You approach the edge of the court and step up to toe the line. Your front foot is angled so it’s pointing at the pole that holds the net, and your back foot is a half-step behind you, parallel to the baseline. This stance will give you both support and forward momentum for your serve. You put one of the balls in your pocket, the other you bounce once, twice, thrice as you settle your shoulders, loosen your hips, and regulate your breathing. The serve is the only part of the game where you’re not directly responding to your opponent—take your time, do it right. You resist the urge to face the court, keeping your shoulders angled to the doubles alley, as much of the power will come from the untwisting of your core. You remind yourself that although it’s called a toss there is no need to put the ball too high, and you’re actually just lifting the ball into the air, keeping your elbow straight, and releasing it just above head height. You bring up your racket head so that its strings brush up along the top of the ball, giving it a downward spin. Thwack! The ball hits the middle of the net. Fuck me. But that’s okay. Whereas the first serve is aspirational, revealing the player you wish you were, the second serve is about acceptance, reminding you of the player you actually are. You take the second ball from your pocket, bounce it, ‘toss’ it, and this time you hit its underside, just hoping to tap it over. The ball hits the tape along the top of the net and lands on your side of the court. Fuck me indeed.    

The sport of tennis has come to dominate much of my time: my mind’s attention, and my body’s action. I scour the internet for highlights from decades ago; I wake up at 3:30am to watch matches in Australia; I practice my forehand in the kitchen while my eggs sizzle and crack; I check satellite maps for the nearest courts before arriving in a new place; and most mornings I send out a barrage of texts to different friends, asking them to play with me—few even bother to respond anymore. If you have had a conversation with me during the last three years, we likely talked about tennis at some point, despite your—I assume—disinterest. Every few days, I’ll turn to my wife and say, “Do you know what makes tennis so interesting…” Because I’m telling, and not actually asking, I continue to talk through her silent scowl. I know that I’m annoying, but when it comes to tennis-obsessed husbands, she could do worse: I’ve read that Henry the VIII was playing tennis whilst having his second wife, Anne Boleyn, beheaded. (Historians assure us their disagreement was not over tennis, but of course they cannot prove this.)

During my recent and rabid preoccupation with tennis, I have of course wondered, why the sudden fascination? I’ve never cared about tennis before, so why now? Recently married, but still living in my childhood bedroom, and confronted with a bleak job-market for the career I’ve spent over a decade preparing for, has tennis come to operate for me as some kind of escape and distraction? Or, as I settle into my thirties, watching my run and swim distances decline along with my physical capacities, did tennis offer me a sport where I could feel myself getting better (mostly because I am so bad)? In other words, could my apparent obsession be in fact a depression? Yes, possibly… Even, plausibly… Okay, probably… Fine, precisely!

But be that as it may, personal circumstances aside, I have reasons for why I think tennis is the most compelling sport—to play, to watch, and even to think about. What follows is more than just the rationalizations of a premature midlife crisis, I hope.   

This essay, then, is my apology for my obsession with tennis. No, not ‘apology’ as a regretful acknowledgement of my offensive behaviour. I employ the word in its original Greek, apologia, meaning a defence or justification of one’s behaviour that may appear wrong to others. To paraphrase Socrates in Plato’s Apology: sorry, not sorry.

Allow me to speak as plainly and provocatively as possible. I’m not explaining why tennis has become my favourite sport, but rather, arguing why it is the best sport. Doing so requires some objective standard against which different sports can be compared. Although ultimately futile, I’ll aim to be compelling if not convincing. So, what makes sports themselves so compelling? Why do we play them, applying ourselves to their techniques and strategies; why do we watch them as fans, and admire those that perform them best? Obviously, there’s plenty of reasons, but…

I believe that one of the central reasons we find sport compelling is that it gives us the opportunity to express aspects of our personality through physicality, and test ourselves against others. This may sound a bit abstract, but it captures the way we talk about sports, both our most revered athletes, or our children’s recreational activities. From the prescient playmaker and generous passer, to the aggressive forward who pushes through, or the patient midfielder who probes. When we talk about ‘the greats,’ we seamlessly slip into speaking of their character, how their prowess revealed their personality, and how their personality informed their prowess.

Everyone inevitably expresses aspects of their personality through their physicality, from their posture, their gait, the (often performative) firmness of their handshake, or (notoriously) the resting expression of their face. Sports can raise this expression of personality through physicality to its highest pitch. Sports are the sphere where we give ourselves the same arbitrary goals and rules, invent tactics to achieve them, and then attempt to overcome each other through physicality in achieving those goals according to those rules. The true drama of sport—the core of the compellingness—emerges from the antagonistic squaring off of these opposed subjects. And this becomes especially true when we can portray this drama as the antagonism of different styles or ‘approaches to the game’—the clash of different characters manifesting through competition.

If this categorization does not seem to apply to all sports, perhaps it helps explain why surfing, mogul skiing, ultra-running, or even gymnastics fail to preoccupy most of us most of the time; each performs amazing feats with their bodies, but where is the (social) drama, where’s the fight against the other? You can’t have a rivalry against a wave or mountain. And that’s what really pulls us in, both as participants and as spectators.

So, then, what makes tennis best, in this respect? What makes tennis special are what I’ll call “the three S’s of tennis”: i) surfaces; ii) social-solitariness; and iii) scoring. And it is this last category, scoring, which makes tennis truly unique, and especially suited to unveiling one’s character, and bringing it into dramatic confrontation with the other. As for what makes tennis’s scoring so unique, it is the combination of three further factors, which I’ll call “the three I’s of scoring” (I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m like this): i) iterative (instead of progressive); ii) interactive (instead of independent); and internal (instead of external). I will now show how these categories combine to make tennis the most compelling sport. Along the way, I’ll also compare tennis to your favourite sport, and explain how tennis is better than the one you like.  

Surfaces

I begin briefly with the least important—but not insignificant—factor, which is that tennis is played on different surfaces: hardcourt, clay, and grass. This makes it unlike most other sports. Although the differences may be subtle, they are significant enough that, at the professional level, each player is typically a specialist in only one, and even relatively suffers on the other surfaces. This is because each surface brings different strategies. Clay makes the ball bounce higher and move slower, and players typically stand farther behind the baseline and engage in longer rallies. Grass is much quicker, the ball stays low, rallies are typically shorter, and strong accurate serves become more important. Players have to step and slide and turn directions very differently on the different surfaces, and much of the season’s physio-regimes are dedicated to preparing the body for the distinct demands of the different surfaces.

These surfaces bring out different characters, like the Nadals (who like long rallies, hitting hard from the baseline), or the Federers (who rely heavily on their serves and are unafraid to race to the net and finish the point with a volley). There is only one kind of basketball court or hockey rink; and Michael Phelps didn’t have to swim any races in choppy open water to win his medals and achieve his supremacy. Contrastingly, on their way to becoming the greatest players ever, Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic has had to master all three different surfaces to an extent never rivalled by any other of their peers.

The different surfaces of tennis make the season (and sport) much more compelling than it would be otherwise.  ‘Rublev has begun the hardcourt swing well, but can he continue this success on clay now?’; ‘Look, Medvedev has finally won his first title on clay!’; ‘Alcaraz won all the clay titles, and look how well he’s doing on grass, but can he really beat Novak in the Wimbledon Final?!’

Add to this progression through different surfaces the fact that each tournament is in a different city, often in a different country, as the tennis season progresses through the different continents, touching each one except Antarctica. Instead of numerous regular season games with negligible stakes, in tennis tournaments if you lose one match, you go home. No best of seven series to give your favourite team yet another chance to save themselves next week; in tennis, if you have one bad afternoon, you’re packing your bags and on a flight out that evening—every game is game 7. Furthermore, because match duration is unpredictable (we’ll get to this below, see internal scoring), matches can go until 2am! And after what may be the biggest victory of a player’s career, they have to get to bed, recuperate, and be on the court again in less than 24hours, for possibly another 4+ hour match. Is there any other sport that has such demanding and dramatic tournaments?

As a final tongue-in-cheek aside, let me add that tennis is mostly played outside, under the open skies, with whipping wind, sun in the eyes, stretching shadows, and punishing humidity. Alas, no truly great human sport can take place under a roof. Why not? I’m not sure… But when I see basketball and hockey players in their enclosed stadiums, I see adults in an artificial womb, hiding from the world and the sight of their Gods. (Are hockey/basketball players supposed to gaze upwards in moments of intense frustration or elation and ponder the… rafters? Ridiculous!) Ask yourself: why do we feel that weddings and funerals and graduations should all ideally take place outside, under the sky? In submitting ourselves to the skies, we invite the earth itself into participation, come what may; to cover ourselves exposes the cowardly impulse to control everything.  

Social-Solitariness

Our character is that which we repeatedly do, thought Aristotle. And we arguably reveal who we most are in moments of pressure, and when everything is up to us. What makes tennis special as a medium for unveiling character is that it puts us all alone, pitted against an other, constantly under pressure, and then grinds you down.

In tennis, you have to do everything on your own: you need a forceful first serve, and a reliable second serve; you need a strong forehand and counterpunching backhand; you need to be willing to rush the net, and be able to rally from the baseline; you need a soft touch and hard hit; you need speed and endurance. In basketball you don’t need to be able to shoot 3’s and postup under the hoop; in soccer you’re not both a striker and a sweeper.

This may sound like tennis actually dilutes the expression of one’s personality, spreading it around these different aspects, but it actually means your personality pervades every aspect of the game, since it’s all under your own purview. You can’t depend on your teammates to pick up the slack, allow you a rest, or get you into a scoring position. Until very recently in tennis (and in my opinion it’s a travesty they’ve changed this rule), once you stepped on the court you even had to be your own coach, with nobody helping you strategize during breaks or half-time.

In pressure moments, are you going to try to go for an Ace up the T, or kick wide and come in for a volley; are you going to go for a winner in a neutral rally, or just focus on not making an unforced error; will you take the initiative, or play high percentage? In tennis, it’s all up to you. And each of these different approaches reveals one’s different character. Aggressively forcing the point comes naturally to Alcaraz, and he goes for the winner when he’s in a tight spot. Djokovic is naturally conservative, and when his back is against the wall he locks-down and waits for his opponent to make a mistake.

To bring this down to our level, whenever my wife has me in a compromising position on the court (say I am in the double’s alley, turning to sprint back into position, and she has the entire court at her disposal to make her next shot), she will always—without fail—go for a winner: either by hitting the ball hard into the corner opposite me, or else back behind me and catching me wrong-footed. In those moments she is saying to herself: “Now is the time, the point is mine, and it will be all the sweeter because he can do nothing about it—I have him, the fool!” Whereas for me, these are moments when I always become the most conservative, as from such a strong position, I feel I can only lose by being brash. My inner monologue says, “This is it, don’t screw it up now by wanting too much—she can only win this point if you mess it up, don’t be a fool!” Because these are the tactics we reliably default to in moments of pressure, I know that they reveal our true characters. Breann wants to take the bull by the horns; I want to use a bridle, and only after reading the manual.

In tennis, because you can score simply from your opponent not scoring, both of these strategies (forcing the issue vs patiently waiting) are genuine strategies that can lead to victory.  Do you intend for your dropshots to be unreachable winners (and so you risk giving yourself a slim margin for clearing the net), or is a dropshot primarily intended to bring a player close to the net, so that you can lob the ball over them after? Do you have the kind of confidence to go for a winner in the midst of a neutral rally, or is your confidence the type that tells you to hold the rally, waiting for an advantageous position. Again, I believe these different defaults speak to different approaches to the game, informed by different characters, which is what makes tennis so fun to play, watch, and think about. For instance, I will always go for a lob over a winner. Not only is it safer, but the unadulterated glee I get from watching my opponent chase down a ball and swing at it in desperation is what I imagine others must feel from hitting a scorching winner. But this is my nature: I don’t want to dominate others through sheer force and strength, I want to trap them through trickery.

Granted, as a ‘solitary’ sport, tennis misses out on the kind of strategy and tactics that can only come from having teammates. But unlike most other sports, what tennis loses in not having teammates, it makes up for by bringing in one’s opponent all the closer. This is because, whereas most sports always involve keeping the ball or puck away from one’s opponent, not allowing them to touch it as you go about aiming to get your point, tennis most often demands that you build your point through sharing possession of the ball with your opponent. This calls for a much more encompassing attempt to see the game through their eyes. Yes, in other sports you must anticipate your opponent’s moves, if only to avoid and keep away from them, and you’ll draw out game-plans based on hypothetical reactions. But in tennis you’re in their head almost as much as your own; your strategy must include their likely strategy. You can’t count on simply keeping the ball away from them, and your own points are constituted through their own attempts to score a point.

In a dancing dialectic that actualizes a Hegelian synthesis, tennis begins with the confrontation of two consciousness in a battle for supremacy, but ultimately teaches you that you must be with oneself in and through the other in order to achieve your goal. The movements of their body and the machinations of their mind must become intimately intertwined with your own. You must share, you must sway together back and forth like a single organism, as you silently seduce them into your strategy, and then you strike. This is what I call the social-solitariness of tennis. Yes, you are on your own, like in golf or a marathon. But unlike those sports, where your opponent could suddenly die from a heart-attack without it at all changing how you go forward with the rest of the ‘competition’ (except doing so would make you seem callous), in tennis you are intimately interdependent upon your opponent, even more so than other sports where you don’t have to often rely on your opponent in order to make your points.

Scoring

As everyone knows—and especially those most unfamiliar with its rules—the scoring system of tennis is unique. Love, Deuce, Ad-in, 15, and now 40? Like every sport, it has its own specific scoring lingo, but that’s not what makes it unique. What makes tennis’s scoring unique is its combination of being iterative, interactive, and internal. And it is this holy trinity that truly makes tennis the best sport.

Iterative

Most sports add up points in an intuitive, progressive way: you score another point, it adds on to the previous, and if you score more points, you win. (Or inversely in golf, you win by ending with the lowest points.) But tennis’s defining scoring feature is its iterative point structure: games nested within sets, making up matches. After each game, you start over, and anyone can win the next one. And with each set, you begin all over again. Unlike in other sports, you’re not really ever able to build up an early lead (in a game or tournament) and then just defend it. When you turn on a tennis match, even if you’re 2 hours late, just the score in the corner can tell you the story of the game: someone bombed the first set, but they did better in the second and it went to a tiebreak, and now they’re winning the third. It’s all there, whereas the score of most other games obscures the drama that preceded it (turn it on during the second half, and you’ll have no idea how the first half of the game went).

In tennis, you can even score more points, but still end up losing if you didn’t score the points that truly mattered. This makes tennis an especially psychologically fraught game: you have to be intensely present, and immediately shake off past frustration. And such frustration is constant, due to this next quirk of tennis’s scoring.

Interactive

In most sports, scoring is independent: each opponent has their own score, and whatever each scores, it doesn’t directly effect the other’s points. Not so in tennis. In tennis, your score can drag back your opponent’s score, such as battles for the game after 40-40. In the case of break points, one’s scoring can completely erase their opponent’s points from that game, and they collect the game point. This is also true of set points: whoever wins the final set point, wins the whole set. Essentially this means that, after about an hour or more of a hotly-contested set of tennis, it all comes down to that final point—one person gets it, and one person sees all their effort erased in an instant. Game after game, set after set. And then it all starts again.

To make things even more maddening, and dramatic, whereas most sports require that your opponent actually score in order to get a point, in tennis all that has to happen is that you don’t score, in which case your opponent gets a point! Part of what makes tennis so compelling is that, so long as the first serve lands in bounds (and even if the second serve doesn’t), someone is winning a point: if the ball is in play, somebody is about to score.

You might think that this leads tennis into the same problem as basketball, where the points come so fast and easy that it’s hard to care about them, except near the end of the game, where they finally start to matter. Even amongst hardcore basketball fans, if one went to the bathroom in the first half and you told them they missed 10pts, they wouldn’t bat an eye; you’d be crazy to care, because it simply does not matter at that juncture. Not so with tennis, where an entire set is often decided by only a single break of serve, and that can happen at any point in the set, even the first game. Because each game is just composed of four points, and either player can score any point, the pendulum of pressure is never far from swinging in either direction.

This makes almost every point in tennis very important. You make two simple mistakes in a row, and the score is all of a sudden 0-30—that’s pressure. You make just two more mistakes (or your opponent does something right twice), and you’ve been broken, and you may have just lost the set. Add to this that the margins are so small (an inch wide, a tad long—if only that ball had of been a hair higher it would have tipped over the net!), and you see why tennis is so (dramatically) frustrating and compelling. It’s like hitting the post on a penalty kick in soccer every few plays. And yes, margins are small in every sport, and losses or victories often hinge on a quick sudden mistake or a flash of brilliance. But in tennis, every single time you slip up and don’t score, your opponent does, which makes the stakes higher.

Internal

Unlike sports that will always end when a certain amount of time or distance has been reached, the duration of a tennis match is unique and internal to each particular match, like baseball or cricket. In tennis, you can’t depend on your teammates to help you, nor the clock to save you. A game can be finished in less than a single minute, or it could take over 10 mins. A set can take 20 minutes, or more than 1.5 hours. And matches can be wrapped up in an hour, or approach five. There is something satisfying about internal scoring features like this. It reminds me of those No Fear T-shirts that said “I don’t lose, I run out of time.” Tennis goes on and on, until somebody breaks. And if nobody breaks, then you get a tie-breaker: the knife-fight by which tight sets are decided, switching serves back and forth until someone slips and loses the set.

When you combine this internality with its interactivity, you get the drama of two players locked in 5+minute game of Ad-in/out and deuce! This kind of do-or-die moment, when one’s back is really up against the wall, is rivalled only by power plays in hockey. Except power plays are given in hockey because your opponent tried to cheat—they hooked you, or cross-checked from behind, etc. In tennis, a break point is won by your opponent’s tenacity (within the rules) or your own sloppiness.

When you combine internality with iteration, you get the high drama of a match point: if you score the next point, the match is over, you win! But if you miss, the game will continue, possibly for over another hour, at which point you could still lose. What other sport can match that? It’s like having a penalty or free-throw in the dying seconds of a tied game, where scoring seals victory and missing means overtime. In other words, it’s something that is incredibly exciting and rare in other sports, whereas it is structurally built into the game of tennis so as to be not uncommon.

Tennis may not be the only sport with any of the above features, but it is the sport that best brings them all together, and in doing so, crystallizes and captures what I think we find most compelling about sports in general—character unveiled. So next time your tennis-obsessed friend texts you to hit the courts, you should pick up your racket and join.  You’ll see that it is a hell of a game, and maybe you’ll even play until the sun is set, because when it comes to tennis, no other sport is its match.  

Addendums   

The essay is over. You can stop reading, if indeed you still are. But if you still want more, here are a few stray asides.

“Football and hockey (rugby, etc.) will always be more impressive to me because of the aspect of forceful contact. You’re trying to catch, run, and throw, but you’re also liable to get hit hard at any moment—that’s sport!” So says my friend, let’s call him Trevor, because that’s in fact his name. Many share Trevor’s opinion. Not me—I hate contact sports. I stopped playing hockey as soon as kids started hitting; my blood boiled if someone made a rough tackle in soccer. For me, these were barbaric interventions into our civilized games—an animality that needed to be restrained and tamed so that true play could begin. Bodily contact was the dark underbelly of sports. With its two sovereigns confined to either side of the net, tennis reveals not its deficiency but its perfection by the fact that the only medium for communicating one’s ferocity is the ball, which is sent to and fro like missile missives full of fury. I know, delicate of me. But here’s the thing: even in football and hockey, are these big bruisers and hard hitters the players we remember and admire? Are they to be found posted up on the walls of children’s bedrooms? Does anybody actually want their child to be that player, or is it more of a consolation? (‘If Timmy can’t trick, he’ll sure as shit tackle!’) Even diehard football fans, can they name all the players bashing their heads together in the middle? Are other grown men wearing their jerseys to the games? (I assume these players also have names on the backs of their jerseys, presumably so that their mothers can pick them out?) But the players we remember and revere—that even non-fans know about—the Gretzky’s, the Brady’s, etc., are not the one’s concussing and bloodying themselves. In the end, to our collective merit, we reveal that contact is the least admirable part of these sports. Football isn’t designed to be compelling, it’s designed for commercial breaks (the ball is in play for an average of 11minutes over the course of the usual 3hour game). Will future generations look back at football stadiums as we do at the Roman colosseum, and see a place where we sacrificed athletes to the lions and tigers of early onset dementia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy for our own entertainment? Probably not, but I wouldn’t blame them if they did.   

“Sorry man, I can’t play tennis today, or even all this week. Summer is golf season for me!” Most of my friends who play tennis, also play golf, and so I hear this a lot. I loathe golf, and not only because it deprives me of hitting partners. Golf is in that rarified category of things I dislike but am almost glad they exist, just because I love to hate them (along with car-culture and reality TV). But again, here’s the thing: I don’t think most people who love golf actually love golf. To hear them talk about their love of golf, the golf itself starts to sound like a fifth spinning wheel. Instead, the emphasis is on the beautiful course locations, these extravagant boy’s trips, or driving carts around, and having beers after (or during). I’m sitting there thinking, you don’t like golf, you like getting out of the house for an entire sunny day, and gallivanting around a nicely manicured private park, shooting the shit with your friends, all while cloaked in an aura of prestige and class. (My friends transitioned from grad-school to law-school—all of a sudden they can’t shut up about playing golf with their bosses.) If you loved golf, there’s no need to travel to all these different courses and take up all this space; you’d just go to a little putting or driving range by yourself and hit the ball. What you really like are all the trappings golf surrounds itself with. Golf offers a variety of expensive gear, lavish locations, all wrapped up in the simulacrum of sport, belied by the levelling feature of its handicap scoring system. (Are we even allowed to say ‘handicap’ anymore? It’s considered a derogatory slur everywhere else except the golf course, where it’s clung to insofar as it enables those flirting with their third cardiac event to nonetheless play alongside actual athletes.) No other sport presents a more inefficient use of time and space: hours spent for no more than a minute total of swings, and no more than ~100 people utilizing this lavish greenspace, where, in cities such as LA or Toronto, five times that many people desperately want the use of that publicly subsidized space. So please, for the love of God, next time I ask you to play tennis, can you just leave the clubs at home and grab the racket instead?

And what about pickle-ball, should I say something about this craze, surely sweeping on to a tennis court near you? No—just by having mentioned it I’ve already given it more space than it deserves in an essay about sports.