The mental side of tennis
Nerves of steel, nerves of cotton
I've never been a sports person. I was a nerdy kid that grew into a nerdy adult, and I’ve never been interested in sports, with one exception: the annual family tradition of watching Roland-Garros and laughing at the way tennis players moan and grunt.
Things changed when I watched someone lose a match in such devastating fashion that you could see it plainly on his face; a certain slump of the mouth and the eyebrows and the look of a doomed man in his eyes, body language that in this line of work smells like blood in the water.
Mentality matters. That’s why the current No. 1 players in men’s and women’s tennis, Daniil Medvedev and Iga Świątek, are working with sports psychologists; why Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic, the Big Three, are often called mental giants. You can argue that mental toughness is the result of exceptional technique, that the greats have such confidence in their skills that it creates the illusion of mental strength; but the easily rattled won't be able to perform at their best in high-pressure moments, whatever their best may be.
Tennis is unique in how much it demands of you. Whatever self-belief you can muster, you have to be able to sustain through a lengthy match; unlike other sports, your coach isn’t allowed to talk to you. There are no teammates to keep your spirits up. It’s just you and the worst of your thoughts, and every mistake wears you down just a little more, fraying the nerves.
Tennis at its best and most gladiatorial is pure theater, a battle of the wills against two evenly matched opponents who both refuse to give up.
The almost six-hour-long Australian Open 2022 final between Nadal and Medvedev would be a good example.
But I am a sadist in nature, and I find weakness more compelling than strength. I start looking out for it: I watch Stefanos Tsitsipas lose to Novak Djokovic at the Roland-Garros 2021 final, his confidence permanently shaken; and one month later I tune in to watch Alexander Zverev play Wimbledon.
The setting is Wimbledon 2021, round four. Zverev is a lanky 6'6" monster of a man (the surname does apparently mean beast in Russian) and his typical 130 mph first serves keep hitting the net. He's making unforced errors, giving away free points. He isn’t being beaten, he's losing.
The purpose of a first serve in the modern men’s game is to be virtually unreturnable. If you miss, you get a second chance — the second serve tends to be weaker, slower, because missing would mean double-faulting and losing the point entirely. Double faults happen to everyone, usually one or two per match.
The men's world No. 3 makes twenty double faults in a single match. He's a mess. He's a Tesla crash-and-burn in slow motion, and I am captivated.
He's talented, dedicated, a marvel of sports biomechanics—and he's a headcase. He was hailed as the next Federer, once, before the domestic abuse accusations and on-court temper tantrums. On top of that, Zverev has the yips.
Tennis yips “manifest in the form of the player all of a sudden consistently failing to execute a serve, leading to a torrent of consecutive double faults.” About 30% of cases are neurological — a condition that affects athletes and musicians called focal dystonia — but most are psychological. It’s easy to tell them apart by noting when and where they happen: in high pressure moments, important tournaments, against high-level opponents and young upcoming talents.
Attention is redirected to thoughts of past and future failure — the hows and the whys and the what-ifs. Those prone to anxiety are familiar with how coordination suffers, how muscles and nerves and breathing seem to seize up. Someone who plays tennis once told me that the more you think, the more you miss; the more frustrated you get, the more you miss; you can't think of anything but the ball, or you'll miss.
Zverev loses his nerve, he chokes, he's a choker. To choke in sports means to underperform relative to your real skill and in French you can say perdre ses moyens; to lose your means of doing something, your capacity or capabilities; to become flustered, to go to pieces, to lose control.
Over time I became familiar with the strange and horny ways of tennis lingo. “He drills the ball so deep and so hard”, says a commentator as Dominic Thiem hits his (admittedly) stunning backhand. In the 2021 Tokyo Olympics the camera comes closer, lingers molasses-slow on Maria Sakkari's sculpted arms and Tsitsipas' golden curls and the trail of Chardy's salt-and-pepper chest hair.
Tokyo is hosting the Olympics — one year late, ongoing pandemic and all — and I'm watching a semifinal that feels like a final. It's Novak Djokovic against Alexander Zverev, and Zverev doesn't stand a chance, I don't think, but I hope he’ll fail in a way that’s interesting.
Djokovic wins the first set easily. Zverev doesn't think he stands a chance, either, and that resignation seems to undo something in him. He is no longer the most promising Next Gen player, the next Grand Slam champion, the next Federer. The pressure lifts just enough that he plays like he's not afraid to lose, and he ends up getting the gold.
“What you're looking at is a player who is severely depressed.”
The commentator is tennis legend John McEnroe. It's September 2021 at the US Open and it's Djokovic against Zverev once again.
Zverev came close to winning a Grand Slam once before, in the 2020 US Open final against Dominic Thiem. In an almost empty stadium in mid-pandemic New York, he became the first person in tennis history to blow a two-sets-to-love lead in a US Open final.
Players often try to camouflage their yips by changing strategies — in golf that means changing grip or switching hands, a superficial solution to a problem that is clearly mental. Zverev seems to have fixed his yips in the interim but the nerves are still there, plainly obvious in the defensive, passive way he plays. Zverev loses, Djokovic reaches the final, and Medvedev beats him to win his first Grand Slam title.
Had I started watching tennis fifteen years ago my eyes might have been on Guillermo Coria, another player who suffered from service yips. Some have called Coria "the best that never was," and he might have been, but that’s a pointless conversation to have.
People deal with pressure in all sorts of ways. Some find a comfortable space in the what-ifs and could-have-beens, because pretending not to care is easier than trying and failing, a more comforting story than having potential and being too afraid to ask the question.
And it’s always easier to look for something or someone to blame. As soon as he starts losing, Nick Kyrgios starts shouting — he shouts at the grass, at his team, at the umpire, at the crowd.
The domestic abuse accusations against Zverev fit the bigger picture. They paint a picture of someone deeply insecure, the way narcissists tend to be, arrogant but fragile; someone who struggles to sustain an ego that says “You're a winner. You’re destined to win a Grand Slam.” Two things happen when an overinflated ego is threatened — people either lash out, or they crumble.
Zvere is interesting. He has the potential and he asks the question and, despite his yips and self-confidence issues, he is highly ranked. Most importantly, his professional problems and his personal problems are, to me, two sides of the same coin — and there is something poetic about that.
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