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 oscillation. 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, 6-2, 6-2, and have scored more points than the winner.

This alone give us a perspective on another possibility; a different kind of mathematics; a whole different space-time in which numbers do not increase in a linear fashion, but in odd denominations and then reverse over themselves in some kind of warped spacetime: one can have an advantage, then lose it, then give one up and gain it again. 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.

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 bound to clear it by a good distance will be drawn into its gravitational field. In inbound ball that looks bound for it will be mysteriously repelled.

In any on a tennis court. this we think explains the curious behavior of balls and the architecture of amateur players. There is a cloak really known rainbow of shit around every player it grows strength as she