Everyday manners brought onto a tennis court!

Amazingly I have to write about manners. Where our politicians have to remind us to respect our neighbours, our society and our environment, because we don't know how to do that either, I also have to tell everyone to employ impeccable manners on the tennis court. It's because most players I see, both on the academy and opponents of my players, don't have many.
 

Is tennis particularly badly affected by this lack of courtesy? I'm afraid so. Maybe in a tennis culture where social tennis over-rides the competitive game, where doubles is more important than singles, will manners have any normalness. So you would see this in UK. There the game of tennis is relatively civilised, but levels of competitiveness are resultingly poor.
 

That winning attitude transgresses manners

So the real problem is that tennis is an individual game, and those who practise the game regularly are usually fierce competitors. They are such fierce competitors that all decorum is forgotten, from the cold greeting you may receive before the match, to behaviour during the match, and the way you are ignored after it.

Rugby friends

I have been fortunate enough to refind a rugby friend in the last few years, and I go down to their club a couple of times a week to train or to watch matches. I never cease to be amazed at the comparison with tennis. Despite the apparent brutality of rugby, the times you have to play in horrific weather conditions, and the terrible fights that sometimes break out (these are usually a result of an accidental bad challenge!), it doesn't take long for a match to calm down again, and the players are playing with impeccable manners. Greetings to team colleagues and opponents are equally warm. "It really is nice to see you all again"!

In rugby a joke may be passed, and certainly a smile and a high fives on a good action. In the game there is a lot of chat, those who believe that they are aware of the game's finer points, strategic or technical, giving you advice, maybe shouting at you to make you perform better. I don't like uncontrolled shouting of any sort in sport, but somehow in rugby it is endearing. It shows that they care! After the game there are showers and a big meal together followed by infantile pub challenges. This may be fuelled by too much alcohol, but the spirit behind it is genuine. The rugby crowd are a truly loveable group.
 

Already tennis players are pathologically late. They drift onto the court, unwarmed up, looking for a possible cup of coffee, passing insincere "pleasantries" as their warming up procedure. Tennis players don't raise a smile easily. They are born complainers about conditions, the balls, courts, weather, time of day. It is non stop poor manners. Anything to give them a prior excuse for a poor performance.
 

Building up pre-match pressure

On the court it is rarer for a match at our level to be adjudicated - no referee of any sort. This gives the player a licence to manipulate and interpret the rules to as close to his advantage as he will dare. He will then have no hesitation in explaining this justification:- " I saw it on the telly, it was in my umpiring exam, my pro told me". It is all absolute rubbish, so you cannot get any conversation out of it, just an argument that you will surely lose.

This leads to gamesmanship of the most disagreeable kind, and some players are remarkable in the gamesmanship they employ. It is pantomime of the highest order. It manifests itself in an opponent who comments his way through the match, comments about your game, about conditions, about his own shots, about correct procedures, references to his grandmother's playing level, the arrogance of the current president, and it goes on and on. It'd be great if he'd just hit balls, smile and have some fun, but this would not occur to him. Tennis is not about smiling and having fun, nor about displaying any manners he may have learned off court.
 

The saddest thing is that as a tennis player grows older, the gamesmanship, the temptation to manipulate an opponent with chat, becomes very tempting, because everyone is doing it, and doing it so well. In my age group most matches are thoroughly disagreeable, this when we have only a few years of active tennis left in us, do our Sunday mornings become totally miserable affairs.
 

Does a referee help?

Of course, every now and then I have an opponent who so rankles me I lose my patience, my own manners, and let fly at him. The ferocity of my attack will shock and terrify my opponent, but it only usually sets off a barrage of whinging, another thing that tennis players are experts at. I wonder what these players are like to live with at home, but if it were anything like this there is a case for committing justified acts of domestic violence. "I was provoked your honour".
 

Technically, if your opponent is being unsporting, you can call on an umpire. Even if you manage, on the rare occasion, to find somone to come onto the court to see off the duration of the match, he usually only ends up by calling the lines and the score. But even there there are many lines the umpire from his chair cannot see, so this only makes matters worse, different yes, but worse.

The non stop chat and comments may become more periodical, but the opponent will be brooding, and still look for any chance to make further comments, this time implicating the "umpire" in the conversation, and usually this "umpire" will participate in this little game of hot air and bluff. By the time you've got to this station, the match has lost all its enjoyment, so the 'umpire' is only present to stop you going over to the other side of the net and throttling your opponent.
 

Different tennis manners from different cultures

In my circles I frequently play against the same people, so these matches repeat themselves with the same opponents year after year. This is not sport. This is me doing my duty, winning my match, for my club team, but there is nothing agreeable about the outing.

Mostly my attitude is to play my matches in silence when I have such an opponent. I work on the premise that at some point my opponent will tire of his own voice, and quieten down. It never works. These players can talk and comment for hours on end. I'm not capable of keeping up such a tirade even about pleasant conversational themes. How do they do it?

You walk off the court having shaken the guy's hand, and not being able to look him in the eye, you say to yourself, 'what a miserable, poor sad ******** you are!' You give him some old cakes you've found in the clubhouse, poison him with some 'soft' drink, then leave him to go and support your team colleague in his own miserable match. Your opponent may well follow you and start his commenting now on someone else's match. These are hard cases!
 

Player types

The match is over. The opponents get in their car, and you see them off, the classic unwelcome guests. We give a final display of insincere manners.

Oh, and I didn't mention one thing. The big C word. Cheating.