Tennis is a game of holding one's nerve. Yes, it's also about hitting a fuzzy yellow ball over a net and trying to look good while doing it even if you're not good at doing it. (I mean, just look at the resurgence of retro tennis-inspired attire in fashion catalogues the past year or two. There's even a word for this marriage of preppy and athleisure: tenniscore. But we digress.)
One of the strange idiosyncrasies of tennis is that the game is supposed to be played in silence. Perhaps it has to do with its lawn tennis roots (and those of its predecessor, real tennis) in the aristocratic courts of Europe. It was, like its silent chums golf, croquet, bowls and snooker, supposed to be a civilised affair, played to pass idle time in a spirit of good-hearted fun and sportsmanship.
Perhaps it also has to do with the breaks between points. Heartfelt and enthusiastic applause, but then quiet, please, so a player can focus on the highly skillful task of serving.
I've often thought about the scenario of a World Cup Final football shoot-out where the referee demands silence before each penalty is taken. Good luck with that you'd say, with a stadium full of sloshed hooligans.
The G&Ts also flow freely at Wimbledon, but a certain decorum keeps prevailing even late into a Saturday night. Players are entitled to wait for silence before serving. In New York and Paris things can get a little more raucous with a home favourite playing, but you get my point.
Yet within the parameters of sophistication, a world of psychological warfare and gamesmanship exists. Many think of John McEnroe as the original tennis villain, introducing tantrums and racquet abuse to the fuddy-duddies of the establishment. But what he and his arch-rival Jimmy Connors brought, along with their ability to disrupt, was the grunt — also known as the groan and in some cases elevated to a shrill shriek or outright unrestrained primordial scream. McEnroe's was only on certain strokes, and one early scientific study found that during Wimbledon 1983 (which he won) his silent serves were twice as successful as his grunt serves. Subsequent research seems to point to the opposite end of the court.
Two studies among university-level players found that the speed of their serves and groundstrokes improved by 4% to 5% when accompanied by groaning. The gain is attributed to the activation of the core muscles.
Nick Bollettieri, the famous coach of Andre Agassi among others, encouraged his students to grunt as a way to release physiological and psychological tension and has said that groaning synchronises breathing precisely with hitting the ball. No wonder that two of the biggest shriekers in history, Monica Seles and Maria Sharapova, came out of his academy.
Critics of the grunt, especially the higher pitched female ones, have been plenty. In the mid-2000s Martina Navratilova went as far as calling it outright cheating because opposing players could not hear the ball hitting the string. For a while there was talk among the powers that be on the women's tour of finding a way to put a lid on this phenomenon.
Top players can still be divided between big-time grunters such as Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka and quiet assassins like Stefanos Tsitsipas and Iga Swiatek.
Another contentious issue is time-wasting, or rather, playing the match at the tempo of one's choosing. Many a competitor who likes to play at a reasonable tempo has experienced the frustration of an opponent deliberately slowing down the time between points either to recover properly or to throw your rhythm off and get under your skin.
Other well-know under-the-belt tactics is to take long toilet breaks to disrupt a player's rhythm and talking between every point to literally get into an opponent's head through his ears
Rafa Nadal was the master of this tactic, so much so that a visible stop clock was introduced to make sure players stay within the 25 seconds allowed between points. Even with its introduction, Nadal often got away with murder, averaging well over 30 seconds in big matches (when to start the clock is up to the umpire's discretion — supposedly after applause has ended and the score is called). Whether this was deliberate or an unfortunate side effect of his well-known obsessive-compulsive disorder is up for debate (the Czech player Radek Stepanek once famously kicked over Nadal's perfectly arranged water bottles during Wimbledon — it didn't work: Nadal still won).
Other well-known under-the-belt tactics are to take long toilet breaks to disrupt a player's rhythm and talking between every point to literally get into an opponent's head through his ears — Nick Kyrgios and Andy Murray being expert exploiters of the latter.
What it really comes down to is trying to control what's happening on the stage that is the tennis court. The fist-pumps and “come-ons!”, the tantrums and swearing, the looking at the coaching box for affirmation, even the silent stoicism of Roger Federer or Bjorn Borg — they're all part of the drama of reality TV.
And perhaps also a little like the great Greek tragedy we call life: because don't we all believe that if we try hard enough we can somehow, sometimes, change the outcome and win, for heaven's sake?
Cloete is a copywriter and four-time singles champion at the Gardens Lawn Tennis Club in Cape Town. His on-court approach is silent with the occasional groan when things get desperate.
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