Tennis : A Beautiful Game, The Perfect Mix

At night, when I am outdoors and I look up, I see a black sky, studded with stars, and crowned by a beaming white full moon contrasting starkly with the background, whose radiance is partly interrupted by wisps of black clouds. A sort of diabolical beauty, though nothing profound, that gives me a few seconds of pleasure and a sense of awe.

Einstein might have looked at the same sky and seen relativity, and all other profound laws of physics, and thought something like, “What is so puzzling about the universe is that it is so understandable.” (Yeah, “What the hell?” is my reaction too).

It is not just true about the sky, or other such mediocre imagery. It is true about anything in life—how you look at things depends on you, your personality— and that may ultimately decide how happy you are and how much you want to live or die.

But then it works the other way around, too. What you are looking at needs to offer you something— it needs to meet you at least halfway in your attempt to seek what it is that you are trying to see in it.

It is the same with sports. A lot of things decide what you see in a particular sport— especially your level of knowledge of it, and your personality. And the more profound is the experience that you draw from it, the more it qualifies to be called beautiful.

Clara has already written a piece that delves upon the beauty that tennis reveals from the artistic perspective, and how much it meets more than half way in her attempts to see the beauty of aesthetics in it. Here, we take a different look.

Playing a sport at some level is like trying to join dots on a piece of paper. The image you get finally depends to a large extent on what you draw between the dots—how you fill up the gaps, straight lines, or curly lines—but it also depends on the dots themselves. You cannot draw beyond certain limits—for one you definitely need to pass through the dots.

You cannot also draw without them—they are there to sort of help you, to guide your imagination. You trust them to give you an enjoyable picture however it is that you join them together. The dots are placed in such a manner: smartly placed.

Yes, the dimensions of the court, the placement and height of the net, and the rules that determine how points are won or forfeited are the dots here. Too constraining and they do not let your creativity flourish. Too little and it is no longer enjoyable— it is not just an organized activity anymore.

If you look at these dots, the building blocks of any sport, it is not difficult to see why those that define tennis would rank at the top. They are beautifully placed to allow for drawing the maximum possible number of images, each one of which allow for the maximum amount of creativity and innovation from the player.

The beauty of tennis, is then traced to these metaphorical dots. They reflect the idea that is tennis, and how good they are is understood from how many different levels of abstractions they allow for, and how deep and complete each is.

A physical activity, to be sport, should be a competition that checks who among the participants is more adept at manipulating the laws of nature, as is humanly possible, to achieve some preset task. It could also check, instead of against another participant, one participant against a set mathematical standard. In short, it checks who is a better practitioner at Newtonian Mechanics.

This again can be a rudimentary check that requires an elementary body movement, or one that requires a complex maneuver. It can check a part of the body more than the other—like it can give more prominence to the the legs or it can give more prominence to the hands.

It could also give a well-proportioned distribution to the whole body. The span of the court, the height of the net and its placement, the weight(s) of the ball, the evolution of racquet technology so far, all have contributed to developing tennis into an all round game in this respect.

It is well known that this is among the few games that needs incredible footwork and equal strength and manipulation of the upper body. There could not be an athletic feat like a running forehand that needs such a great co-ordination of the hands and legs.

Players switch racquet grips from Western to Continental revealing in how many different ways gravity, and fluid mechanics can be combined to produce strokes that look as different as chalk and cheese. There cannot be a better example of Newton’s third law than the idea of the “sweet-spot.”

The different surfaces involved, offering different amounts of elasticity and friction, give different responses to a ball that hits the ground. These different surfaces again warrant a different manner of running, and a different manner of striking the ball. Don’t slip on grass, while do slide on clay. Hit with top spin on clay and it will throw an upper-cut on your opponent, hit flat on faster surfaces and it will blitz past your opponent in no time.

Surfaces, racquet grips, strings, and definitely the rules of the games themselves thus offer immense opportunities for the players to manipulate the laws of nature and still stay in the game.

The most basic action of sport in tennis—the physical layer seamlessly leads us into the next level—the tactical.

Tactics and style of play are closely intertwined. The inherent limitations of a player would make him extremely efficient in certain areas but a sitting duck in others. He could do well from the baseline, or from the net. He could do well on a particular surface and not others.

On the one hand there is your opponent’s weakness, on the other there are your strengths. How you play is of course an optimization between the two. And you have five factors not necessarily independent of each other, the control of which you use to achieve that optimization—the two dimensions of the planar court, the altitude, the spin on the shot and the time to setup for the stroke.

There are simple tactical battles like the one-two punch or elaborate point-constructions where each passing stroke in the rally moves you closer to the point. There are sacrifices made to effect a check-mate the next shot (like Federer’s chip into the service line followed by the pass), and visibly deliberate and unstoppable aggressive moves (like the Pistol’s move to the net on back of a serve). When you play the game you are in charge of both attack and defense.

The complete matrix of your tactics is what finally is your "style of play." The style of play can be as eloquent an expression as any—the intent to dominate (Sampras), the will to be superior (Federer), the fighting spirit (Nadal), or simply a fancy to laugh at your opponent (Murray).

Note that from the physical level to the style of play, what you choose to do at each level should be to your strength to be successful. There is enough scope for creativity at each level of the game that a most successful player can be so due only to excellence solely in one of these (Monfils) or an extremely talented athlete can be a complete failure because he did not have the keys to one of these (Santoro).

From an entertainment perspective, two things make it one of the most dramatic of sporting experiences—the point system and the gladiatorial nature of the battle.

The point system is hierarchical in that it “forgets” what happened in the previous game or the previous set. However pathetically you went down to an opponent in the previous play, you always get a chance to come back and start afresh. Both these factors have led to many an unbelievable comeback, and heart-breaking near misses.

Whatever the kind of outlook you have, tennis has enough of it to offer. The “dots” that form the game seem to be placed in the most optimized manner for the kid to draw the cutest little picture in his nursery class, the artist to conceive the most fantastic painting, or the engineer to formulate the most creative optimization that fits them.

The set of ideas that is tennis is simply an outright winner at every category. It is a beautiful idea—a beauty that arises from simplicity and coherence.