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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Mint-on-sunday/  What you wield against you
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What you wield against you

There is an outer game of tennis and it's played against that crafty opponent across the net. But there's an inner game too, and your opponent there is even craftier

Photo: iStockPremium
Photo: iStock

During a recent session on the tennis court, my friend and I took a break to catch our breath. After some small talk, he asked me how to hit his backhand. This flattered me, because my backhand is iffy at best: sometimes I hit it well, other times the ball flies almost anywhere except where I intend to send it.

Though yes, I’ll admit: it is better than his stroke.

So, I told him how I think about the backhand: shoulders turn towards the ball, racquet back, step forward, smooth full-arm stroke that meets the ball just in front of you, head still, follow through till the racquet finishes above your head.

“Think about it," I said. “Picture yourself playing the shot."

It struck me later: I hadn’t suggested he practice his backhand, though I trust he will. I had only suggested he form a mental picture of himself hitting it.

It may be a small thing, but when thinking about it some more, I realized this is just my experience. When I practice my strokes against a wall, for example, this is what happens: as I walk up to the wall, a moving image forms in my head of how I want to hit the stroke. I’m not sure how and when I started doing this. I’m not sure the image is even consciously formed—it’s just there as I get going. And then I spend the next half an hour or so trying to replicate that little mind movie, over and over again.

If I thought I was the only one in the world who does this, at some point I realized that nearly anyone who plays nearly any game with any seriousness does it too. It’s called visualization.

Elite players do it consciously, deliberately, as part of their training, as part of preparing for a big match. Great cricketers like Matthew Hayden and Rahul Dravid, for example, were known to go out to the pitch the day before a Test match. They would sit down, close their eyes and imagine the ball coming at them in different ways, visualize the strokes they would play in each case, remember earlier triumphs and what worked then. A focused, intense session like this was just as vital as hours spent practising in the nets. It laid the foundation for the long innings they wanted to play—and often did play—in the actual game the next day. Similarly, athletes in tennis, golf, track and field and more use visualization like this.

I’m no psychologist, nor am I an elite player of anything, but I’m a believer in the power of visualization. The very act of imagining yourself doing things right has an effect when you actually try to do them. It smoothens your movements, it makes you focus, it lifts your game.

What’s the reason for this? There are plenty of books that explain, but for me this is how it works. On the court, there’s an opponent across the net who gets the ball back, makes me run and hit that next shot and the next. Overcoming him/her is the battle every point boils down to. But there’s another opponent too, and that one resides between my ears. He’s prone to suddenly telling me things like: “You’ve hit three shots in a row, so now everyone and their bro-in-law knows you’re going to hit this next one into the net." Or: “Your serve has never amounted to anything much. That’s not going to change now that you need to avoid double-faulting." Or: “You’re up 5-2 in this set. You can afford to take it easy."

What happens then? The next shot goes unerringly into the net. Or I double-fault not just right then, but twice more in succession. Or five games go by in the blink of an eye and suddenly, I’ve lost the set 7-5. All those and plenty more have happened to me.

In 1974, W. Timothy Gallwey wrote a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. My brother-in-law—as much of a tennis fanatic as me and possibly more—gave me a copy as a gift. I let it gather dust on my shelf for years, thinking: “Ah, one more of those self-help books. What on earth is the ‘inner game’ anyway? Tennis is played out on the court!" But I finally did read it, and found that it spoke to much that I felt was languishing in my game.

Yes, Gallwey explains, there is an outer game of tennis and it’s played against that crafty opponent across the net. But there’s an inner game too, and your opponent there is even craftier. Because it’s you, and the weapons you use against you are the fundamental doubts you have about yourself.

Frankly, I’ve always thought of this kind of language as mumbo-jumbo at best. Still, I persisted with the book. And one weapon Gallwey suggests you, in turn, wield against yourself is visualization. Imagine what you want yourself doing on the court, and it has a curious way of turning into reality. While serving, for example, if I take a few seconds to imagine the ball landing in a specific spot across the net, it will actually land there more reliably than otherwise. (To me, once every three attempts counts as “more reliably" than once every 10).

The very day I finished the book, I remember, I tried doing just that. I was playing a strapping teenager who had nothing much to his game except a whopping forehand that he loved to try to hit me with, and occasionally succeeded. Irritating dude, but he was the only one on court that evening. Gallwey fresh on my mind, I spent a few seconds before each serve simply visualizing where I wanted the ball to go.

I honestly didn’t think it was making any difference to my game. Until the teenager’s mother, sitting watching us, suddenly yelled at him, and I swear this is pretty much verbatim: “You’ve got to be more careful! He’s serving them right at you today!"

Something clicked in my mind. And among other things, the teenager has never again managed to hit me with that belted forehand.

Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Final Test: Exit Sachin Tendulkar.

Twitter: @DeathEndsFun

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Published: 04 Oct 2015, 08:44 AM IST
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