Living Out Of Debt

Tennis psychology is nothing more than understanding the make-up of your opponent’s mind and gauging the effect of your own game on his/her mental viewpoint and also understanding the psychological effects resulting from the different external causes on your own head.

However, it is also true that you no one can be a successful psychologist of others without first understanding his own mental processes. Therefore, you must study the effect on yourself of the same thing occurring under different circumstances. This is because you react differently in different moods and under different circumstances.

You must understand the effect on your game of the ensuing irritation, pleasure, bewilderment, or whatever other form your reaction is. Does it improve your prowess? If so, try for it, but never offer it to your opponent. Does it rob you of concentration? If so, either remove the reason, or if that is not possible, try to ignore it.

Once you have correctly assessed your own reaction to conditions, study your opponents in order to determine their temperaments. Similar temperaments react similarly, and you may judge men of your own type by yourself. Opposite temperaments you have to try to compare with those whose reactions you already know.

A person who can regulate his/her own mental processes runs an great chance of determining those of someone else for the minds works along definite lines of thought and can be studied. One can only control one’s own thought processes after studying them very carefully .

A steady, phlegmatic baseline player is rarely a quick thinker. If he were he would not stay on the baseline. The physical appearance of a player is often a pretty clear indication of his/her kind of mind. The stolid, easy-going player, who usually advocates the baseline game, does so because he hates to stir up his/her slow mind to work out a safe method of getting to the net.

Then there is the other sort of baseline player, who would rather remain on the back of the court while directing an attack intending to disrupt up your game. He is a much more dangerous player, and a deep, keen thinking antagonist. He achieves his/her results by mixing up his/her length and direction and worrying you with the variety of his/her game. He is a good psychologist.

The first type of player mentioned above simply strikes the ball with little thought about what he is actually doing, while the latter always has a definite strategy and adheres to it.