Point of View: Winsome, Lose Some

“You’re quite the tennis player,” my younger opponent said the other night.

Well, I would like to think so, but there’s much to do. Several times recently I’ve felt I was on the brink of mastering my serve, only to be disabused. Tim Ross says he has that got-it-nailed feeling with his golf swing at times only to have it vanish the next time out.

“I think I’m just about there,” I said to him the other night after the younger player and I had finished a good match. “I’ve just got to remember to crook my elbow and wait a bit before letting it reach up for the ball.”

Lisa Jones, my teacher, says she has a book in mind about tennis that she would like to call “The Gathering.” I gather it has to do with properly preparing to stroke the ball that’s headed your way. Sadaharu Oh, the great Japanese home run hitter, said something to that effect in his autobiography, I believe, to wit, that the pitcher and batter were, while in opposition, also in unison, when the pitcher, who has gathered himself, delivers the ball to the plate while the batter — cranelike, on one foot, in Oh’s case — gathers himself to hit it.

And that’s something I could work on, having mistakenly characterized my opponents, when I began to play singles again last fall, as the enemy, rather than view them as potential partners in the creation of a good match, which is to say a balanced one.

Fueled by an obsessive pursuit of winning in the fall, I won a lot. I win some and lose some now, and am having more fun, which, as Abby Okin reminded me not long ago, is what playing tennis ought to be about.

In having more fun though, I’m no less intent on improving — is that a disease? — and have thus asked Rob Balnis, who’s strengthened my shoulders and core greatly in the course of the past year, to help me become increasingly nimble afoot, and to help give me “wrists of steel — like Lisa’s.”

“Wait . . . wait . . . reach up!”