Could I Have Made It as a Pro?
No, almost certainly not. If I could have, I may have. But I certainly could have been closer to it than I was. One part of me believes that under perfect circumstances I may have had a reasonable chance.
On the surface, I have a lot of things going for me. For one, tennis comes easy to me. I’m a well-rounded athlete with an ideal height and weight for the sport. I’m currently a 5.0 player, which puts me in the top 1% of the talent pool. Yet I am still nowhere close to the pros. Why am I not better than I am?
That is a very complicated question because it involve a lot of variables, some of which I had no control over. One variable that I could have controlled was myself. In this regard, I have to admit that most of my relative non-achievement had to do with me. During my formative years, I never worked hard. I chose comfort and avoided hardship. I was a bad loser that competed in tournaments too infrequently. I never trained my body physically. I practiced 4 or 5 hours per week and usually against players that were below my skill level.
At the time, I thought I was working hard, but I was too immature to understand what hard work looked or felt like. In hindsight, I can obviously see how far I was from hard work. Could the adults in my life have done a better job pushing me or showing me what genuine work looked like? Absolutely, and I wish they had.
On the other hand, I also understand why my parents and coaches didn’t push me too hard. I was a very sensitive boy. From their position, pushing me would cost a lot of money and likely cause me to quit tennis and resent them. This is plausible, but I’m not sure it’s true.
As a youth, losing hurt a lot. After difficult losses, I would distance myself from tennis for weeks or months and sometimes contemplate quitting for good. But most of these lost matches were respectably close. Perhaps if I’d worked harder, I would have won those matches and felt more confident. Imagine how I might have felt if the pattern of close losses instead became a pattern of close wins. From my perspective now, I think the moral position that the adults took was totally wrong. Hard work would have protected me from pain, not caused more of it. And if I did burn out completely, oh well. I would have found some other meaningful activity to fill my time.
My coach was another variable that I could have controlled. With all due respect to him, I should have moved on by 11 or 12 years old. I have to be fair that he was a primary reason why I loved tennis. But I was too good for him and the players that he kept in his network, and that stunted my development. When I had opportunities to work with other coaches, I flinched.
But as much as I want to blame my support system, the onus is still on me. I knew that other kids were playing twice as much and working with better coaches. I knew they were competing more frequently and working out off the court. In my feeble-brained adolescence, I thought that winning with talent was somehow cooler than winning with hard work. Instead of embracing dedication, I gave myself am excuse to lose.
Then there were variables that I had no control over at all, most notably is my body. I hit puberty late, experiencing the majority of the physical changes slowly around the age of 15-1/2, about a year behind most of my peers. Although I grew rapidly over three years, shooting up about 8 inches from 15-18 (plus another inch in college), I didn’t fill in or reap the physical benefits of my maturity until much later. At 16, I was remarkably skinny - 5’11” and 135 lbs. In terms of physical maturity, my opponents were basically adults, giving them the upper hand when our skills were similar.
Consider an alternative timeline in which I worked harder, chose better coaches and mentors, had more accessible talent to practice against, and developed physically at an earlier age. Taking all of this into consideration, I wonder how much better would I have been. Would that be good enough to go pro?
While my heart tells me yes, my brain tells me no way. The truth is, despite my complaining, I probably fulfilled something like 85% of my potential during my upbringing. Maybe with perfect conditions, I might have reached most of my potential. I’d like to think I could crack the top 2000 players in the world. But getting to the top 200 is an entirely different ballpark.
Tennis deals in diminishing returns and difficult to control variables. Perfect circumstances would give me 99% of what I’d need to make the pros. The extra 1% is thousands of hours of grueling work, competition, and luck. Who’s to say I wouldn’t burn out, get injured, or fail is some other, unforeseen way? Even with everything perfect, the odds of going pro are very, very low. As proof, consider the thousands of kids that attend full-time tennis academies. These environments are considered ideal training grounds for future pros and yet very few graduates go on to become professionals.
Although I have regrets about my development in tennis, there are many silver linings in this story. Tennis has the potential to ruin lives, and I’m very glad that my life is intact. If I’d played that much more, I wouldn’t have much of a personality, and I may not have met the people in my life today. Would I trade my life today to redo my development with low odds of making the pros? No chance.
