Tennis 101

During the Australian Open I saw a professional tennis player do the following:

1)    Hit a fuzzy ball

2)    With a tennis racquet

3)    Over a net

4)    Into an area defined by white lines

The player standing at the other end was unable to replicate the task, due to where the first player had hit the above mentioned ball.

To highlight the first player’s excellence at this placement, Jim Courier (adding his professional excellence to the commentary team) said,

“He’s a man who is really familiar with the geometries of a tennis court.”

Hearing this, I realised I’m halfway to becoming a professional tennis star without ever having drunk enhanced-water.

The first two points might be tricky and I will admit I’m not certain I’ll always be in the right place at the right time to perform those steps. I am all over numbers three and four, though. I’ve glommed onto that stuff partly because ‘the geometries’ are not subject to regular revision, but mainly because in a deep and Euclidean sense, they are not complicated.

I’ll let you in on the secrets of the ‘geometries’ of a tennis court.

The rectangle or “oblong” if you will, is as mentioned, clearly marked. Even if your memory goes hazy under performance pressure  (familiarity does breed contempt, Mr Courier) it’s like there’s a cheat-sheet right there on the ground. You should never be caught screaming at an umpire, “You have got to be kidding! Given an amorphous, blob-shaped court of identical surface area, that ball was clearly in!”

You only have to get familiar with one face of the two-dimensional, rectangular playing area. Tennis players in the professional world tour call it the “ground” or “surface”. Unless the competition organisers had Möbius or Klein help design the court or there’s been an increase in gravity which folded the Euclidean geometry in on itself, you can always expect the ball to stay on one side of it. For the non-technical, we call this “bounce”.

There's bilateral symmetry in the playing area design, too. The incidental by-product of the rules of tennis allow for more mental shortcuts while remaining ‘familiar with the geometries’. To help yourself, put a mental mirror up at the net. Very broadly, what you know about your end of the court will be true of your opponent’s end of the court (it only appears to get smaller at the other end). Relax. You will swap ends during the match. Any vagueness you experience about the opponent’s territory can be dispelled with a visit every third game. For the more advanced among you, I would suggest that there was bilateral symmetry to be found within your own end of the court as well, if you put the mirror up lengthways…  but this is to ignore your forehand/backhand paradox and is not important. Players of the modern game do not discriminate between the forehand and the backhand.

The above point is also true of the net itself. Again, broadly, the net should be perceived as being the same height from either/both ends of the court, so you really only need to remain familiar with half of the court and transpose what you know onto the other half without actually having to remember any fresh information.

And there you have it. You are now familiar with the geometries of a tennis court having done less than half the work of your average tennis pro.

In Tennis 102, I will explain the relativistic issues Jim Courier presents us with, when he describes a ball that is moving fast as “heavier” than a ball moving smelly… I mean slow.