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May 2, 2024
Rene Lacoste wrote this book soon after he won the Wimbledon Championship in 1929. He explains his road to mastery: how he went from holding a racquet for the first time at the age of 15 to a grand slam winner by the age of 22. Along the way we learn how hours of physical effort and intellectual intensity helped improv his technique, tactics and temperament. What stood out was how modern his approach was - perhaps learning methodologies are lindy and haven’t changed all that much, or perhaps in stable games equilibrium strategies just get repeated. Perhaps Lacoste was an outlier in his time; after all, he did invent the ball throwing machine, the modern steel tennis racquet and breathable polo shirt. Interestingly, he was able to turn all of his inventions into a successful business - The Lacoste brand.
Here are some of the lessons that I took away:
- The anxiety to improve yourself is the surest path to success
- Success is a function of effort * intensity * time (physical and intellectual)
- Avoid the complex till you have mastered the basics. Look for combinations of the basic within the complicated.
- Create your own feedback, error correction and improvement mechanisms.
- Be a good soldier and a good general. By keeping notebooks full of observations on his practice, his matches, and his opponents game he had a database to try different tactics and improve his technique
- Play the player, match circumstances and the vector of time
- Give the opponent puzzles to solve so that they can’t give you puzzles to solve.
- Conserve your resources, energy, shot variety, surprises for the psychological turning points, games and sets
- Good positioning can offset technical weaknesses. But fix your weaknesses as sooner or later they will force expensive trade offs
- When technique and tactics can’t explain the result, temperament usually does
- Limit your thoughts to the boundaries of the court - the next ball, next point, next game, next set.
- See defeats as a part of the process to renew yourself and an essential component to forge a will to win
For a general reader chapter on his early years, match tactics and temperament will be of interest. The remaining chapters go into fairly detailed instructions on how, why, when and where of shots and how these differed amongst his contemporaries. Rating: 8/10
Here are some of the lessons that I took away:
- The anxiety to improve yourself is the surest path to success
- Success is a function of effort * intensity * time (physical and intellectual)
- Avoid the complex till you have mastered the basics. Look for combinations of the basic within the complicated.
- Create your own feedback, error correction and improvement mechanisms.
- Be a good soldier and a good general. By keeping notebooks full of observations on his practice, his matches, and his opponents game he had a database to try different tactics and improve his technique
- Play the player, match circumstances and the vector of time
- Give the opponent puzzles to solve so that they can’t give you puzzles to solve.
- Conserve your resources, energy, shot variety, surprises for the psychological turning points, games and sets
- Good positioning can offset technical weaknesses. But fix your weaknesses as sooner or later they will force expensive trade offs
- When technique and tactics can’t explain the result, temperament usually does
- Limit your thoughts to the boundaries of the court - the next ball, next point, next game, next set.
- See defeats as a part of the process to renew yourself and an essential component to forge a will to win
For a general reader chapter on his early years, match tactics and temperament will be of interest. The remaining chapters go into fairly detailed instructions on how, why, when and where of shots and how these differed amongst his contemporaries. Rating: 8/10
Displaying 1 of 1 review