On Tennis

It's been several weeks since I started playing tennis again. The modest goal is to play once a week. The first week I played, I stopped after about half an hour, which showed how much out of shape I was. Not saying that there's much improvement now, but at least I can play the full hour without embarrassingly bending down with my palms on my knees every 5 minutes or so.

Yesterday, the coach decided to get a little more intense. He started to give me shots loaded with spins. I guess that means I had passed on to the next level. But, gee, I thought my skill was OK before, but now I realized that I'm nowhere near OK.

Anyways, what I actually wanted to talk about is something that the coach said that surprisingly was never told to me earlier on when I was little and training seriously (or at least I don't remember that lesson). We were practicing cross court forehand and he was instructing me from afar so I couldn't really hear what he was saying. After a while I got curious because he started looking frustrated at something I did wrong. So I stopped and approached the net to have a chat with him. What he said struck me, "You are not aiming!" I thought we were just hitting crosscourt and for the most part my shots were aimed that way. What he meant was that the shots were not sharp enough; the balls did not fall close enough to the sideline as well as the baseline. I was giving him comfortable shots to return. "Oh, yeah, I was just hitting them back without planning." He gave me a shocked expression, "You HAVE to be purposeful. You have to know where exactly you want your ball to fall. Even in circumstances where you're hitting a difficult ball and you're cornered, you still have to figure out a way to get what you want."

That my friends, may be something I've heard many times before, in different ways. But this one, coming out from the mouth of a tanned skinny tennis coach with a ponytail, somehow strikes a cord. It could be because of the way he said it, or the disbelief expression as if what I did not do was a grave sin, or just because it came out at a right time. I kept thinking about it. Most of the time, I walk in life taking what's given to me, and reacting accordingly. But, I rarely plan. I rarely make my returns sharp enough to be purposeful. I simply hit the ball only caring that it falls within the line, not caring where it falls, as long as it's in.

My childhood tennis hero, Michael Chang, would best explain the second part of what my coach was saying: aim, even in cornered situations. In his first grand slam final, at 17 years old, not only he lost on paper because of his age and his rank, but also because he had cramps in the middle of the match. But, he ended up winning that French Open title, claiming a record of being the youngest ever to win a grand slam. On the fifth set, he delivered an underarm service, breaking the concentration of his opponent  and winning that point. That reminds me to always put in the effort to figure out ways to fulfill your intentions.  That aside, I just want to say that I was eating bananas on the court because of him <3.



Aim purposefully.

Cheers from on top of a comfortable bed, still half hidden under my checkered blanket.