Chapter 15: Games People Play on the Tennis Court

That something else besides tennis is being played on the courts is obvious to the most casual observer. Regardless of whether he is watching the game at a country club, a public park or a private court, he will see players suffering everything from minor frustration to major exasperation. He will see the stomping of feet, shaking of fists, war dances, rituals, pleas, oaths and prayers; rackets are thrown against fences in anger, into the air for joy, or pounded against the concrete in disgust. Balls that are in will be called out, and vice versa. Linesmen are threatened, ball boys scolded and the integrity of friends questioned. On the faces of players you may observe, in quick succession, shame, pride, ecstasy and despair. Smug complacency gives way to high anxiety, cockiness to hangdog disappointment. Anger and aggression of varying intensity are expressed both openly and in disguised forms. If an observer was watching the game for the first time, it would be hard for him to believe that all this drama could be contained on a mere tennis court, between love-all and game, set and match.

There is no end to the variety of attitudes toward the game. Not only can the full spectrum of emotional response be observed on the court, but also a wide range in the motivations of its players. Some care only about winning. Some are amazingly tenacious about warding off defeat, but can't win a match point if it's offered to them. Many don't care how they play, just as long as they look good, and some simply don't care at all. Some cheat their opponents; others cheat themselves. Some are always bragging about how good they are; others constantly tell you how poorly they are playing. There are even a small handful who are out on the court simply for fun and exercise.

In his widely read book, Games People Play, Eric Berne described the subliminal games that lie beneath the surface of human interaction. He made it remarkably clear that what appears to be happening between people is only a small part of the story. The same seems to be true on the tennis court, and since, to play any game well, one must know as much as possible about it, I include here a brief guide to the games people play on the tennis court, followed by a brief account of my own search for a game worth playing. I suggest that this guide be read not as an exercise in self-analysis, but as a key to discovering how to have more fun while playing tennis. It's difficult to have fun or to achieve concentration when your ego is engaged in a life-and-death struggle. Self 2 will never be allowed to express spontaneity and excellence when Self 1 is displaying some heavy ulterior game involving its self-image. Yet as one recognizes the games of Self 1, a degree of liberation can be achieved. When it is, you can discriminate objectively and discover for yourself the game you think is really worth playing.

Game I: Good-o - General Aim: To Achieve Excellence - General Motive: To Prove Oneself "Good"

A brief explanation of the meaning of "game." Eric Berne uses the word to mean an interaction between people involving an ulterior motive. In an inspiring book called The Master Game, Robert S. De Ropp writes that a game is "essentially a trial of strength or a trial of wits played within a matrix which is defined by rules." Every game involves at least one player, a goal, some obstacle between the player and his goal, a field (physical or mental) on which the game is played, and a motive for playing. In the guide below I have named three categories of games with their aims and motives for playing. I call these games Good-o, Friends-o and Health-o-Fun-o, and they are played both on and off the courts. Under each of these major categories are subgames, which have subaims and submotivations, and even each subgame has numerous variations. Moreover, most people play hybrid forms of two or three games at a time.

Subgame A: Perfecto

Thesis: How good can I get? In Perfecto, "good" is measured against a standard of performance. In golf, it is measured against par; in tennis, against self-conceived expectations or those of parents, coach or friends.

Aim: Perfection; to reach the highest standard possible.

Motive: The desire to prove oneself competent and worthy of the respect of self and others.

Obstacles:

External: The never-closing gap between one's idea of perfection and one's apparent abilities.

Internal: Self-criticism for not being as close to perfection as one would like, leading to discouragement, compulsively trying too hard and a sense of inferiority; fear of not measuring up.

Subgame B: Compete

Thesis: I'm better than you. Here, "good" is measured against the performance of other players rather than against a set standard. Maxim: It's not how well I play, but whether I win or lose that counts.

Aim: To be the best; to win; to defeat all comers.

Motive: Desire to be at the top of the heap. Stems from need for admiration and control.

Obstacles:

External: There is always someone around who can beat you; the rising ability of the young.

Internal: The mind's preoccupation with comparing oneself with others, thus preventing spontaneous action; thoughts of inferiority alternating with superiority, depending on the competition; fear of defeat.

Subgame C: Image

Thesis: Look at me! "Good" is measured by appearance. Neither winning nor true competence is as important as style.

Aim: To look good, flashy, strong, brilliant, smooth, graceful.

Motive: Desire for attention, praise.

Obstacles:

External: One can never look good enough. What looks good to one person does not look so good to another.

Internal: Confusion about who one really is. Fear of not pleasing everyone and of imagined loneliness.

Game II: Friends-o - General Aim: To Make or Keep Friends - General Motive: Desire for Friendship

Subgame A: Status

Thesis: We play at the country club. It's not so important how good you are as where you play and who plays with you.

Aim: To maintain or improve social status.

Motive: Desire for the friendship of the prominent.

Obstacles:

External: The cost of keeping up with the Joneses.

Internal: Fear of losing one's social position.

Subgame B: Togetherness

Thesis: All my good friends play tennis. You play to be with your friends. To play too well would be a mistake.

Aim: To meet or keep friends.

Motive: Desire for acceptance and friendship.

Obstacles:

External: Finding the time, the place and the friends.

Internal: Fear of ostracism.

Subgame C: Husband or Wife

Thesis: My husband (or wife) is always playing, so ... Enough said?

Aim: To see your spouse.

Motive: Loneliness.

Game III: Health-o-Fun-o - General Aim: Mental or Physical Health or Pleasure - General Motive: Health and/or Fun

Subgame A: Health

Thesis: Played on doctor's advice, or as part of self-initiated physical improvement or beautification program.

Aim: Exercise, work up a sweat, relax the mind.

Motive: Health, vitality, desire for prolongation of youth.

Obstacles:

External: Finding someone of like motive to play with.

Internal: Doubts that tennis is really helping. The temptation to be drawn into Perfecto or Good-o.

Subgame B: Fun

Thesis: Played neither for winning nor to become "good," but for fun alone. (A game rarely played in its pure form.)

Aim: To have as much fun as possible.

Motive: Desire for enjoyment.

Obstacles:

External: Finding someone of like motive to play with.

Internal: Learning to appreciate fully the subtleties of the game. The temptation to be drawn into Good-o or Friends-o.

Subgame C: High

Thesis: Played to raise one's awareness. Very rarely played in pure form.

Aim: Higher consciousness.

Motive: Desire to transcend ordinary consciousness.

Obstacles:

External: None.

Internal: The attachments and fluctuations of the ego-mind.

The Competitive Ethic and the Rise of Good-o

Most tennis players in our society, regardless of the reasons which they may think motivated them to take up the sport in the first place, end up playing one or another version of Good-o. Many start tennis as a weekend sport in the hope of getting exercise and a needed relief from the pressures of daily life, but they end by setting impossible standards of excellence for themselves and often become more frustrated and tense on the court than off it. How can the quality of one's tennis assume such importance that it causes anxiety, anger, depression and self-doubt? The answer seems to be deeply rooted in a basic pattern of our culture. In the New World, excellence is valued in all things. We live in an achievement-oriented society where a man is measured by his competence in various endeavors. Even before we received praise or blame for our first report card, we were loved or ignored for how well we performed our very first actions. From this pattern, one basic message came across loud, clear and often: you are a good person and worthy of respect only if you do things successfully. Of course, the kind of things needed to be done well to deserve love varies from family to family, but the underlying equation between self-worth and performance has been nearly universal. Now, that's a pretty heavy equation, for it means that to some extent every achievement-oriented action becomes a criterion for defining one's self-worth.

If someone plays bad golf, it comes somehow to mean that he is not quite as worthy of respect, his honor of others, as he would be if he played well. If he is the club champion, he is considered a winner, and thus a more valuable person in our society. It then follows that the intelligent, beautiful and competent tend to regard themselves as better people.

When love and respect depend on winning or doing well in a competitive society, it is inevitable (since every winner requires a loser and every top performance many inferior ones) that there will be many people who feel a lack of love and respect. Of course, these people will try hard to win the respect they lack, and the winners will try equally hard not to lose the respect they have won. In this light, it is not difficult to see why playing well has come to mean so much to us.

But who said that I am to be measured by how well I do things? In fact, who said that I should be measured at all? Who indeed? What is required to disengage oneself from this trap is a clear knowledge that the value of a human being cannot be measured by performance—or by any other arbitrary measurement. Like Jonathan L. Seagull, are we not an immeasurable energy in the process of manifesting, by degrees, an unlimited potential? Is this not so of every human and perhaps every life form? If so, it doesn't really make sense to measure ourselves in comparison with other immeasurable beings. In fact, we are what we are; we are not how well we happen to perform at a given moment. The grade on a report card may measure an ability in arithmetic, but it doesn't measure the person's value. Similarly, the score of a tennis match may be an indication of how well I performed or how hard I tried, but it does not define my identity, nor give me cause to consider myself as something more or less than I was before the match.

At about the age I was tall enough to see over the net, my father started me on tennis. I played the game more or less casually with my cousins and older sister until I was eleven, when I received my first tennis lesson from a new pro named John Gardiner at Pebble Beach, California. That same year, I played in my first tournament in the "under 11" division of the National Hardcourt Championships. The night before the match, I dreamed of the glory of being a dark-horse winner. My first match was a nervous but easy victory. My second, against the second-seeded player, ended in a 6-4, 6-4 defeat and with me sobbing bitterly. I had no idea why winning meant so much to me.

My Search for a Game Worth Playing

The next few summers I played tennis every day. I would wake myself at 7 A.M., make and eat my own breakfast in five minutes, then run miles to the Pebble Beach courts. I usually arrived a good hour before anyone else and would spend the time hitting forehands and backhands tirelessly against a backboard. During the day, I would play ten or fifteen sets, drill and take lessons, not stopping until there was no longer enough light to see the ball. Why? I really didn't know. If someone had asked, I would have said that it was because I liked tennis. Though this was partially true, it was primarily because I was deeply involved in the game of Perfecto. There was something I seemed to want badly to prove to myself. Winning was important to me in tournaments, but playing well was important day by day; I wanted to get better and better. My style was to think I would never win, and then to try to surprise myself and others. I was hard to beat, but I had an equally difficult time winning close matches. Though I hated losing, I didn't really enjoy beating someone else; I found it slightly embarrassing. I was a tirelessly hard worker and never stopped trying to improve my strokes.

By the time I was fifteen I had won the National Hardcourt Championship in the boys' division, and felt the rush of excitement at winning a major tournament. Earlier the same summer I went to the National Championships at Kalamazoo and lost in the quarterfinals to the seventh-seeded player, 6-3, 0-6, 10-8. In the last set, I had been ahead 5-3, 40-15 on my serve. I was nervous but optimistic. In the first match point, I double-faulted in an attempt to serve an ace on my second serve. In the second, I missed the easiest put-away volley possible in front of a packed grandstand. For many years thereafter, I replayed that match point in countless dreams, and it is as vivid in my memory now as it was on that day twenty years ago. Why? What difference did it really make? It didn't occur to me to ask.

By the time I entered college, I had given up the idea of proving my worth through the vehicle of championship tennis, and was happy to settle for being "a good amateur." I put most of my energy into intellectual endeavors, sometimes grade-grubbing, sometimes a sincere search for Truth. From my sophomore year onward I played varsity tennis, and found that on days when I did poorly in my academic work, I would usually perform badly also on the tennis court. I would try hard to prove on the court what I had difficulty proving scholastically, but would usually find that lack of confidence in the one area tended to infect the other. Fortunately, the reverse was also true. During four years of collegiate play, I was almost always nervous when I walked onto a court to play a match. By the time I was a senior and had been elected captain of the team, I was of the opinion that competition really didn't prove anything. I knew intellectually that being good at tennis wasn't a valid test of manhood—or of anything else of importance—but I was still tight before a match.

After graduation I gave up competitive tennis for ten years and embarked on a career in education. I became interested in learning theory, and in 1970 while teaching tennis during the summer, began to gain some insights into the learning process. Deciding to continue teaching tennis, I developed what came to be called yoga tennis, the precursor to the Inner Game way of learning. It applied to tennis some of the principles I'd learned in yoga, and seemed to increase tremendously the learning rate of students. It also had a beneficial effect on my game. Learning a little about the art of concentration helped my game revive quickly, and soon I was consistently playing better than ever. After I became the club pro at the Meadowbrook Club in Seaside, California, I found that even though I didn't have much time to work on my own strokes, by applying the principles I was teaching I could maintain a game which was seldom defeated by anyone in the local area.

As an instructor of yoga tennis, I didn't concern myself with winning; I simply attempted to achieve and express a high degree of excellence. But one day, after playing particularly well against a very good player, I began wondering how I might fare in tournament competition. I felt confident of my game; still, I hadn't played against ranked players. So I entered a tournament at the Berkeley Tennis Club in which Laver, Rosewall and other top-ranking players were competing. On the appointed weekend, I drove to Berkeley with confidence, but by the time I arrived I had started to question my own ability. Everyone there seemed to be six foot five and to be carrying five or six rackets. I recognized many of the players from tennis magazines, but none of them seemed to recognize me. The atmosphere was very different from that of Meadowbrook, my little pond where I was chief frog. Suddenly I found my previous optimism turning to pessimism. I was doubting my game. Why? Had anything happened to it from the time I left my club three hours before?

My first match was against a player who literally was six foot five. Even though he carried only three rackets, as we each walked to a backcourt my knees felt a bit wobbly and my wrist didn't seem as strong as usual. I tested it several times, tightening my hand on the handle of my racket. I wondered what would happen out on the court. But when we began to warm up, I soon saw that my opponent wasn't nearly as good as I had imagined. Had I been giving him a lesson, I knew exactly what I would tell him, and I quickly categorized him as a "better-than-average club player" and felt better. However, an hour later, with the score 4-1 in his favor in the second set, and having lost the first set 6-3, I began to realize that I was about to be beaten by a "better-than-average club player." All during the match I had been on edge, missing easy shots and playing inconsistently. It seemed my concentration was off just enough so that I missed lines by inches and hit the top of the net with every other volley.

As it worked out, my opponent, on the verge of a clear victory, faltered. I don't know what was happening inside his head, but he couldn't finish me off. He lost the second set 7-5 and the next 6-1, but as I walked off the court, I had no sense that I had won the match—rather, that he had lost it.

I began thinking immediately of my next match against a highly ranked player in northern California. I knew that he was a more experienced tournament player than I and probably more skilled. I certainly didn't want to play the way I had during the first round; it would be a rout. But my knees were still shaky, my mind didn't seem able to focus clearly, and I was nervous. Finally, I sat down in seclusion to see if I could come to grips with myself. I began by asking myself, "What's the worst that can happen?" The answer was easy: "I could lose 6-0, 6-0."

"Well, what if you did? What then?"

"Well... I'd be out of the tournament and go back to Meadowbrook. People would ask me how I did, and I would say that I lost in the second round to So-and-So."

"They'd say sympathetically, 'Oh, he's pretty tough. What was the score?' Then I would have to confess; love and love."

"What would happen next?" I asked myself.

"Well, word would quickly get around that I had been trounced up at Berkeley, but soon I'd start playing well again and before long life would be back to normal."

I had tried to be as honest as I could about the worst possible results. They weren't good, but neither were they unbearable—certainly not bad enough to get upset about. Then I asked myself, "What's the best that could happen?"

Again the answer was clear: I could win 6-0, 6-0.

"Then what?"

"I'd have to play another match, and then another until I was beaten, which in a tournament like this was soon inevitable. Then I would return to my own club, report how I did, receive a few pats on the back, and soon all would again return to normal." Staying in the tournament another round or two didn't seem overwhelmingly attractive, so I asked myself a final question:

"Then what do you really want?"

The answer was quite unexpected. What I really wanted, I realized, was to overcome the nervousness that was preventing me from playing my best. I wanted to overcome the inner obstacle that had plagued me for so much of my life. I wanted to win the inner game.

Having come to this realization, knowing what I really wanted, I walked toward my match with a new sense of enthusiasm. In the first game, I double-faulted three times and lost my serve, but from then on I felt a new certainty. It was as if a huge pressure had been relieved, and I was out there playing with all the energies at my command. As it worked out, I was never able to break my opponent's spinning, left-handed serve, but I didn't lose my own serve again until the last game in the second set. I had lost 6-4, 6-4, but I walked off the courts feeling that I had won. I had lost the external game, but had won the game I had wanted to, my own game, and I felt very happy. Indeed, when a friend came up to me after the match and asked how I'd done, I was tempted to say, "I won!"

For the first time I recognized the existence of the Inner Game, and its importance to me. I didn't know what the rules of the game were, nor exactly what its aim was, but I did sense that it involved something more than winning a trophy.