Tennis

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Being by nature and physical displacement a cricketer, and therefore and anti-tennis player it has taken the JC some years to come to terms with the fact that tennis can tell us something meaningful about the world.

Mathematics is arbitrary

Tennis employs an alien mathematical system. Firstly, it does not progress sequentially — the first two points in a game are worth 15, the third only 10 — though there is no suggestion that the third point is any less valuable — and thereafter the game numbering just gives up and talks only of an “advantage” which can be acquired and then forfeit any number of times — counting switches from accretion to a net differential. To win a game you must both accumulate a minimum of four points, but also a bet differential of two. One gets no credit for winning be a larger differential: a service game broken to love is worth the same as a service game won on the 42nd deuce.

Thus it is quite possible for a player to score more points in total but still lose the match.

Secondly, the number of points required to end a game and convert it to a point in the set is path-dependent and therefore unpredictable. It is perfectly possible for a player to lose 6-3, 6-3, 6-4, and have scored more points than the winner. (If all the winner wins all its games by a differential of two (in total 36 points) and the loser wins all its games by a differential of 40, so a net differential of 4 points to the loser.

This alone give us a perspective on another possibility; a different kind of mathematics; a whole different space-time in which values do not increase in a linear fashion, but by reference to a counterposing force. This is in fact a more realistic accounting for the vicissitudes of life. Yet by the lights of our conventional counting system this is some kind of warped spacetime: one can have an advantage, then lose it, then give one up and gain it again. And even points you have scored may be worth nothing: the 14 games you win in a set eventually lost to 16 are thereafter worth nothing. There is no sequential accumulation of points; one might score seven points in every game in a set, but at the end of the set have no points at all.

Spacetime

Speaking of spacetime, a tennis court is also like a gruesome experiment on conventional geometry. Apparently, Euclid’s calming, flat unpredictable space-time has inconstant effect.

On one hand, there are places where it works beautifully: behind the baseline even an inexperienced player knows the instant her ground-stroke contacts the ball that it will be out, even by half an inch. This sense of certainty is so profound as to imply some kind of strange entanglement of physical states between current segments of spacetime occupied by the striker and the immediate future of a quadrant of spacetime some thirty yards distant.

As you approach the net this spooky predictability falls away and things get very weird, very fast. There are warps, eddies and portals in the space time continuum hover and wink in and out of existence. These are not well explained by modern cosmology. A tennis net, we think, has some kind of dark energy: if it were constructed of dark matter, or collapsed stars, that would explain a lot. In any case it exudes weird influence on things who approach it too closely: balls, and players — particularly men.

An outbound ball, well struck and apparently describing a trajectory clearing the net cord by a good distance will — sometimes — be drawn into its gravitational field. The strength of this warp in the fabric of reality depends, often, on what is at stake in the match — in more than one sense is it a “gravity well”. The player, usually male, who leaps like a salmon at his opponent’s feeble last-ditch backhand lob, bringing all the newtons at his disposal upon it as it crosses the threshold bisecting the court will watch in horror as it defies settled laws of motion and angular momentum and canons limply into the net. In other cases the gravity field appears to invert, so in inbound shots that look destined for it are mysteriously repelled and float defiantly over the net.

There is a cloak really known as “ the rainbow of shit” that encircles around every player, growing in strength as she — more often he — approaches the net. The area is described as the point where the player in theory can, but as a matter of common sense absolutely shouldn't — reach the ball to return it by volley You can expect a ball played inside the scheißeregenbogen to come back with more menace than you imparted on it. Outside the visual spectrum, the ball will float beyond his reach. But if you can intersect with it, anything can happen. It is the smart bomb of tennis.