I recently met up with a best friend of mine from college. He is not an athlete and has never played any sports professionally. He is a salesman for a 3D printing company. And ever since I went pro, he has treated my job with as much enthusiasm as I have treated his: supportive, yet slightly underwhelmed with a stoic interest. If he tells me about a sale he is exceptionally proud of, I will acknowledge how great that is and tell him I am proud of him! But really, I have no idea what that means, what he is talking about, or anything other than the surface-level “Good job, buddy!” I am not trying to trivialise it, but I don’t know much about it, and frankly, I do not care that much. Similarly, if I tell him about a great match, he will have the same reaction that I had. I told him I had won a round at Wimbledon this year, and he said excitedly, “You played at Wimbledon? Nice!”
Bad days at the office
If I have a bad match, he will treat it the same way as if he had a bad day at work: “It’s okay, there is always another one tomorrow; you’ll be fine.” As athletes, we remain miserable long after our losses because they trigger us in many unhealthy ways. Of course, you can’t remain stoic and not care about your losses because, in a way, we need to hate losing to fuel the fire to keep fighting and pushing and training. Some period of grief is entirely natural. It becomes a problem when we connect our tennis performance with our self-worth. Then a loss becomes “I’m bad,” instead of “I had a bad day in the office”.
My friend helped me realise that bad practices, injuries, and bad losses are just bad days at work. And as athletes, it would help us if we saw sports more like that.
More than just a tennis player
In this way, my friend made me realise that tennis is, at the end of the day, just another job. As athletes, our sport has become all-encompassing; it completely takes over our lives. You get so into it that you do not see any other way of life, you begin to catastrophise and put more weight on things than you should, and create a negative attachment to your sport. But someone like my friend can show me how much it is just a job. In a sport that puts most of your value on your ranking, it is refreshing to be around people who value you for things other than your sport.
In the tennis world, people will treat you differently based on your ranking or whether you’re currently playing well or not. I’ve had girls become “friends” with me only after I reached a certain threshold in the rankings. And I’ve had people stop messaging me congratulatory texts when I dropped out of the top 200. That’s why, in a sport that targets one’s self-worth and value so quickly, it is essential to surround yourself with the right group of people, where your performance does not change how they see you. My friend’s opinion of me does not change based on a win or loss, just like I don’t care whether he sold a printer that day. Because it is just another job.