“Talk does not cook rice.” 

-ancient Chinese proverb

And there I was for hours a day, day after day, month after month, on a tennis court in the sun. Always with the sun, always shining bright and hot off the hard courts, through the cloudless afternoons of my teens. Practicing. Drilling. Playing. 

Keep your eye on the ball. The very first and very oldest lesson. Drilled into your head. You watch the ball, you study the ball, you slow the ball down in your mind and see it spin. Keep your eye on the ball. You say it over and over. Then repeat and repeat until the very last ball of the day or point of the match. Keep your eye on the ball. Your mantra. The intensity of your concentration can never let you down. 

Next. But simultaneously. Keep the ball out in front of you. Always. In front of you. Easier said than done, but don’t ever let it get behind you. There is an energy transfer that happens best when the ball is in the sweet spot. And not just the sweet spot of the racquet, but the sweet spot of your weight transfer, the sweet spot of your strength and technique. A stroke. You’ll know it when it happens because you can feel it. Keep the ball in front of you. But it can only happen if you anticipate and prepare and move and get yourself in position before the ball gets there and the only way to ensure this is by using your feet.

It’s a dance. A crazy dance. Footwork. On your toes. It’s up, it’s back, it’s side to side. It’s bending your knees and it’s lunging and it’s standing straight up and reaching high overhead. Foot placement. Posture. Get in position. While it is never exactly the same, you try so hard to make it exactly the same every stroke. 

And finally, contact has been made, but you haven’t finished yet, because you have to follow through correctly and guide the ball to where you want it to go. You have to follow the ball, and then, just when you thought you hit a winner and the point was over, you have to start the whole process again by keeping your eye on the ball as it is returned cross-court, even deeper in your back-court territory now, and you're scrambling for position so that maybe you can get to that ball one more time and finish this point for good.

We don’t talk much on the court. It’s all in the execution. There were fleeting eternities when there was nothing else in the universe but myself and a tennis ball. And on the best days it was simply the tennis ball.

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