Power is nothing without control.
It’s the mantra you hear often, and one that I’ve always believed, but that I neither understood nor executed until I was down 1-7 (15-40) in an eight-game pro set match Monday night against an opponent from a spring tennis league.
At that moment, it suddenly occurred to me that given the amount of time I’ve spent immersing myself completely into tennis, it would be a little ridiculous – not to mention humiliating – for me to collapse 8-1 in my first competitive endeavor in a long time. Had I seriously not learned anything at all from the athletes whom I’d spent the last two years bombarding with questions about form, technique and the mental aspect of the game?
See, I have a tendency to just swing at the ball with wild abandon. The rationale – or lack thereof – is that if the little green orb comes flying toward you too fast for you to see it, you can’t hit it.
But talking to tennis players over the last couple of years has brought home the reality that hitting a tennis ball is a little different from slugging a baseball, and there’s a lot more to the game than just a heavy forehand.
Marco Verdasco would attest to that. He’s been on the losing end of several matches this year in which small, scrappy Davids managed to chip away at his heavy-but-erratic Goliath-like game and wear him down to the point where frustration mounted and he self-combusted. Verdasco has one of the biggest games around. But whether he can master control of the tools he has at his disposal is something that remains to be seen.
Ryan Brandel, the Ducks’ leading javelin thrower, has told me the same thing: You can’t just muscle the javelin and expect it to go where you want it to. A state of controlled violence is necessary for any sort of success with the javelin.
But I think the person responsible for really showing me the importance of the mental side of the game is Dominika Dieskova of the women’s tennis team.
There are few players out there who are more cognizant of the strategic, chess-like nature of the game than Dieskova, a cerebral athlete who possesses the ability to dissect a match down to the most minute of details so that even when she suffers a bad loss, she can tell you after the match exactly what she did wrong and what she should have done to correct it.
But the biggest thing she has going for her is her solid sense of self-belief. Over the course of this season, I was constantly floored by her ability to bounce back from defeat, especially given the fact that she’s not accustomed to losing. She honestly believes that she can talk herself out of trouble on the court. When she’s playing, she is her own biggest opponent. If she’s in a match and her game plan is not working, she puts the onus on herself to poke around until she finds something that works. She firmly believes that all she needs to win is already in her, and that defeat is a product of incorrect usage of those existing tools.
With a mindset like that, control of your game follows. And standing on that baseline Monday night, I tried to take a page out of the tennis queen’s book and just relax, take control of my arsenal instead of allowing it to control me. It worked. To a point. I managed to pull back three games and take the match to 8-4 before my primal tendency to just whack the damn ball won out over the controlled aggression. Mastering this control, it appears, is much more mentally exhausting than actually muscling the ball itself.
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