The ‘I don’t care’ mantra

I won a tennis match I should rightfully have lost yesterday. I was down 4-6, 0-3, and stormed back to win it at 10-8 in the third set. It was not a spectacular day of tennis for me, but I wasn’t playing all that badly. My opponent was pretty good, actually. This got me thinking about a mantra that my coach used to tell us players to say before every point, which is “I love this shit”. I find myself unable to say it during tennis, partly because I genuinely do not like the shit. I like the exercise, but the pressure and the mental game of the sport can really get to me. 

Instead, I say my “I don’t care ” mantra before every serve. It’s actually kind of funny because it does sort of take some of the pressure off and helps me to relax a bit. Yet there is some truth to that mantra, which I will not go into too much detail on. At the end of the day, I’ve always felt that tennis is my dad’s passion, not mine. He truly cares about this sport, and I just sort of play it as an extracurricular activity. Nevertheless, paradoxically, because I don’t really care for it, I tend to feel less pressure playing it, and I think it makes me a better player because of it. It’s funny how this sort of dynamic can play out in life sometimes.