Orders of Competence in Tennis

The previous post was inspired by an email from my man in Seattle, Sameer Anand Siruguri:

Reading “Infinite Jest” at the same time that Federer exists in this world, gives one an entirely different perspective on what it takes to be him. I'd recommend you all do it, except you have to get at least 600 pages into the book to really get that perspective.

To which I reply: Fortunately, you don’t have to read 600 pages, you can cheat and read this little extract from David Foster Wallace’s Esquire piece on Michael Joyce, a former top-100 player who is now Maria Sharapova's coach:

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) fixed positions, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables -- i.e., a shot’s depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racket, height of backswing and angle of racket face, as well as the 3-D coordinates through which the racket face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out and out, on and on, and then on much further when the opponent’s own position and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in...

If you’ve played tennis at least a little, you probably have some idea how hard a game is to play really well. I submit to you that you really have no idea at all. I know I didn’t. And television doesn’t really allow you to appreciate what real top-level players can do -- how hard they’re actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical imagination and artistry. I got to watch Michael Joyce practice several times right up close, like six feet and a chain-link fence away. This is a man who, at full run, can hit a fast-moving tennis ball into a one-foot square area seventy-eight feet away over a net, hard. He can do this something like more than 90 percent of the time. And this is the world’s seventy-ninth-best player, one who has to play the Montreal qualies.

This ties in well with a pet theory of mine, that tennis is the one sport with the maximum number of "orders of competence" separating a top pro and a weekend duffer (where an "order of competence" is defined such that a player of order N will beat a player of order N-1 with ease). I first got an inkling of this a few years ago when I was courtside at York U here in Toronto. Said U happens to be the home stomping ground of the Ontario junior tennis association, and there were a bunch of teenagers playing.

Now, these were all prototypical tennis kids -- all self-evidently the kind who had been belting balls back and forth since the age of five or thereabouts -- and just to give you an idea of their quality, I'll point out that I would struggle to win 1 point in 10 against any of them [1]. But there was one kid in particular who was just way better than the rest. It wasn't obvious from the game score, but it was clear: he just had more time, his strokes were more compact and explosive, he moved better -- he was just a class apart.

I mentioned this to the dude standing next to me (who happened to be the head coach at York U), and he said, "Yup, good eye, that kid is the Ontario junior #2, his opponents are all ranked in the teens. But I'll tell you something else. He's good enough to get a tennis scholarship to a good school, but not to one of the very top tennis schools -- no USC or UCLA, no Georgia or Stanford. More like a mid-level Div-1 school like Duke or Michigan. He'll get a good education for free, but there's no way he's going to be an NCAA champion, or even close. There are other kids out there who are way better".

So, this kid, who is by far the best tennis player I've ever seen up close, is nowhere near the level of the top US college players. And the top college players don't always turn professional. And even those who are good enough to go pro and eke out a living on the tour, struggle mightily to crack the top-100. And then once you're in the top-100 it's still a long way to crack the top-10. And then of course there's the Federer-Nadal stratosphere.

The point being, Fed/Nad will almost always beat any other top-10 player. Any top-10 player will almost always beat any random top-100 player. Any top-100 player will almost always beat any random top-500 player. Any top-500 player (ie, tournament professional) will almost always beat a (non-professional) top college player. Any top college player will almost always beat a mid-level college player. Any mid-level college player (on a tennis scholarship) will almost always beat anyone without a tennis scholarship. And most of the kids I saw that day, any one of whom could kick my ass, were not going to get tennis scholarships.

Order and orders of competence. I can't think of any other sport that comes close.

[1] Context: I'm a typical bog-standard club player -- good enough to perhaps make my club's intercounty C team, good enough to make my hostel team, good enough to destroy anyone who has never been coached or isn't a regular player, but not good enough for the club A team or the university team.