Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

I’ve watched many hours of the French so far, and it’s been enjoyable, but what stood out during the early rounds is how impossible it is to watch everything. There are 128 players in each of the men’s and women’s draws. That means there are 128 total first-round matches, another 64 in the second round, 32 more in the third. So what do you choose? How do you guide yourself through the tournament so that you maximize your chances of seeing something remarkable and, if not remarkable, at least beautiful?

It’s Memorial Day, and the choice between writing a lot and not writing a lot came down to the choice between having a beer and not having a beer. Having a beer won, because America is a land of champions.

In Jerry’s piece from Tuesday, he described a client/friend of his who heard about the improvements in his golf game and said, “That’s great, Jer, but you’re bound to get better by practicing so much.” Her suggestion that the TTW principles amount to little more than a call to practice got me remembering something.

Back in the summer of 2013, a little more than a year before I started working with Jerry, I went fishing with a couple of friends at the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico. We fished an area just below Navajo Dam. The water flows from the bottom of the dam, and so it stays consistently cold all year long, making it an excellent environment for zillions of tiny little bugs and the trout, especially rainbow trout, that feed on them. The fish there get big. There’s a restricted-limit zone for the first couple of miles below the dam, and in that area you’re allowed to keep one fish over twenty inches per day. You can catch trout that size pretty regularly. Like I said, big.

I’ve been fishing the San Juan since I was a teenager, and have been many times, but it had been a long time since I’d gone, maybe approaching ten years. It was good to be back.

My friends and I got on the river by mid-morning. We did okay but not great at the start, and then, as happens at the Juan, we hit a lull and didn’t see a strike for a long time. During that time, rather than giving in to frustration, I did something I’d never done there before: I stopped fishing and started really observing and thinking about what I observed.

One of the fascinating and frustrating things about fishing the San Juan is that when you wade in, the fish will come right up to your legs and use you to block the river’s current. From what I understand, the fish like it there because by cutting the current, you cut the energy they require to stay in place, and the way the water flows around your legs concentrates food behind the break in the current. An upshot of this is that when you’re not catching fish, you can’t petulantly convince yourself that they aren’t there–you can see them, just a few feet away.

So I started watching, really watching. What I saw was interesting. They’d swim in place against the current, and all of the sudden they’d dart a few inches to one side or the other, moving to get food. Additionally, I noticed what they don’t do: they don’t move up and down. They stay at a particular depth and feed there. If you watch, you’ll see.

From that simple observation, I concluded a few things. First of all, they’re constantly feeding. Once I looked for it, it became obvious. So if they’re not biting what you’re drifting down, there are only a handful of possible reasons why. Either you’re fishing a fly that’s the wrong size or the wrong color, or you’re not fishing at the right depth. That’s it. Those are the only possibilities.

With that realization, I started fishing again. Figuring out the right fly turned out to be easy enough–just take a good look at the nymphs that were making it up to the surface and match them as well as possible. From there, the only question was how to weight the line so that the fly would reach the right depth. So I watched and I played with different length tippets and amounts of weight and placement of the weight on the line, and each time I would drift the fly, I would visualize as best I could what that combination of factors was doing with the fly–how quickly it was sinking in the current, how long before it began to drag on the bottom, and so on. And sure enough, before not too very long, I started catching fish.

It ended up being probably my best day ever at the Juan. I was pretty pleased. I’d figured something out.

At the end of the day, my friend Coit, who is like a second father to me and taught me pretty much everything I know about fishing, said to me, “You know, I’ve known you so long, in some ways it’s hard to not see you as the kid you were. But today I really saw the man you’ve become.”

I took that as a very nice compliment, but I thought it also spoke to some of the benefits that come as we age, as we become a bit more calm and willing to slow down a little and really pay attention to what’s happening around us.

I tell this story here because Jerry’s piece from Tuesday got me wondering: to what degree are the improvements in our golf game simply the willingness to slow down and pay attention as we practice? What is it that makes what we’re doing with TTW any different from what I did at the San Juan that day?

As of right now, I can’t say that I know the answer. I told this story to Jerry, and he thought it was a question worth asking. In upcoming pieces, we’ll strive to find the answer.

Even under the best of circumstances, Andy Murray looks like he’s about three missed showers away from living in a box under a bridge. But when things start to go awry, as they did yesterday against Mathias Bourgue, the 22-year-old French wild card playing in his first Grand Slam, Murray begins to mutter sub-audibly to himself in an animated way that looks deeply, Mayor-of-Crazytown psychotic.

Watching Murray play is almost always entertaining. He’s got fluid, powerful groundstrokes, moves beautifully, and plays with an elegant touch and a quick imagination. But for added entertainment when he starts his muttering, try mumbling aloud the sort of aggressive half-gibberish you can imagine him saying. It’s really fun. Like this:

“Yeah, sneeze factory, try that again. I’ll punch you in the pizza box. Hit another ball like that? I’ll shave your kitten. Anyone can buy a racquet. Cheese grater! Grate cheese!”

Try it. You’ll be glad you did.

So what did we see?

We saw Stan Wawrinka lose two out of the first three sets against Lukas Rosol before pulling himself together to win. He nearly became the first ever defending champion to lose in the first round the following year.

And then there’s Andy Murray. I said that after his win in Rome, Murray should have a lot of momentum going into this tournament. Umm, right. He dropped the first two sets of his match against 37-year-old Radek Stepanek and struggled in the fifth before finally prevailing.

These extra sets have a real energy cost. The flow of Grand Slams is really different from other tournaments. Playing best-of-three-set matches every day, as in a regular tournament, is energetically quite different from playing a best-of-five-set match every other day. The deeper you push your body, the longer it takes to recover. It’s not linear. It’s easier to play three-setters on back-to-back days than to play a five-setter, take a day off, and then play another five-setter. If Wawrinka or Murray lose early in this tournament, the culprit could very well be their inability to get out of their first-round matches without expending too much energy.

Meanwhile, the rest of the top men’s seeds handled their business without too much travail. Nadal beat Sam Groth 6-1 6-1 6-1, Djokovic handled Yen-Hsun Lu in relatively straightforward straight-set fashion, and Nishikori did the same against Simone Bolelli.

And then there’s the women. Sigh. The women.

Angelique Kerber’s dream of competing for a calendar year Grand Slam made it all the way to the first round of the second Grand Slam of the year. She was the 3-seed and lost to Kiki Bertens in three sets. Victoria Azarenka, who won in Indian Wells and Miami, looked poised to have a strong French Open, but did something to her knee and had to retire at 0-4 in the third set. Roberta Vinci, the woman who beat Serena at the US Open, here seeded 7th, crashed out 6-1 6-3. Muguruza, the 4-seed, very nearly lost.

At least there were some good performances among the top seeds. Simona Halep, the 6-seed, won 6-2 6-0. Agnieszka Radwanska won 6-0 6-2.

And then there was Serena herself. Against Magdalena Rybarikova, number 77 in the world, Serena actually got broken on her second service game–and then shifted into second gear and won the next eleven games to win 6-2 6-0. No wasted energy on this one.

Today, both Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams start play as the favorites to win this year’s French Open. And both of them are facing a level of pressure that could affect their chances.

We all watched Serena implode under the pressure at the US Open last year–the hype around winning the calendar-year Grand Slam obviously got to be too much. And then in the final in Melbourne back in January, she came out nervous and stressed and lost to a good player with a solid game plan and nothing to lose. That’s pretty good evidence that she’s feeling the pressure of equaling Steffi Graf’s record. However, I said at the time that I thought that she’d actually given herself an edge for the rest of the year because there will be no talk of a calendar-year Slam. I predicted she’d equal and then beat Steffi’s record. We’ll see. At the very least, she did just get through Rome without losing a set.

On the other hand, Novak went in the opposite direction. We’ve gotten so accustomed to Novak winning in business- or even machine-like fashion that his struggles in Rome two weeks ago were incredibly fascinating. He was mentally off all week. He got bageled in the first set of his round-of-16 match against 57th-ranked Thomaz Bellucci before remembering that, oh yeah, he’s Novak Djokovic. He handled his quarterfinal match against Rafa well, winning 7-5 7-6, but got considerably outplayed by Nishikori in the the first set of their semifinal, the same match that saw him get a well-deserved warning for unsportsmanlike conduct for petulantly but with some force batting a ball in the direction of a ball boy, only narrowly missing him. And in the final, he complained forcefully and continually that the light rain that fell made it unsafe to slide on the clay, but Andy Murray–usually the player in that pair that we think of as Mr. Meltdown–didn’t seem to have any problems, and he dispatched Novak in straight sets.

So we’ve been left to wonder: in Novak’s case, was a week of mental meltdown the result of accumulated fatigue, or was it the pressure amping up ahead of the French? He’s had a week to regroup. We’ll see how he looks as he starts the tournament.

For the next couple of weeks I’m going to focus my energies on writing about the French Open, which started yesterday.

For both the men and the women, a single respective question summarizes the dominant pre-tournament storyline. For the women, that question is, “Will Serena finally equal Steffi Graf’s record of 22 Grand Slam victories?” For the men, it’s, “Will Novak Djokovic complete his career Grand Slam?”

Surrounding these storylines are two very different situations. The question of “Will Serena win?” can be more accurately translated as, “Will Serena beat herself, and if she does, which of this pack of also-rans will be on the other side of the net at the time?” The women’s game as a whole is kind of demoralizing right now. At 34, Serena is by far the best player on tour. The 2-seed at Roland Garros is Agnieszka Radwanska. To the other women on tour, she’s a tricky touch-player, but her deft, agile game is to Serena what a gazelle is to a lion. Again, Radwanska is the 2-seed. According to the rankings, everyone else is worse.

At least there’s some hope that the next generation–especially Madison Keys, Garbiñe Muguruza and Belinda Bencic (who, unfortunately, withdrew with injury before the tournament)–might actually develop into the stars the women’s game so desperately needs. So far, though, none of them have shown the mental fortitude to consistently compete.

The men’s side is a lot more competitive. Djokovic is the clear number one, but at least he has some genuine competition. Sure, Roger Federer is out with injury, and Stan Wawrinka, last year’s champion, has been a shell of himself during the whole clay-court season, but Rafael Nadal is reclaiming something of his past form, Kei Nishikori continues to improve (his match against Novak in the semis in Rome was terrific) and Andy Murray’s win over Novak in the Rome finals should provide him with a lot of momentum.

“Serena versus the world” and “Can Novak do it?”–these are the frames for the 2016 French Open. Now, it’s time to watch.

I started playing classical guitar during my first year of college, and when I came home that summer, my dad suggested I continue my studies with the guitar professor at UNM. I thought it was a worthwhile idea, so I called him and we agreed to meet.

At our first lesson, after watching me play a piece or two, he said, “Your teacher must be a student of a student of Segovia. Your right-hand technique is badly out of date. It’s inefficient, produces inferior tone, and increases the likelihood of injury.” He demonstrated what he considered proper right-hand technique, and I could quickly see and hear his point: it made much more sense biomechanically and it did sound better.

When I tried it, it felt deeply unfamiliar. It was immediately clear that I was basically going to have to start over and rebuild my right-hand technique from scratch.

Unsurprisingly, I found the prospect deeply daunting. But at the time I had dreams of pursuing guitar very seriously, and I understood that if I didn’t make this change, I’d be putting a ceiling on my abilities as a guitarist.

He gave me a number of exercises to work on. The practice was every bit as tedious as I feared. He had me plucking single notes at a time, following a metronome set at a very slow tempo. It was about as far away from actual music making as you could possibly imagine. At the same time, it demanded serious concentration; there was no phoning it in. To properly produce the stroke, I had to catch the string at the interface of the fingernail and pad of the finger just so, or else the tone suffered. And I needed to learn to be very precise–if I was ever going to play a piece at tempo, I’d have to work until this level of precision became automatic, no matter how fast the figuration in the right hand might be.

As you might imagine, my ego hated this. I went from playing music to devoting entire practice sessions to doing the most rudimentary of exercises. It was deeply humbling.

It wasn’t easy, but I stuck it out, and ultimately it paid off. My tone was far better, and I could play faster with less fatigue. I was unequivocally a better guitarist. That ceiling on my abilities was no longer there.

My memory of this episode rose up during the last week as I’ve confronted the reality of this same basic process with respect to my golf swing. If I’m really interested in improving, I’m going to have to sigh and step up and do the fairly tedious work I described last week. There’s just no way around it. And exactly as was the case all those years ago, I have to concentrate to make sure that I’m precise in my practice. There’s no sense doing all this work if I’m only going to end up grooving another faulty swing.

As before, my ego doesn’t like it. It wants me to be good now. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. The only path forward is to accept with humility the unsexy work that needs to be done.

It’s become pretty clear to me that simply publishing something/anything every day isn’t producing any growth for me as a writer anymore. I’ve exhausted the practice–the practice of trusting the zero drafts, iterating quickly through revisions, and obviating perfectionism–in its present form.

At the same time, it still feels critical to keep publishing on a consistent schedule.

What to do, then? How do I evolve the practice while continuing to practice it?

The rules serve as a statement of values, both to myself and to my readers.

To myself, I am making certain promises about showing up, no matter what. I am articulating the minimum expectations I demand from myself. (It feels good to notice that my minimum expectations aren’t trivial.)

To you, my readers, I am stating what you will find upon making a trip to Free Refills. Through my drafting rules, you can know that I’m always working on new material. Through my publishing rules, you know that you’ll find something new, any weekday you make a visit.

There’s a third value embedded in the rules as well. In the rule that says I can amend the rules, I am promising to evolve. I don’t know if this is clear yet, but what I am building with Free Refills is meant to live at the heart of my work and my career as a writer.