Trying The Dance Of Shiva

So I suppose what is needed is not just a movie and a ball machine but a wise pro. A tennis guru.

Two weeks after the Esalen weekend I had a chance to try yoga tennis back to back with the best of the traditional drills, ones given at John Gardiner's Tennis Ranch in Scottsdale, Ariz. I had been through the Gardiner clinic before. The drills were fun, the strategy was percentage strategy, the ranch was elegant and my serve emerged unscathed.

In the mornings I drilled away at the Gardiner clinic, forehands, backhands, volleys and overheads. And in the early evening I went to yoga tennis because Rick Champion or, rather, Baba Rick, was teaching in Scottsdale at the high school courts. I had also read Zen in the Art of Archery because it occurred to me that yoga tennis is actually a misnomer. Yoga means union, but to some people it is a guy in diapers standing on his head or the RCAF exercises without push-ups. But it isn't a sport, and Zen archery seems more applicable to tennis. The student in Zen archery went through many of the same agonies as a beginning tennis student. He tried to tell his right hand to release properly with his sergeant mind. The Zen Master never coached him. The Master said, "The right shot at the right moment does not come because you do not let go of yourself...the right art is purposeless, aimless! What stands in your way is that you have a much too willful will. You think that what you do not do yourself does not happen." Breathing exercises were to detach the student from the world, to increase a concentration that would be comparable to "the jolt that a man who has stayed up all night gives himself when he knows that his life depends on all his senses being alert." Nothing more is required of the student than he copy the teacher: "The teacher does not harass and the pupil does not overtax himself."

In our small yoga tennis class it was an hour or more before we got onto the court. First we sat in a circle and breathed "ahhhhh." Then we breathed with alternate nostrils. We chanted Ong Namo Guru Dev Namo. A nice, pleasant singsong, Ong Namo Gu-ru Dev Na-Mo. (The chant is not a sentence and does not really have a meaning; the words have to do with the Divinity, the Teacher, the Divine Nature and the Divinity possible in creation.) Then we concentrated on the center of energy, below the navel, and moving that energy out through the arm.

We took to the court, paired off and practiced patting balls to each other, watching the pattern on the ball. It seemed ludicrously simple, standing on the service line patting balls, but my mind began to rumble around like Molly Bloom's. It would do anything rather than empty and stay on the patterns of the ball: What's for dinner? What time is it? How long are we going to do this? How am I going to start the speech to the Harvard Business School Club of Arizona on Saturday? What time is it?

My nine-year-old, who attended both yoga tennis and Gardiner's, said, "That breathing is very relaxing, but I like to run around the court more."

The next day at Gardiner's I tried my yoga tennis during the clinic. It wasn't a notable success. My sergeant mind, ever adaptable, had simply picked up the vocabulary of yoga tennis. Instead of the usual command, "Follow through, dummy," it was now saying. "Extend ki, dummy, you didn't do it that time." I tried a racket mantra with the ball machine: inhale, racket back, pause, exhale and hit. But by the time I said, "Inhale, racket back," the ball was already past me and I was off balance and slicing. I did notice at Gardiner's the barrage of negativity. My fellow students all brought their sergeant minds, and they apologized constantly: "I always get my racket back too late. It's my follow-through, I don't follow through enough," and so on. They had heard these things before, and the pros reinforced them: "Get your racket back, you're not following through." So everybody was agreed: the sergeant Egos and the teaching staff. We were dummkopfs. The atmosphere was cheerful because the pros had such good humor, but by the end of the session we were depressed because we had learned 200 different things we did wrong, and perfect strokes seemed impossible.

The staff took video tapes of our strokes. One pro said I had a great serving motion. That was because there was no ball in it. "I serve fantastically as long as there's no ball," I said. "I should have been in Blow-Up."

"Your toss isn't going to the same place each time," the pro said.

"I know that," I said. "I tell it to, but it won't."