Tennis
“I’ve always loved to hit.”
I read that first sentence in the book “Unstoppable” by Maria Sharapova, and I was sold. Maria’s my favorite player for a couple of reasons: she’s eloquent, she’s smart, and most importantly, she’s never had a bad outfit.
What is it about tennis? Is it the dichotomy of wearing a mini dress while serving a ball at 200 km/h? The sound of the ball hitting the strings of the racquet? The complex dynamics of such a simple sport? Or the metaphor it offers for how to take control of our lives? As mathematician Blaise Pascal says, in regards to the originality of his ideas, “Let no one say that I have said nothing new; the arrangement of the material is new. When we play tennis, we both play with the same ball, but one of us places it better.”
Placement is everything in tennis. Placement beats power. I knew this because I had been playing Mario Tennis long before touching a physical racquet. I got hooked on the game for the same reason as Maria, as she explains in her book, “I began to understand how each shot sets up the next shot, how you have to anticipate and plan for the kill. It’s a lot like chess. Every shot should set up something else.”
It’s like chess in the sense that you have to think ahead, but you don’t have time to think; you have to trust your instincts. It feels like playing God’s game with a design that’s a natural property of the universe that we discovered rather than invented.
Besides the gameplay, what I love most about tennis is the freedom to play different characters on the courts through different fashion choices. Some days I’m Princess Peach. Other days I'm a killer assassin. It’s where I live my second life as an aristocratic oligarch with a pleated skirt and a vivid imagination.
As we go through life, it’s easy to get too attached to the identities we’ve created for ourselves. Growing up, I had zero hand-eye coordination. I couldn’t even make my high school basketball team, much like Michael Jordan. And for the longest time, I was too embarrassed to try new sports. As a kid, you tend to believe people when they tell you what you can and cannot do. I didn’t start honoring the desires of my inner child until recently, and what I discovered was a little kid who sees the world as one giant puzzle, and she’s just moving pieces around and seeing what breaks.
The world operates mainly on belief, like a game of poker. There’s a saying, “F*** around and find out.” Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been the type who would rather find out for myself than to blindly trust someone else’s opinions. Part of it is just because I believe I’m the exception to every rule, but the rules are made up anyways. The real question is, how do you actually get to a point where you can experience life as a blank slate despite having traumatic experiences that affect the way you view the world? We’ll save that for another blog post.
