Contemplating tennis \u2014 and not playing \u2014 was like practicing music without an instrument. It was doable, but not much fun. I owned Bill Tilden\u2019s book on singles and Gardnar Mulloy\u2019s doubles book. There was no tennis on TV. We didn’t have access to indoor courts.<\/p>\n
Tim Gallwey\u2019s The Inner Game of Tennis<\/em> (1974) recommends watching the spin on the ball. Focus on the rotation of the ball\u2019s seams. The author of The Inner Game of Music<\/em> said something similar. Focus. I can\u2019t remember on what. (Not as good a book as Inner Tennis<\/em>.)<\/p>\n When I play a concert, I sometimes focus on an imaginary green cot as a mental image. The cot is an emergency-shelter Red Cross cot. Keeps me calm.<\/p>\n When I<\/strong> <\/span>was a sub on a gig, the bandleader shouted at me: \u201cListen!\u201d Meaning \u201cListen to the music!\u201d Maybe I was distracted by the hors d\u2019oeuvre.<\/p>\n In my twenties — after college — I thought tennis was dumb. Two adults hitting a ball over a net. That was not solving any problem. I hung out with Rich at his tennis pro job in Rocky River, Ohio. Rich said he couldn\u2019t teach the middle-aged women \u2014 the 35 year olds \u2014 anything new. He said, \u201cI wish tennis hadn\u2019t boomed. It would force me to do something else.\u201d He spent time arranging inter-clubs between \u201cour girls\u201d and Lorain. He eventually moved to Seattle and did something else. Insurance, for one thing. And he plays harmonica in a blues band.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Rich Greenberg and I were in high school, tennis was a tree of life to them that lay hold fast of it. Rich shoveled the snow off the courts at Cain Park in Cleveland Heights. Nuts. He played so well he wound up on the UC-Santa Barbara team. I waited six months every winter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coming-of-age","category-sports-pages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26158"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26166,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26158\/revisions\/26166"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"green](\"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/home\/yiddis6\/public_html\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/green-cot-300x107.jpg\")
<\/p>\n