Dear Reader,
You are probably here because I yelled at you to come check out my substack on my twitter. Fair enough. I’m glad that you love tennis as much as I do, because I truly believe it is a lovely sport with more than enough to offer in the way of explaining how life itself works. I hope to use this space to better articulate what it is about tennis that makes me feel this way. In a sense, this publication is my attempt to figure out for myself how life works, through a lens that makes me happy.
I am the kind of person who chronically overthinks everything. It’s in my second nature to work myself into knots to the point I forget what I’m thinking about in the first place. Naturally, my first instinct (annoying person that I am) is to impose all of this overthinking on my twitter followers. There is no greater joy in life than overthinking and imposing it on someone else, only for them to turn around and tell you that they get it too. And that is the greatest joy in writing about sports for me.
I really enjoy posting longer twitter threads with more in-depth analysis about the game. Tennis is a lovely and complex game with plenty to analyse, and I realised that I was quickly creating thirty tweet threads which I ended up chucking into my drafts. I figured that it made sense to move that sort of logic and thinking to somewhere where I can actually write out the whole of what I am thinking.
So. A substack. I want to write about the way tennis connects with the rest of life. I’m not very good at a particular kind of statistical or technical analysis that I feel is sort of required to be someone with a sports writing platform. Unfortunately, I still feel drawn to try and explain the random connections tennis makes me feel with the general project of Being Alive. Hence, I am here.
Admittedly I have very little idea about how this platform works, and it will probably take a while for everything to be ironed out. I hope you have the patience to bear with me while this happens. It would be lovely to have you along on my journey through tennis.
In an ideal world, I would like to upload here once a week. Unfortunately, I live in this world, where I am very bad at coaxing myself into writing. I am prone to the vice of procrastination just like everybody else, so I am not going to make a hard promise about when I upload. I’ll write when I write and I’ll shout at you all to read it when it happens.
Best,
May
P.S. I’m not set on the title (given I’ve literally just stolen it from David Foster Wallace). Please dm me any suggestions you have! I’d greatly appreciate it.
Looking forward to more essays, May. / Ken
I concur