ELITE PERFORMANCE: The Autonomic Genius of Carlos Alcaraz
I will begin by confessing or declaring my love of tennis, which I have played on and off for nearly forty years, and which is a clear contender for the most beautiful sport that exists. I am also deeply enamored of soccer, which it makes more sense to call football, as most of the world does. Tennis is a game that takes the dexterity of the hands and arms to its utmost extension, while football takes that of the feet. Yet while football requires a squad, the purest tennis is played by a single player on a single side of the court. Within the domain of tennis you can witness the full continuum from dancing to combat.
Anytime that we are engaged in athletics we are in the realm of movement: the arena of the sympathetic nervous system. The same autonomic power that undergirds fight and flight is beneath the mobilization required to run, jump, pivot, stretch, and swing. Motion is sympathetic. Pretty much anyone can learn to hit a tennis ball. Swinging a racquet through the air, be it a tennis racquet, a squash racquet, a pingpong paddle, or a pickleball racquet seems to convey with it a primal satisfaction. There is something about striking a moving projectile and reversing its course that is deeply satisfying. The crispness of a clean strike of the ball is glorious. And in the back-and-forth of a rally, we have the call-and-response that our nervous systems love. This is a form of dancing, really, with a net between us, back-and-forth, to-and-fro. As soon as call-and-response happens, we are in the realm of ventrality. Back and forth is the rhythm of regulation, a cadence of relationship. And so tennis, in its movement and its rallies unites two neural systems: the connection system and the sympathetic nervous system.
If you practice tennis for any duration, you begin to understand that the higher the level of play, the more refined the movements become. And that, exponentially so. At the game’s most elite levels, the highest professional levels, the ball is moving with astonishing velocity and nearly unimaginable accuracy. Serves are coming off the racquet sometimes at 140 miles per hour, traversing the 78 feet of a tennis court in less time than it takes to blink twice. Forehands come screaming across at 100 miles per hour. When you do in fact strike the ball, it is in contact with the strings of your racquet for merely a micro-second, and today’s high-tech racquets, made of moulded strips of graphite, with extremely technical strings, amplify the force of the player’s whip-like motion so greatly that the standard stance for hitting shots has completely changed in the past twenty years because of advances in racquet technology. Today’s game is lightning fast. You can watch professional tennis on television without getting any real sense of the speed at which modern play happens. This is because the purview of the televised game is giving you a view of the court’s total action, which means that you are watching generally from high above. But if you are actually standing on or beside a court with elite players, you have a totally viscerally different understanding of the speed and timing required to play at this level. Today’s professional players are bludgeoning the ball. The tuning of the reflexes required to respond, with precision, to these levels of speed is unprecedented.
Elite tennis is a game of millimeters and micro-seconds. At this year’s Wimbledon, which is the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament, the most royal of all the Grand Slams, the human line callers made errors with such regularity during the first week of play that these incorrect calls altered the course of at least three matches. Stationed at intervals around the perimeter of each court are an assemblage of linecallers, all reporting to the chair umpire. Hands on knees, leaning forward, uniformed in buttondowns that contrast with the green of the grass courts, they scour a particular line with their eyes, calling out like a defense attorney objecting in court if a ball misses the line. But when the forehand is struck at 100 miles an hour, and it catches merely a millimeter or two of a two-inch chalked sideline, deforming and rolling as it makes contact, you can imagine that even finely trained eyes might get it wrong sometimes. Balls were called out that were not, in fact, out. Balls were called in that were actually out. At a tournament like this there is an electronic line-calling system, and no match at this level is played without, at some point, one of the players challenging a call, and the umpire and stadium pausing to watch the electronic replay. When we watch these replays we can see that the ball doesn’t make a circle on the line. The kiss of the first point of impact is twinned with rotation and deformation. The ball compresses, skids, and rolls across the point of impact, smearing across the line. (Here’s a literal book about this.)
The greatest players ever, Roger Federer comes to mind right away, had such extraordinary precision that they could aim for the outside of a line. From 80 or 90 feet away, as they were sometimes standing 10–20 feet behind the baseline, they could paint the outside edge of the line with a ball on purpose. For me this is kind of like watching Steph Curry sink a swoosh not from the 3-point line, from his own baseline. The level of precision required for this kind of play is almost unfathomable. And here is where this gets really interesting. Autonomic balance governs the tension in your muscles. Which is to say that the very specific mechanics of how you inhabit your body change as you shift across the continuum from relaxed to stressed. Which is to say that your ability to govern this is what makes the difference between that ball catching the back of the line, where you win a stunning point, and missing it completely.
If you’ve ever played any sport competitively in your life, you know that the way that the shot feels during practice is not the way it feels in the middle of the big game. This is, for many people, a common performance problem. We often practice a sport in contexts that are fairly relaxed, and quite different from where we compete. For example, most of us generally practice without an audience. But if you compete, it is often in front of an audience. And when 10,000 screaming people are watching you play, it is unlikely you feel as relaxed as you do on the practice court. The higher the level of stress–sympathetic activation–the more tension your muscles carry. The bigger the stage, the greater the pressure, the bigger the stoke, the greater the adrenaline surge. So in a game where the distance between winning a point and losing it is millimeters, the balance of your autonomic nervous system, which literally tightens and loosens the muscles controlling your shot, matters a great deal.
The higher the level of stress–sympathetic activation–the more tension your muscles carry. So in a game where the distance between winning a point and losing it is millimeters, the balance of your autonomic nervous system, which literally tightens and loosens the muscles controlling your shot, matters a great deal.
I have written, previously, about Novak Djokovich, the 23 time Grand Slam champion. Djokovich is known as a master of the mental game of tennis, a master of the mental constancy required to stay locked into the groove of elite performance on the world’s biggest stages. But Djokovich, I would propose to you, as well as most of the world of professional tennis, and the way that it is coached, actually misunderstands what it is exactly that gives rise to the most elite of performance.
And this is where I turn my attention to the autonomic genius of Carlos Alcaraz, the 20-year old Spanish tennis phenom who, yesterday, defeated Djokovich in the final of the men’s single’s championship of the world’s most important tournament, after being destroyed in the opening set 6–1. Alcaraz is giving us, through his play, a lesson about this, if we know what to pay attention to. About Alcaraz, who has just captured the Men’s singles title, the youngest player since the preternaturally talented Rafael Nadal, my friends say: That kid must have ice running through his veins to stay that cool under pressure. But no, that’s not it at all.
I started playing tennis at ten years of age. This was three years after I had been removed from my village. Both of my mother’s parents were tennis players. My grandfather, who was more serious about it, was approaching sixty, nearly a decade older than I am now. He stood six foot two, weighted probably 180 lbs, and served well over 100 miles an hour. My grandmother, who was portly and about 5 foot 2 had a wicked slice, and slashed at both her forehand and backhand as though she was swatting at mosquitoes. He couldn’t serve to her, because the ball would either hit her, which was not good for her, or she would be unable to return it, which was not good for him, and so I think was motivated both by sharing a game he loved with his grandson, and was also looking for someone who could return his serve. My entry into the sport happened pretty rapidly. I went from one day of lessons a week to two days and then to three days, and for several years the better part of my Saturdays were spent at a club called South Hampshire Racquet Club, with a pro named Lori Gunther who was known for developing young players. The club was about 45 minutes from my house, and had a restaurant where my grandfather would order steamed vegetables for lunch. All of the tennis clubs of my youth had bars in them. If there was a restaurant it was always in the bar, and I remember the smell in particular of the end of the bar where they had soda, the particular effervescently sweet smell of 7UP being gunned into glasses full of ice.
There was a certain etiquette in the clubs that felt stuffy to me, but that I didn’t understand as a phenomenon of class then, and there was the smell of the courts themselves, the change in air pressure that happened when you walked out into the vaulted cathedral of the indoor courts, which is for some reason where I mostly played, probably because by that point in their lives my grandparents preferred the air-conditioned indoors to the swelter of outdoor courts in St.Louis summer. When you are learning tennis as a kid the pros line you up and hit buckets and baskets and shopping carts full of balls to you, and you learn the grips, and the swings, and the stances, and how to transfer your weight. And you repeat these motions again and again and again. Thousands of repetitions.
By the time I was taking lessons three days a week, and my grandfather was paying for them, he figured I was fair enough game to attempt to receive his serve at velocity. I stood about five feet tall, and he towered over me from across the net. He probably had close to 100 pounds on me. With racquet extended above, he was striking the ball downward from about nine feet high, and I often felt like I was looking down the barrel of a gun, which explains something fundamental about the dynamic of our relationship.
Mostly in the early days I was just trying not to get pegged. As an eleven-year old training yourself to actually see a hundred mile per hour serve, and not just wince when the racquet cracks against the ball, takes some doing. One time I went with them to watch a professional tournament, somewhere in the environs of St. Louis. The match we watched was in the evening, and we had pretty good seats. My recollection was that the more highly ranked player was named something like Zibodan Ziboyunovich, although I’m making mincemeat of the spelling. He had a 140 mph serve. I literally could not see the ball. I would watch him toss it, and then I would watch his opponent dive, or return it, and while I could see the return, the serve was moving too fast to be visible to me.
I was not unathletic. But I had a trauma history that I would not come to understand for many decades, and although I was formidable in practice, I would come apart under pressure in matches. For most of my teenage years I played in tournaments. By the time I was a freshman in I had made the varsity team at my highschool, and by my sophomore year I had gone to state. One of those years my doubles partner and I placed fifth. He went on to get a squash scholarship to Harvard. When I was sixteen I made it to the finals of a decently sized tournament where I played the top seed, who was the number one player in Missouri at the time. His name was Christian Hill. He was a gifted tennis player who dominated the city’s tournaments from the time that he was twelve years old until I lost track of him when I stopped playing and following tennis. I’m not sure I won two points in a row the entire match. He dispatched me 6–0, 6–0. I could barely stay on the same court as him. I’m sharing this to give you a sense of the vast gulf in abilities that stack up in the world of elite tennis. Christian Hill is listed on the ATP Tour’s website as a professional tennis player. He played his first professional tennis tournament in Pheonix, in 1998. By February of 2000 he had risen to his highest international ranking, and this last listed tournament took place in September of that year in the Bahamas. At his peak he was the 661st best tennis player in the world. This essay is about Carlos Alcaraz, who is the world number one. If you watched me play tennis today– and I am a very very good tennis player — keeping in mind that I was pulverized, absolutely, by a boy who would become the 661st best player in the world, you will begin to understand the gulf between a good tennis player and Carlos Alcaraz. You will begin to understand why I’m talking about genius.
The stunning gifts that Alcaraz brings to the table are not merely his athleticism, lightning-quick reflexes, and ferocious strength, for he does have all of these, but something much more rare in the world of professional sports, which expresses, in part through a level of touch that is almost velvet. Alcaraz has the most devastating drop shot in the men’s game, which means that someone can hit a forehand at him at a hundred miles an hour, and his touch is so refined that he can take the pace entirely off of that ball, plinking it predictably in a tight arc that drops it sometimes twelve inches over, and three feet back from the net. If his drop shot is really on, it is so precise and unexpected that his opponents don’t even give chase–they are too stunned.
Touch, for those of you who speak the language of the Autonomic Nervous system, is a ventral attribute. Touch comes from our connection physiology. And here is, perhaps, Alcaraz’ most unique gift. For to watch Alcaraz play, which is, in his more transcendent moments to unleash, happens when he finds a level of ventrality I’ve never seen before in a tennis player. Carlos Alcaraz adores the game of tennis. He loves playing, he thrills for it. There is nothing he would rather be doing. And this joy, which is infectious, animates his body with a kind of vitality that is not only radiant with energy, but also brings along with it a marriage of the deepest kind of ventrality, which is the wellspring of touch, paired with ferocious sympathetic charge. When these two elements come together, Alcaraz begins to enter a gear that few others ever find. He becomes super-charged with grace. And this is something we can learn from.
When we are first finding the groove of elite performance, some part of it is learning to ride the wave of sympathetic activation that comes with stepping onto a bigger stage. This flow of adrenaline can, if you don’t deepen into it, sweep your breath away. It can suck the air out of your lungs. It can crush and wither you. To perform at an elite level is to learn to harness this surge, to ride the wave of it, to allow it to animate you. This is the difference between stress that is performance-enhancing, and stress that is crippling.
There are many people who have learned, Djokovich included, to manage themselves under this kind of pressure, to root into it, to not let it carry them away. But what Alcaraz can teach us, through that smile that erupts after he hits a shot that surprises even himself, is that riding the sympathetic wave is not the endgame. The next level, the truly elite level, is to ride that wave while relaxing fully into ventrality. When that happens–when sympathetic power merges with deep ventrality–something altogether different emerges. It’s not ice in the veins. It’s not simply talent. It is the autonomic genius of play, genuine play, at the highest elite level of tennis.
And in bringing this game, this playfulness, to the biggest stages Alcaraz makes tennis, possibly the most beautiful sport that exists, a joy to all who behold it. This is not physical or mental strength. It is autonomic genius. Yesterday autonomic genius dethroned mental toughness and hoisted the most significant trophy in the sport. Lesson: play is pure performance. Well done, Carlitos.
THE AUTONOMIC SPECTRUM: Mapping the Neural Landscapes of Wellbeing & Disease. The American Medical Association (AMA) recently declared that 80% of physical, mental, and emotional ailments are caused by Autonomic Nervous System dys-regulation. This means that most of the health outcomes in your life will be determined by a part of your nervous system that most people know almost nothing about. Those who do know that it exists understand it almost not at all. Are you ready to change that?
