Learning Tennis

Oh so impatient are you!

You look at the title of this blog and your eyes avert away! Why is that? Was there some incident in your youth where you gazed at some dumb jock (and boy were they dumb!) who only cared about football or basketball but lacked the intellect to calculate the roots of a quadratic equation, that lacked the intellect to understand the causes of the Civil War, that laughably dreamed of a pro career where they would make money, a dream so improbable that perhaps ignorance of math was the only thing that sustained such folly, a folly as silly as Seward's? (You betcha!)

Tennis is one of the sports that you can, if you want, try to learn on your own. You can read books, you can have friends teach you, you can visit the courts frequently, or hit against the wall, you can admire the pros.

Even if you have a powerful intellect, one that reasons, one that thinks, until recently, until the Web, you really lacked the information you needed to play tennis well. You could, I suppose, record stuff on a VCR, if anyone has those gadgets any more, and play and replay and hit slowmo and hope to glean the mysteries of how to hit a forehand or a backhand, how to hit with spin.

Even with the Web as your ally, powerful search engines to narrow your inquiries, how do you interpret what you see. You want to run what is the equivalent of a physical diff.

What is a diff? In computer world, you often want to see the changes made to a text file, typically a computer program you wrote, but it could be a story you wrote in a creative writing course. A diff is a way to represent what was and what is. It looks a touch technical, and to the casual eye it is. The main lesson to draw is it summarizes what changed before to make it what it is now.

A physical diff then is the difference, in some general way, between the way your body does something and the way someone who does it "right" (as there are more definitions of right than we care about) does it. Because there are many definitions of right, we want to abstract one level up to point out what are the basic differences.

A diff of two text files, two programs, or two variations of the same story you've been writing is very exact. It's easy to tell the exact changes made. The kind of diff I'm talking about is much more akin to the difference between you and Hemingway, you and Shakespeare, indeed, you and any good writer. That level of abstraction is hard to capture in writing, but somewhat, though not wholly, easier in sports.

We can look at the general structure of how someone hits. They move their arm this way. Their wrist is this way. Their shoulders are that way. This is the sequence of things that happen.

We can learn by watching and imitating. But you may fail to see! You may not see all that there is to see. I didn't look at their legs! Was that important? Was that hop necessary? Why did they make this motion here, but not there? I don't get it!

The nice thing about tennis is that there are a handful of things to master, but you have to spend a lot of time getting the body acclimated to those motions.

But when it comes to learning something else, something useful, something like programming, there's far less to tell the would be programmer. Why is that? Admittedly, tennis has been with us for over a century. The knowledge we've gain about tennis has proceeded by leaps and bounds and is now accessible in a way never seen before until very recently. There are ways to look at our own game and analyze it.

But programming? Much younger. Still immature. And while people seem to know how to program just as people seem to know how to play video games, we don't yet know why. We don't have a good theory as to why. It doesn't make sense to us.

In the things we find most important, the learning of "real stuff", we are at an impasse. How is it that we don't even know how to program, that each of us finds our own way their and that perseverance, more than anything seems the key to guide us to a nebulous solution to the problem at hand?

In that respect, tennis seems more reassuring. There are answers, even if we must sometimes pay for such answers. These answers may change. The answers today may not be the answers tomorrow. The game evolves. The solutions evolve. Programming too may evolve perhaps far more dramatically than anything that happens in tennis.

I suggest that even as I learn tennis because I find satisfaction in learning tennis, that you think about how you learn something--anything. How does that happen, and why is that so hard to convey to the next person?