Better than Calvinball

I was recently introduced personally to the sport of tennis. I had observed it enough (last year my window looked out over the tennis courts) and I discovered that the game is very easy to pick up. I always pictured it as a scaled-up version of Ping-pong...bigger court, bigger weapon, heavier ball. I was wrong. Not in my comparison to ping-pong, but in my assumption that it was scaled up.

Let me give a caveat before I start. I greatly enjoyed playing tennis. So hear me out, tennis fans.

I know that in ping-pong the main challenge, at least for me, is hitting the ball so it doesn't go out of bounds. I always found this unique--most games have out-of-bounds, but as a precaution rather than an objective. I expected tennis would be different--that the challenge would lie in hitting the ball hard enough to make it out of your side. I was woefully overestimating the corporeality of tennis equipment.

A tennis ball isn't merely light. It is ethereal. Its very existence hangs by a thread. It is so light I wonder that it is even called a ball. And the racket is the same. Together, the barest amount of force transfers unto huge amounts of motion.

Ok, point taken. I realized I was swinging too hard. I found out quickly that the main objective was in fact, pulling back in force to hit inside the lines. I had expected that, and that objective exists in all sports. No field-goal kicker wants to hit too hard. But tennis is unique in that the amount considered "too much force" is about that required to open a door.

That aside, I found tennis very enjoyable. It's incredibly relaxing. It's the only sport I know of where you can do fairly well with one hand in your pocket. Keep in mind, I'm referring to casual play, not competitive. But that's the beauty of it--it lends very easily to laid-back play. Football has no casual option. You can't play soccer without expending fair amounts of energy. But tennis is so relaxing if you want it to be, I am leery of even referring to my use of it as a sport.

To me, calling casual tennis a sport is like calling Mah Jong a puzzle. In Mah Jong, you're not trying to figure out how to do something. You're mostly just repeating steps until you finish. Yet, the game is addictive. It's relaxing, stress-relieving, and even gives satisfaction at the end despite its generous learning curve.

Anyone who has played Fable 2 has probably experienced this. The game involves "jobs" your character can get, such as blacksmithing or chopping wood. The minigame for the job is mindlessly simple and repetitive. And I couldn't stop playing it. I could play it while studying for a test or carrying on a conversation. It took almost no brain cells and only one finger. Part of the draw was that I was earning money, which I could spend on a sword to save the kingdom, or preferably, on a vegetable cart which would bring in revenue with which I could buy more veggie carts. But the game itself was somehow stress-relieving. It's the gamer's definition of grinding....yet it was somehow worthwhile. And it showed my that despite gamers' protests, a game does not have to be challenging or fast-paced to be fun. Note the success of Puzzle Quest and Hidden Object Games.

Anyway, I found this rule to hold true for tennis. We didn't have to keep track of points. We didn't even have to spend energy. We just played because it was enjoyable. And the fact that it takes place outdoors and involves movement is icing on the cake. I may not be leveling up my skills or earning gold, but I'm spending time using the apparatus God has given me to interact with the world known as my body, and that's always a plus.