Growing up in Indiana in the 1970s, the popular sports for boys were basketball, baseball, and football. On a crisp autumn Saturday my afternoon slamming into my peers in pads quickly convinced me that real football was not for me. Pick-up games of touch football throwing passes to my pals were far more enjoyable. I was pretty good at baseball. I hit lots of singles, played a solid first base, and had success pitching. When I was passed over for my league’s all-star team, I was sorely disappointed, and my baseball days came to an end. Like most Hoosier males under the age of twenty, I dreamed of basketball glory. But I wasn’t quite good enough to make my high school’s varsity team. That was okay, though, because I had been playing tennis since I first picked up a racket at the age of twelve. Tennis was my sport. For 50 years I’ve been on a court, outdoors or indoors, for hours a week, nearly every week, year-round. I joke with my wife that when I die, on the pyre I should be cremated with my racket on my chest, like a warrior of old with his sword. Except that I’m only half joking.
My first racket was a T-3000. It differed from the T-2000 popularized by Jimmy Connors with its red details and a little yoke at the neck of the Chromium-plated tubular steel shaft. It was an ugly racket. But in singles I got a long way with it using a tactic of drop shot, passing shot, drop shot, passing shot. By the time I upgraded to an AMF Head Pro—also with red details—I was getting better at doubles than singles. I lacked a big serve, but I had good hands, thrived at the net with crisp volleys, and had a shortened-swing, low overhead smash—Bam! The latter shot earned me the nickname Bamin’ Bill. My return of serve was good, too. After 50 years, I continue to work on my lobs.
For teenagers, cursing, ball abuse, and racket abuse were common. The more one matures playing tennis, the less one expects egregious outbursts. All players of all ages and skill levels get frustrated occasionally. But as experience grows, adults expect that losing need not entail emotional meltdowns. Tantrums on a tennis court are no fun to witness. I can tolerate fits thrown by others. What I deeply regret is when I occasionally lose my cool. As with any sport, so too with tennis: there is no place for destructive emotional outbursts. Stoicism can teach a lot about this.
How does Stoic therapy apply to emotions in tennis? First, frustration must be distinguished from anger. Frustration is typically unhappiness about not playing well oneself. In contrast, anger is an emotion directed at either an opponent or one’s doubles partner if she is judged to be making unforgivable errors. Frustration can arise when a player bungles what she believes is an easy shot. Frustration can also result from attempting the wrong shot for the situation. Frustration can boil up over the course of a game or a set. When it erupts into cursing, slamming a ball, or racket abuse, your opponent immediately has the edge. You blew your cool, you lost your focus, stoking your opponent’s confidence that she is beating you. What does a Stoic think about a frustrated player cursing aloud, slamming a ball, throwing a racket, or pounding it on the net or the ground? All such outbursts are juvenile, unseemly, and unquestionably unsportsmanlike. Tantrums have no place on a tennis court or in any sport. Respect for your opponent (and doubles partner) always demands courtesy. During a match adversity tests not only a player’s tennis skills but even more her tenacity. Superior mental toughness and concentration often empower a player to prevail over a more skilled opponent with inferior mental focus. A player who throws a tantrum loses the respect of everyone watching. Nobody wants to play with a hothead who throws tantrums. Ugly court antics ruin the sport.
Anger is a vile emotion, according to Stoics. They believe that anger is a passion directed at others. Anger is often a response to an opponent’s tantrum or other unsportsmanlike behavior, such as a bad line call. A second example of unsportsmanlike conduct is shouting when the ball in play is on your opponent’s side of the net. This is called a hindrance. A third sneaky ploy is quick-serving before the receiver is ready. An example of poor etiquette is returning an out first serve (a fault) to the server’s side of the court when the receiver didn’t have to. The courteous act is for the receiver either to let the faulted ball go past her to the back of the court or to gently hit the ball into her own side of the net. Many players needlessly return balls they know are faults, often delaying play by forcing the server to clear the nuisance of the returned ball before making a second serve. This discourteous habit is very common. In my many un-Stoic moments, I find it annoying.
Annoyance amplified becomes anger. In On Anger Seneca explains that anger results from two judgments: (1) Someone has wronged you; (2) It is right for you to retaliate for that unjust act. If your opponent seems to quick-serve you, it may be that she didn’t know you weren’t ready to receive the serve. So, instead of leaping to the judgment ‘My opponent wronged me by intentionally quick-serving,’ the Stoic advice is to withhold assent from this judgment. Instead, politely ask your opponent to give you another moment to get set to receive the serve.
What about forgetting the score? Everyone’s memory is fallible. If someone loses track of the score, then the Stoic advice is to calmly consult with the other player(s), recall how each point went, and reconstruct the score. Mistaken score calls can be innocent. So, if you disagree with what your opponent says the score is, don’t assume she is trying to wrong you. Habitually announce the score loudly enough for your opponent(s) to hear before each point you serve. Don’t worry if you can’t persuade your opponent(s) to adopt that habit. Instead, focus on practicing good, courteous habits yourself.
Line calls are the most common occasions for players to judge that they have been wronged. Before making such a judgment Stoicism reminds us of our epistemic limitations. When my opponent makes what I believe is a bad line call, I must remember two things. First, it is often difficult to see clearly whether a fast-moving ball bounced on a sliver of line or barely missed it. My opponent’s vision and viewpoint may be better or worse than mine. So, whether a ball bounced on or outside a line may look different to me, from my perspective, than it does to my opponent. Mistakes can be innocent, so I must not rush to believe otherwise. Fallibilism applies to line calls in tennis and all other kinds of errors all-too-human human beings make. People making honest mistakes do not deserve to be scolded. A pragmatic Stoic tennis player is epistemically cautious, and so is reluctant to attribute ill will to her opponent(s). Do you know for certain she meant to cheat?
But what if the circumstances suggest that a line call is egregiously terrible. Perhaps it occurs after a series of questionable calls. Perhaps you were closer to where the ball landed than your opponent was, had a better angle, and you saw the ball bounce three inches inside the line. Maybe your opponent has a reputation for making bad line calls, rarely or never compliments her opponent’s good shots, and gets ugly in close matches. If the evidence suggests that my opponent very probably saw the ball in but called it out anyway, what then? Isn’t cheating unfair? Shouldn’t a Stoic committed to fairness stand up for it everywhere and all the time? Shouldn’t a Stoic tennis player therefore protest cheating in tennis too?
This brings us to the second judgment necessary for anger to occur. Assume that the preponderance of evidence indicates that your opponent(s) intended to cheat. Now ask: Is it right for you to retaliate for that (supposedly) unfair act? Here I think the wise Stoic would remind us that cheating in a tennis match does not warrant the kinds of response that cheating in a marriage, on one’s taxes, or when counting ballots do. The stakes of amateur tennis are never high enough to justify berating even an obvious, habitual cheater. It’s a tennis court, not a court of law. Stoicism teaches that players behave as they do because they believe that it is good for them to behave that way at that moment. Players who invest their self-esteem in winning a point, a game, or a set, by hook or by crook, no matter what, suffer from ignorance. They suffer from a misunderstanding of tennis and sport. The proper response for a Stoic to an opponent who (seems to) deliberately cheat is pity. If a player disrespects her opponent and the sport by cheating, then it is the cheater who suffers harm, not the opponent hooked by the bad call. Only a mentally weak player is tempted to rob an opponent of a point. Habitual cheating is a vice of character. The victim is not the player who was ‘robbed’ of a point. The victim of the cheating is the cheater who, by stealing the point, was robbed of dignity and integrity of character. Losing to a cheater is a win for the Stoic player who plays fair, honors the sport, and upholds good sportsmanship.
When confronting cheating and other mean behaviors Marcus Aurelius offers this pearl of wisdom:
In the gym, our opponents can gouge us with their nails or butt us with their heads and leave a bruise, but we don’t denounce them for it or get upset with them or regard them from then on as violent types. We just keep an eye on them after that. Not out of hatred or suspicion, but just keeping a friendly distance. We need to do that in other areas. We need to excuse what our sparring partners do, and just keep our distance—without suspicion or hatred. (Meditations, 6.20; Hays trans. modified)
Bad line calls will happen from time to time on the tennis court. As Epictetus says in Handbook 4, whenever you plan to engage in an activity, rehearse in your mind what that activity will entail. In this case, when you go to play tennis, picture what is likely to happen. A few line calls may seem questionable. Players may express frustration when they botch shots. Players may forget the score or get it wrong. Gusts of wind may push a ball heading out back in or the opposite. Dead spots or cracks in the court may cause bad bounces. A racket string may break at a pivotal moment. An injury may occur. Rehearse these events in your mind to prepare for your match. Then, if they happen, you won’t let them spoil your fun, since your intention was to keep your prohairesis (volition or will) in line with nature while playing tennis.
This idea of keeping your will aligned with nature applies especially well to another common tennis phenomenon—the net cord shot. Sometimes a struck ball clips the top of the net and barely dribbles over for a winner. Even when a fast-moving ball clips the net and bounces higher over the net and in, it is usually much more difficult to play than a clean shot. Sometimes a net cord shot lands out when the ball’s trajectory would have taken it in if it had barely cleared the net. The opposite also happens. Sometimes your struck ball clips the net cord tape, pops up, and falls back on your side, losing you the point. Non-Stoics will say that such events result from luck. Stoics don’t believe in luck. Stoics believe that all events are fated. When a net cord dribbler lands on their side of the net and they lose the point, non-Stoics get upset and curse it as bad luck. When a net cord dribbles onto their opponent’s side of the net and they win the point, non-Stoics celebrate it as good luck. But Stoics understand that a tennis net is tied into the web of causality with all other physical bodies. What happens to a flying tennis ball when it strikes the top of a net is determined by the ball’s speed, spin, and direction, the friction of the ball’s surface on the net’s tape, the tension of the net, and the speed and direction of the wind at the moment of the ball’s impact. In other words, it’s all causally determined by physics (phusis, nature). The only reasonable thing to do is to accept that net cord balls will happen because they are fated to happen. Our inability to predict which side of the net those balls will land on does not mean that luck governs the physics of felt-covered spheroids.
Physics informs a Stoic’s philosophy of tennis. Physics is one of the three branches of philosophical inquiry, according to the Stoics. The other two branches are logic and ethics. Stoics conceive of philosophy as an organic system. So, the three parts of this systemic whole are intimately interrelated, like the branches of a tree. The Stoics use several examples to illustrate these interrelationships. One of them is that philosophy is like an egg: logic is the shell, ethics is the white, and physics is the yolk (Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, vii. 39-40). Thus, the egg has coded significance for Stoics. The egg has hidden significance in tennis, too. It’s an old joke that love means nothing to a tennis player. Fans of tennis know that the word love denotes a point score of zero. Tennis history buffs know that this usage of the English word love is supposed to derive from the French word œuf meaning egg. An egg, with its oval shape, represents a zero. So, every time a player announces a score of love, whether she realizes it or not, she utters a code word symbolizing philosophy’s egglike tripartition, according to Stoicism.
What advice do Stoics give for coping with injuries? Impediments to activities can be dealt with by putting the activity into the context of roles. A robust theory of roles is articulated by Epictetus. He suggests “First think about what sort of role this is. Then, closely examine your own nature and whether you can fulfill it. Do you want to be a pentathlete or a wrestler? Look at your arms and your thighs, inspect your buttocks” (Handbook 29.5; my trans.). Epictetus distinguishes natural roles we are born into from roles we acquire. Every sport in which we choose to participate, from wrestling to tennis, is an acquired role. A remarkable thing about tennis is that anyone, at any age, of any size, shape, or raw athletic ability, can lace up a pair of tennis shoes, pick up a racket, and learn how to hit a tennis ball. Tennis is a sport for a lifetime. I have played with octogenarians. A few amazing athletes play into their nineties. This is inspiring. It also teaches a lesson about wisdom. These very experienced players have grown wise—or at least prudent—about how to take care of their bodies. Care of the body includes managing injuries. Epictetus advises someone aspiring to undertake a particular kind of sport to examine her limbs and assess whether she has a suitable physique for that sport. This applies equally to injuries, I think. Prudence dictates being realistic about rest and treatment of injuries before resuming play. It can be tricky figuring out whether a gimpy calf, an achy heel, or a sore wrist is a minor, possibly chronic nuisance of an aging body or an acute injury requiring days to heal. Players suffering from tennis elbow (or golfer’s elbow, which I get occasionally) often go to great lengths to keep playing despite the pain. Good judgment is needed, but hard to achieve.
The point of playing any game is to have fun. The point of playing any amateur sport is to have fun and get exercise. So, playing joyfully ought to be the goal of a Stoic tennis player. The most joyful player I’ve known is a guy named Tom from Iowa. During points when the ball would slowly sail just beyond his reach, or when it would bounce in an unexpectedly strange way, or when no one could hit a winner despite many opportunities, Tom would loudly giggle. He played tennis with glee. I marveled at his gleeful court demeanor because during ‘competitive’ matches the other two guys on the court and I would often be clenching our jaws with glowering ‘game faces.’ If players say they love tennis, you’d expect them to show it in how they play. Extremely competitive amateurs often forget—me included—that their tennis is play. Professionals competing for prize money are doing a job. Tennis is work for them. But everyone else chasing a ball around a court is engaged in play, whether or not they keep score. For us, tennis time is playtime, not a chore. If our play is not fun, then we are living contrary to the nature of play.
A friend of mine was an excellent tennis player and an accomplished athlete. His baseball talents could have given him a pro career. Instead, he chose to be a philosopher and become an expert in the philosophy of sport. He argued that sport is serious unseriousness. It does not matter which player (or team) wins. The outcome of a sporting contest is utterly unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Few things in life are as trivial as who wins a game or by how much. All sports are by their very nature unserious activities. Yet a significant difference remains between playing well and playing badly. How players conduct themselves during the game reveals their values, vices, and virtues. Thus, how players treat their opponents, their teammates, the officials, and their coach(es) matters, because conduct reflects character. Lack of effort, poor concentration, and carelessness are serious failures in a nonserious activity. Virtuosic performance ought to be a goal taken seriously by every player. Playing really well is a worthy goal. But falling short of that lofty goal is nothing shameful since the activity remains unserious in the context of life. Stoics are serious about moral progress.
Playing skillfully is a legitimate goal for a Stoic player. So, how does a Stoic player combine the serious pursuit of skillfulness with the understanding that sport is unserious? Epictetus says that materials are indifferent, but the use made of them is not. By materials he means ‘indifferents’ like possessions, wealth, poverty, health, illness, etc. Epictetus compares indifferents to game equipment, like dice and counters, or a ball (Discourses 2.5.1–23). What matters is not the balls or racket. What matters is how well you use the racket and balls. If you use them skillfully, then your performance is virtuosic. But what is not reasonable, what conflicts with nature, is wanting a particular outcome. Winning and losing are outcomes. Neither is to be desired. Playing well, showing good sportsmanship, respecting your opponent(s), and respecting the sport are desirable. They are ‘up to you’, as Epictetus says. The activity, the process of playing, deserves your focus, your intention. Becoming a better tennis player, or better archer, is a worthy goal (‘Stoicism and the Art of Archery’ by John Sellars: https://modernstoicism.com/stoicism-and-the-art-of-archery/). The outcome of the contest is ‘not up to you’. The outcome is fated, and so can be accepted as a natural, and therefore necessary, event. If rain cancels a match, that is as natural an event as any player winning or losing. Players and fans ought to want a good match, not a lopsided win. The Stoic player knows she is like a dog tethered to a moving wagon. It is better to keep pace walking with nature as it unfolds than to resist and be dragged. Fame is an indifferent. Winning an amateur tennis match never won anyone fame anyway. So, win or lose, it’s how you play the game that reveals your wisdom or foolishness, your virtue or vice. If you can’t be playful playing tennis, if you can’t play joyfully, then you had better look for joy elsewhere.
William O. Stephens is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Creighton University. He is the author of several books on Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the most recent being Epictetus’s Encheiridion: A New Translation and Guide to Stoic Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2023), co-authored with Scott Aikin. His publications on Stoic topics include food, animals, ecology, love, death, habit, refugees, sportsmanship, travel, the Star Wars films, and the film Gladiator (2000). His popular essays on practical Stoicism have discussed phobias, terrorism, lawn care, time, Dungeons & Dragons, and Santa Claus. His next book, Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher-King (Reaktion Books), will appear in late 2025.
