit the ball. He’s not trying to hit the ball…the ball seems to get hit through a process which doesn’t require thought.” Me: Yeah, right. Magic, hunh? My body couldn’t possibly do that without the help of my micromanaging brain.
By the time I got to the end of the book, I came up with the kind of evil plan only a teenager can concoct to debunk it. I would try out the techniques at my next tournament, in Goldsboro, NC, then write Gallwey to tell him he was a doofus (even then I was eloquent). That’d show him.
The plan backfired spectacularly. I played better than I ever had, beating two nemeses along the way to the finals. Even when I lost, I found myself strangely calm. For the tournament, my scores were: Racket throws 0; Bloody murder screams 0; Peacefulness 100%. And, for the first time ever, I won the tournament sportsmanship award.
In the half century since then, I’m not sure I ever again so fully captured living the inner game on the tennis court as I did for that mystical week in Goldsboro, but I’ve also never returned to my brat-worst self either. For example, these days I find that there are, in fact, objectively, a few bad shots still worthy of screaming about – but it can be just as satisfying to grunt the name of a foul-sounding food or chemical additive* as it does to insult deities or body parts. I don’t often find myself fully “in the zone” of effortless beauty on the court for a full match, but when it happens I can appreciate it and bask in it as long as it lasts. And to be honest, losing is not something I ephemerally observe and forget about. But the dark shadow generally hangs around for only a couple of hours before I remember tennis is just a tiny part of life and there’s always another match.
I never got around to writing Gallwey that letter. Maybe this is it.
-Leslie
*When you absolutely positively have to say something, some alternatives I have found for cuss words include: “bean curd,” “fudge ripple,” and “fructose.” Of course “cuss word” by itself can also help deliver me of pain.
Questions: Have you read the book? If so, how did it affect you? Or is there another book from your teenage life that was as transformative?
Next time: What reading The Inner Game did to the rest of my life.
References:
The book: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/inner-game-of-tennis-w-timothy-gallwey/1100619448
Dangers of head-bashing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi-CgSO9Evw
Don’t Worry Be Happy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-diB65scQU