Schooled by A Pipe-Smoking Yoda

There are some tennis memories that are burned in my mind and they will never leave me. One for example, is watching a Bjorn Borg – John McEnroe Wimbledon final, one is saving up to buy my first second hand Donnay Borg Pro racquet.

Another is the day that I learned that I was focusing on all the wrong things.

At 14-years-old, I had hit a million balls against the wall already, read Borg’s My Guide to Tennis book until the page corners were tattered and browned (there is an irony that I now work for SPORTIME, home of the John McEnroe Tennis Academy. Trust me, I know).

More importantly, I had ascended to the pinnacle for any floppy-haired teenager from England, a place on the Men’s second team at my local club! It actually was a big deal and a history maker for the club and myself, as my 15-year-old partner, Peter, and I were the young guns and good enough to be officially tolerated!

Our first match was to be an adventure, an away match at a little grass court club in the deepest darkest corner of the English countryside!  As we pulled our cherished arsenal of weapons from the trunk of the car, mine two much loved Donnay Borg Pros and Peter’s Prince Pros, we looked across at the courts to see some elder statesmen warming up. We crossed the field to the courts sharing some snickers and juvenile jokes, which on its face should have been enough to predict what was coming.

I don’t remember the names of the two players we faced that day, I only remember that both had more than sixty years’ experience on this planet, and probably quite a lot of it had been spent on that tennis court. Both wore all white clothing, Dunlop green flash, vintage tennis caps, a long since outdated style, and one squinted through rectangular eye glasses. Their shorts descended to the top of their knees and their socks extended upwards to the bottom of their knees. Those knees still haunt me, like four pink walnuts mocking me, but one thing has left more of an emotional scar!

The player with the glasses had another facial accessory. During the warm up he was chewing on a pipe, and when the warm up was over, I was relieved to see him stumble to his bag to put it away, except he didn’t. Instead, he stacked it with Golden Virginia tobacco, lit it and took a long draw! “Puff or Smooth” he called as he spun his Slazenger Challenge No.1, surrounded by a cloud of smoke. He was already in my head.

The next hour and ten minutes was a doubles master class in slicing and dicing. Their weapons may have been out of a book never to be written, but they knew every divot, every blade of grass on this court and they could hit them with pin point accuracy. They changed speeds, heights, depths and spins, and they were never out of position. Despite our perfect technique and youthful legs, we got schooled by these two tennis Jedi Masters.

On the car journey back I tried to make sense of the pain, as Peter and I sat silently in back of the Ford Escort that was now charged as our vehicle of salvation. It was bad enough to lose love and one but his voice bounced around my head a reminder, a tormentor, a reality check!

Our team captain, a passenger in the front seat, pivoted back:

“Those guys are tough,” he said. “They know how to play the game, and how to make the ball do exactly what they want.”

And there it was, like a bolt of lightning from the tennis gods, as if the clouds had opened to a heavenly chorus and Borg himself had spoken. We had hit, we had drilled, our strokes were refined, but we didn’t know how to play, and more importantly, how to adapt! It wasn’t just that specific grass court, which despite its lush appearance was full of minor hills and bumps, but how could it be that we had totally and completely missed the point of tennis. That was May 1982, but I can still smell the grass and see the faces of Yoda and Obi Wan!

Tennis is about making the ball do something that challenges your opponent. When we practice, are we looking at how we change the ball’s characteristics, changing direction, spin, speed, height and depth, or are we just trying to hit it harder and hope it doesn’t come back?  So much of our focus is on technique, but this must always serve a purpose.

So this summer, have you improved your direction? Can you place the ball at the onrushing player’s feet or hit with enough height and spin that it pushes them back?  Can you change the pace of the ball and still maintain depth or push them back and use an angle to send the on a run on a challenging diagonal?

As they look down on us from tennis heaven, I am sure that both of the legends that schooled us on that day won’t recall the match, the score or even that I was sporting a completely matching FILA ensemble from head to toe. But I do, and I am grateful for it, as it shaped my mind and my desire to play tennis. Thanks so much to Yoda and Obi Wan for giving me perhaps my most important tennis lesson.