The General Psychology of Tennis (Part 1)
Tennis psychology is nothing more than understanding the workings of your opponent’s mind, and gauging the effect of your own game on his/her head and also understanding the mental effects resulting from the different external causes on your own mind.
However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own psychology. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under various circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.
You have to understand the effect on your game of the resulting irritation, pleasure, confusion, or whatever other form your reaction takes. Does it improve your prowess? If so, strive for it, but never give it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, but if that isn’t possible, try to ignore it.
After you have properly measured your own reaction to conditions, study your opponents to determine their temperaments. Similar characters react in a like way, and you may judge people of your own sort by yourself. Different temperaments you must try to compare with those people, whose reactions you are already familiar with.
A person who can regulate his/her own psychology has an excellent chance of determining those of another for the minds works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own mental processes after examining them very carefully .
The regular, unemotional baseline player is seldom a keen thinker. If he was, he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is usually a fairly clear indicator of his/her kind of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually displays the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her slow mind to think out a safe strategy of reaching the net.
Then there is the other sort of baseline player, who would rather remain at the back of the court while directing an attack intended to break up your game. He is a much more dangerous player and a deep, keen thinking opponent. He gets his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variance of his/her game. This player is a good psychologist.
The first type of tennis player mentioned above just strikes the ball without much idea of what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite strategy and adheres to it.
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