Tennis is More than Just a Game

The book Break Point: 9 Life Lessons From the Tennis Court was written by David F Berens, an author and USPTA-certified Elite Professional. This book was easier to read via audible app on the cell phone since I have a subscription with Audible from Amazon, which made it easy to find this book since I know I have learned important lessons from the game.  An author read the story out loud while I took notes. The book is approximately 2 hrs. and 30 minutes. 

The book is about the tennis player Whitfield Franklin Andrews, who learned life lessons through the game. He became interested in tennis as a boy and put in the hard work by starting at his garage door and then moving up to the wall at the tennis court. Even if you have no one to play with, you can learn to focus while you’re chasing balls as a beginner. You have to start somewhere because we all have to pay our dues before getting into the fun and excitement of playing tennis.

I liked how the author kept going back and forth with Whit struggling on the tennis court to sitting down during the changeover and going down memory lane. He was remembering a lesson he learned as a boy but now as a professional tennis player in the middle of trying to come back from one set down and losing the second one. This was Whit’s way of trying to get his focus back in the game by going over the basics in his mind.

You see Whit got into trouble with the law and ended up going to county jail and his dad had to bail him out. He was losing because he couldn’t focus on the present but focused on the past of his jail time. It seemed whenever he got himself into trouble on the court he would go back to the past.

He’s not focused, but is instead thinking of those past lessons with his dad, mom, and his first coach during the middle of the game against Heinrick Mostultz. Whit went back and forth in his head but realized he had a game to finish. Whit learned to strategize instead of flying by the seat of his pants which meant it was not too late to implement his game plan.

This is something he learned from his support group which were his parents and his first coach. He was never alone and that he should “deal with the situation at hand”; not to what happened two shots ago. Let it go and deal with it.

The author asked some pertinent questions but wanted to end with this question: Am I worried about being in no man’s land so much that I freeze and cannot deal with life’s situations? This is a good question for anyone even if you don’t play tennis. This ended up being a great book because it reminded me of the great life lessons I learned from my own time playing tennis.