Tennis: Kinesthetic Beauty

I read Roger Federer as Religious Experience recently, and I think it explains a lot about what I like about tennis.

In some sports, being new or outright terrible is pretty forgiving. You'll lose every match, sure, but you can at least play out points. This is a big perk of pickleball, for instance - the physics of the sport are intuitive and forgiving, and you can ask someone new to the game to play out a game or two while having a good time. This is true even if the skill ceiling is really high and the sport requires a ton of coordination; small kids can play soccer against each other and keep the ball mostly within bounds and avoid touching the ball with their hands.

In tennis, it's a little bit different. You can't really expect to have a really good time out on a court without prep up front, whether it's one-on-one coaching or showing up at a court and hitting balls around trying to figure things out. Maybe the forehand will come easily to you, but the backhand almost certainly won't, and the serves are something I still choke on despite actually trying consistently to be half decent at them. Even if you do find workarounds like hitting everything underhand or lobbing the ball over the net, it won't feel anywhere near correct, and you'll feel a disconnect. It'd be like bowling with both arms between your legs just trying to avoid the gutters.

I'm getting to a point in my practice where I don't hit great strokes often, but I do hit them sometimes, and it feels magnificent. Six different pieces of advice come together simultaneously, resulting in a ball that clears the net - but barely - traveling across the court at speed and spin that makes it hard to react to, landing in a back corner that the other player isn't defending, or better yet, can't possibly defend.

The wonderful thing is that in most cases, the more beautiful the movement is, the better the ball travels. That's true for dropshots, serves, forehands, backhands, volleys... Most games reward graceful movement, and not much feels better than moving gracefully.

It doesn't happen often, but it happens sometimes.