The surest way to hold a match in mind is to play for every set, every game in the set, every point in the game and, finally, every shot in the point. A set is merely a conglomeration of made and missed shots, and the man who does not miss is the ultimate victor.
Please do not think I am advocating "pat-ball." I am not. I believe in playing for your shot every time you have an opening. I do not believe in trying to win the point every time you hit the ball. Never allow your concentration on any game to become so great that you do not at all times know the score and play to it. I mean both point score and game score. In my explanation of match play in a later chapter I am going into a detailed account of playing to the score. It is as vital in tennis as it is in bridge, and all bridge players know that the score is the determining factor in your mode of bidding. Let me urge again concentration. Practise seriously. Do not fool on the court, as it is the worst enemy to progress. Carelessness or laziness only results in retrogression, never progress.
Let me turn now to the first principle of all ball games, whether tennis, golf, cricket, baseball, polo, or football.
KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE BALL!
Just a few statistics to show you how vital it is that the eye must be kept on the ball UNTIL THE MOMENT OF STRIKING IT.
About 85 per cent of the points in tennis are errors, and the remainder earned points. As the standard of play rises the percentage of errors drops until, in the average high-class tournament match, 60 per cent are errors and 40 per cent aces. Any average superior to this is super-tennis.
Thus the importance of getting the ball in play cannot be too greatly emphasized. Every time you put the ball back to your opponent you give him another chance to miss.
There are several causes for missing strokes. First, and by far the largest class, is not looking at the ball up to the moment of striking it. Fully 80 per cent of all errors are caused by taking the eye from the ball in the last one-fifth of a second of its flight. The remaining 20 per cent of errors are about 15 per cent bad footwork, and the other 5 per cent poor racquet work and bad bounces.
The eye is a small camera. All of us enjoy dabbling in amateur photography, and every amateur must take "action" pictures with his first camera. It is a natural desire to attain to the hardest before understanding how to reach it. The result is one of two things: either a blurred moving object and a clear background, or a clear moving object and a blurred background. Both suggest speed, but only one is a good picture of the object one attempted to photograph. In the first case the camera eye was focused on the background and not on the object, while in the second, which produced the result desired, the camera eye was firmly focused on the moving object itself. Just so with the human eye. It will give both effects, but never a clear background and moving object at the same time, once that object reaches a point 10 feet from the eye. The perspective is wrong, and the eye cannot adjust itself to the distance range speedily enough.
Now the tennis ball is your moving object while the court, gallery, net, and your opponent constitute your background. You desire to hit the ball cleanly, therefore do not look at the other factors concerned, but concentrate solely on focusing the eye firmly on the ball, and watching it until the moment of impact with your racquet face.