After a long winter of avoiding indoor courts, I’ve lately started playing tennis again. I’m not sure precisely, but I think my record (in sets) so far this spring is something like 0-14. It’s…not great. I can quickly be reduced to swatting stray balls into the fence while pointedly instructing myself to be better.
My frustrations have given me occasion to reflect on a
long-standing tennis phenomenon: the personal meltdown. It’s obvious but still important that in
tennis, each player must play every point.
There is no team. There are no
substitutions. You just have to keep
playing. Things can go from bad to
worse.
I’m thinking about this because an interesting thing
happened at this year’s Australian Open.
Moments of frustration were remarkably absent. I have no data to support this, but my own
guess is that number of incidents in which a player displayed visible anger or
frustration sharply declined from major tournaments in recent years. Let’s assume I’m right for a moment. What might explain it? This year’s Australian Open marked the first
time a grand slam event was called entirely through
technology, rather than by human linespeople. I think these two facts are likely
related. The linespeople are not
playing, but you can nevertheless take the participant standpoint
toward them. When a human being in front
of you calls your ball out, it’s easy enough to react with anger. Hawk-Eye, by contrast, is not
an agent. So it makes sense, I think,
that otherwise hot-headed players can shrug off the verdicts of a computer more
than those from a chair umpire. Even
McEnroe hasn’t suggested that the Hawk-Eye cannot
be serious.
What’s a little more surprising to me is that not only did
the Australian Open see fewer incidents of player-to-official anger, but it
also saw (again, based on my own speculation, along with opinions from
commentators in the TV booth) fewer episodes of players getting mad at themselves. There were a few puzzling moments of
adjustment in which a player would move to challenge a call. But of course, the same technology reviewing
the challenge was the one that made the call in the first place. All that could be done was look again the
replay, with its dispassionate re-presentation of reality.
Again granting myself these facts to work with, I want to
suggest two lessons: one shallow and one slighter deeper. The shallower lesson
is about what we might call the phenomenology of interference. It’s really bad for people to be subject to
the interference of other agents. It
affects not just our well-being but also our sense of
self-efficacy and the value we attach to our actions. Not accomplishing what we want is one
thing. Not accomplishing it because
someone else interfered is another thing entirely. I also think that interference
can affect our relationship with ourselves.
When things just happen to go bad, it’s easy enough to brush it aside
and play the next point. When someone
else is involved, it takes more processing, and in the meantime we have to go
somewhere with all those feelings. With
no teammates or coaches around, you can be left as both initiator and recipient
of your worst reactive emotions.
This last thought pushes toward the slightly deeper lesson,
which is about how our reflective attitudes are connected to circumstances in
which we find ourselves. My favorite
David Foster Wallace essay considers what it takes to have a winning sports
psychology. DFW was a much better tennis
player than I ever will be, but he also bemoaned his breakdowns in the big
moments. His diagnosis was that he was
too often caught in the mirror of self-scrutiny:
“…but what if I double-fault here
and go down a break with all these folks watching?...don’t think about it…yeah
but except if I’m consciously not thinking about it then doesn’t part of me
have to think about it in order for me to remember what I’m not supposed to
think about?...shut up, quit thinking about it…”
The excruciating inner monologue goes on from there, but you
can already guess how that second serve on break point is going to pan out.
What divides the great tennis player from the persistently
mediocre one? Well, many things. Among them is something mental. How much does one take their own mental
states as the objects of attention? DFW
imagines the great athlete as unbothered by an overactive inner voice. It’s not that the athlete is unintelligent –
indeed, greatness demands strategy and tactics as much as pure physical
aptitude. But the athlete must not be
constructing a story of their experience while also living it, lest the former
task disrupt the latter’s success. Truly
gifted athletes, he infers, must not be really
seeing themselves. In the wonderful
flourish at the end of Wallace’s essay, he suggests that a certain blindness is
not the price of the gift, but “its essence”.
I love this thought, perhaps in no small part because it
allows me to reconceive of my own painfully anti-clutch playing disposition as
concealing something like the opposite sort of giftedness. Of course I will botch big points; with an
inner life as rich as my own, how could I help it?! My own corollary to DFW’s point: Maybe
discerning self-awareness is not the price of being bad at sports, but its very
essence!
Much as I find my corollary appealing, observations like
those from the Australian Open give me pause.
If great athletes were wired differently from you and me, we might well
expect those psychological differences to be robust against changes in how
matches are called. But if replacing
linespeople with Hawk-Eye changes the amount of reactive sentiments experienced
by players, then my corollary looks less promising. As
with other virtues, we might do better to look for situational features
that support a given psychological disposition, rather than thinking of it as a
deep-seated feature of the player’s character.
In other words, my guess is that Simona Halep and I are pretty similar
in the depth of our inner lives, but pretty different in that Halep is a
world-class athlete and I’m…terrible.
So here are the two lessons.
(1) Interference uniquely provokes reactive attitudes and (2) situations,
more than character, have a lot to say about how those attitudes will affect
us. What to make of this? Now the political part. I think philosophers dramatically
underestimate how bad interference is, for reasons relating to (1). Here’s a common way of arguing: “In the world,
X value is compromised. But X is really
important! So it’s ok to interfere with
people for the sake of X. Yes it will be
interfering, but X is more important than the cost of interference.” My problem with this general strategy is that
it’s not attending to the endogenous response to the proposed
interference. And this is where (2)
comes in. Interference is bad, and
institutionalizing it compounds the problems.
Translation: when interference is institutionalized within the political
state, many philosophers think it’s not as bad; I think it’s worse.
I grant this is something less than an argument. On the other hand, I’m way closer to getting
an argument than to getting enough top spin on my second serve.