Post 12: "Peace With Inches"

One of the rituals I have before I play an important tennis match is to listen to a speech from, "Any Given Sunday," recited by Al Pachino. Here is the most momentous part of the speech in my opinion:

"You find out life's just a game of inches. So's football. Because in either game, life or football, the margin for error is so small. I mean, one half a step too late or too early and you don't quite make it. One half second too slow or too fast and you don't quite catch it. The inches we need are everywhere around us. They're in every break of the game, every minute, every second. On this team we fight for that inch. On this team we tear ourselves and everyone else around us to pieces for that inch. We claw with our fingernails for that inch. Because we know when we add up all those inches, that's gonna make the *censored* difference between winning and losing... I'll tell you this, in any fight, it's the guy who's willing to die who's gonna win that inch."

Throughout tryouts, this speech resonated in my mind. Honestly, this tryout yielded a lot of pressure on me in the last two matches, since both matches were directly related to my rank on the team for the rest of the year. Last year, since I was a freshman trying out for the first time, it was as though all the pressure was on the other players; the returning players. However, this year, since I was returning, I let the pressure get to me, which resulted in sub-par performance. However, the biggest difference between how I played in tryouts this year and how I played in tryouts last year was how I played on the big points, such as "no-ad" deuces. Last year, when I would win 2/5, this time around, I won 4/5. Two points is the difference between winning the set 6-4 and losing the set 4-6. Inch by inch, I had to work hard to win those matches.

My coach told me that tournaments are won months before they are played. He has never really explained it to me why this is so, but I think that this is because the mentality which someone has all the time determines how well they do, and how much they improve.