By David Bradshaw
You can achieve virtually anything—
if you close your mind to the possibility of defeat.
You can achieve virtually anything—
if you close your mind to the possibility of defeat.
SOMETIMES,
watching tennis at championship level, I feel it’s like a graphic
representation of life’s struggles.
Tennis is the most gladiatorial of all non-contact sports.
It’s all about the will of one player to beat another. (It’s no coincidence
that BBC Television used Hans Zimmer’s music for the movie Gladiator in the lead-up to its coverage of the Wimbledon finals.)
Obviously, talent, ability, and sheer tennis playing genius come into the equation, but when we’re talking about players at the top of their game, we can take that for granted.
What I find fascinating about the game is the psychology
that lies behind it. I thought about this particularly back in 2010 when two players,
Tomas Berdych from the Czech Republic and Samantha Stosur from Australia,
then ranked No. 13 and No. 9 respectively, knocked out the reigning champions Roger
Federer and Serena Williams at Wimbledon and Paris.
Amazing
It didn’t really matter that ultimately they didn’t win the
championships, in that they’d already achieved the near impossible: they’d
beaten the top players in closely fought, knife-edge thrilling matches which
had everyone watching on the edge of their seats.
Clearly, Berdych went into his match believing he could win.
But Federer no doubt expected to win. And the same thing
applied to Sam Stosur’s encounter with the apparently unbeatable Serena
Williams.
So belief won out over expectation in both cases.
Or did it?
The dividing line between the two mental states may be wafer thin, and is quite likely to alter in the course of the encounter. And according to author and quantum theory expert Phil Gosling in his book Luck Engineering, “Expecting something to happen is more powerful than willing it to happen”.
And in the matches under discussion, who’s to say that, for whatever reason, the two “underdogs” expected that something amazing was about to happen . . .
So belief won out over expectation in both cases.
Or did it?
The dividing line between the two mental states may be wafer thin, and is quite likely to alter in the course of the encounter. And according to author and quantum theory expert Phil Gosling in his book Luck Engineering, “Expecting something to happen is more powerful than willing it to happen”.
And in the matches under discussion, who’s to say that, for whatever reason, the two “underdogs” expected that something amazing was about to happen . . .
