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| Despair |
My friend Doug told me once that one year in his childhood in Ann Arbor, he responded to the University of Michigan's annual disappointment in the Rose Bowl by destroying his bedroom, tearing down all of his posters of Michigan players, banners, photos, etc. Finally his father had to pull him aside and instruct him, solemnly, that "we do not destroy our rooms when our sports teams lose."
To which I've always thought a good answer might have been, "excuse me, but the evidence is that we certainly do."
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The subject of self-directed sports-related frustrated rage is one that comes up fairly often with me and my tennis friends. It's a familiar phenomenon: When things go badly on the court the overwhelming instinct can arise to slam your ($200!) racket on the ground or fling it over the fence, to scream at yourself, and otherwise ot act like an absolute ass. Your opponent — who is, by definition, having a much better time — will stay silent, in recognition of the phenomenon, and sometimes will offer "helpful advice" after the match along the lines of, "don't take each point so seriously, you're playing really well, you just need to focus a bit on x."
Which makes sense until the next time he is going through one of these frustrating periods, when he inevitably he does the same thing.
We regularly, when laughing about these outbursts of self-loathing, have conversations trying to explain to ourselves what it is that prompts them. It's not losing — or it's not just losing — as we can (and do) lose regularly without feeling any desire to slam our racket on the ground at all. But it's not just playing badly, either — it never happens when we're winning, for instance. It tends to happen, I think, when ... things are going badly, and you're simply not able to hit relatively simple shots that you normally can and do, and you don't know what's going wrong. Things just ... have stopped working, and you don't really know why.
It doesn't happen often, of course. I have only slammed a racket straight down on the ground once, and that was (seriously!) more playful than anything else. Still, I can't say it has never happened, and I have several times over the years forced myself at the last moment to throw my racket horizontally, generally into an open field or nearby bush.
My most dramatic and explosive outburst came last summer, during a social match with my friend Danny up at the posh La Paloma resort in Tucson, where he is a member.
My game, more than anyone else I know, goes through ups and downs. I think that's because I didn't learn from a coach, and I didn't learn with proper mechanics and technique. As a result it's very easy for things to slip, and I regularly go for months — sometimes four or five months — feeling desperate and overwhelmingly frustrated at my inability to hit the ball hard without hitting it out. My defense, quickness, and competitiveness remain fairly high, of course, so I still generally win more than I lose, but ... going for months at a time without being able to hit a winner (which means, in tennis, hitting it hard past your opponent), when I know there are times when I certainly can, can be extremely frustrating. Having them whizz balls past me, without me being able to do that to them, is embarrassing and frustrating.
I was three or four months into one such spell when I played Danny at La Paloma last August. A year before I had gone through a spell of playing really well against him, but at this point I hadn't beaten him — hadn't even taken a set off him — for about four months. Still, although I lost the first set this day, I was playing ok in the second set, and actually managed to recognize a mechanical mistake I was making and fix it, putting me up 5-2. One game away from winning my first set against him over the last six matches we had played, over four months or so.
At which point ... God decided I hadn't ... done enough penance. Suffered enough. Whatever.
We were playing on the clay courts at La Paloma, which have lines made out of white tape (vinyl, or whatever), not chalk. The upside is you don't have to repaint them, but the downside is that when the ball hits the line it can slide, not rising up at all, or —rarely, but occasionally, when the ball hits the front lip — pop way up high. That doesn't happen often, though — maybe two or three times a match. And having it jump so high and so quickly that it literally jumps over your racket without you being able to adjust in time, happens maybe ... once every four matches.
So at 5-2, over the next two games, that happened to me twice. And Danny hit a net-cord winner (i.e., a shot that hits the net and then falls on the other side so close to the net that your opponent can't get to it). And two of my balls hit the tape on the top of the net and fell back on my side. But I stayed calm.
Then, I finally clawed my way to my first set point in four months, at 5-4, 40-30. And on that first opportunity in four months, Danny hit a ball that hit the tape ... and literally rolled over and dropped down a couple inches over. But even then I maintained my cool.
He went ahead to win the game.
Next game, at 5-5, I hit a ball that clipped the top of the net and then bounced out, and I still kept my cool. But the pot was starting to boil, as I started to whine that it's not fair that his keep falling over, but mine ... before I stopped myself mid-sentence and turned back for the next point.
And then, then, at 30-40, I crushed crushed crushed a backhand down the line, and ... it hit the tape on the top of the net, and slowly fell back on my side.
And man, I l-o-s-t it. I exploded. You would not have recognized me.
The frustration of the previous 4-5 months was impossible to contain, and it raced out of me, as did my confusion about what lessons God was trying to teach me, and just absolute rage. I screamed two f-bombs as loudly as I could — I mean, loud (with a nice couple happily playing on the court next to us looking over, alarmed) — whipped my racket at the fence, and when Danny tossed the ball to me to start the next point I whirled, turned, and whipped it over the fence and as far away as I could.
That seems to have drained some of the adrenaline out of me, but I was still almost shaking as we switched sides to begin the next game, so I raised my hand and said we should stop. "I know I'm going to be really embarrassed about this tonight," I said. "In fact, I'm embarrassed about it already, right now. But if we try to keep playing I'm just going to try and hit the ball as hard as I can with every swing, which won't make either of us any happier. Why don't we just stop right now." He agreed.
I texted him that evening to apologize, and he responded that he understood, but pointed out that it was pretty embarrassing for him, as a paying member of the club, where kids were playing in the resort swimming pool nearby, etc. I winced and said I understood, and promised that it wouldn't happen again. (And it hasn't).
(Amusingly, and helpfully, when I wrote about it that evening to my former tennis coach, Tad, who had moved to Florida eight months earlier, he responded by laughing, noting that it happens to everyone at some point, and waved it off. That ... was good to hear.)
Honestly, I'm not quite sure what prompted the outburst. It was frustration with my tennis skills and results, of course, but it may have also reflected some frustration with circumstances outside of tennis, and ... oh, who knows? It was certainly way out of character for me, to say the least, and I wonder at it.
I am, interestingly, back into a better tennis groove these days, but I'm acutely aware how fragile that is, and how quickly it can all disappear. I hope I hope I can retain perspective next time this comes up and avoid this. I'm pretty sure I can and will.
Still, if someone pulls me aside in the future and says, "we do not respond to misfortune by screaming and throwing things," I think I might have to say, "with all due respect, I'm afraid the evidence is, yes we do."
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