Why We Applaud Survival More Than Initiative

I was watching a tournament recently and something caught my attention, not a shot, but a sound. When two players got into long, physical rallies, the kind where both players are running hard, defending brilliantly, refusing to miss, the crowd responded. You could feel the appreciation build with each ball. The running, the fighting, the refusal to give in. People were genuinely moved by it. There is something real in that response, and I am not dismissing it.

But then, a few games later, a player hit a good serve that jammed the returner, and a weak response landed the net. Point over in one shot. And the response from the stands was, almost nothing. A polite ripple at most. Silence where, moments before, there had been warmth.

I found myself thinking: why?

Two Kinds of Courage

There are two genuinely different forms of courage in tennis, and I think we only tend to celebrate one of them.

The first is the courage to suffer. To run. To defend. To stay patient when the match is hard, when the opponent is finding their shots, when the fatigue is real and the temptation to ease off is strong. To keep competing when you are down in the third. To keep making the opponent play another ball. That courage is real. It is valuable. It can be beautiful to watch. I have enormous respect for players who are built that way.

“There is the courage to suffer. And there is the courage to act.”

The second is the courage to act. To take time away early. To come forward to the net and make a decision about where the ball is going. To step inside the baseline and change the pace of a rally before it becomes a battle. To try to win the point before it costs you something. To make a choice and live with what follows. That courage is just as real. And it is much less often recognised.

Why Long Points Feel Earned

When a point lasts thirty balls, it feels earned in a very visible way. The physical effort is on display. You can see the legs, the lungs, the will to stay in the point. The narrative builds with each ball: will they make it? Will they miss? When someone survives that, it feels like a story with a resolution.

A short point does not give you time to build that narrative. A first serve, a weak return, an early forehand hit with pace and direction, a point that is over before most people have even settled into watching it, there is no arc to attach yourself to. The effort was real, but it was invisible. The decision was made somewhere in a fraction of a second before the ball arrived, and if the execution was good, the point was over before the situation became dramatic.

But that short point can be just as skilful. The serve placement that pushed the return to a predictable spot. The recognition that the opponent was slightly off-balance. The footwork that allowed the player to step inside the baseline rather than be pushed back. The decision to go early rather than wait. None of that is easy. None of it is cheap. It just does not look like struggle, and we have a strong association between struggle and quality.

A short point is not a lesser point. It may be a better one, one where the problem was solved before it got complicated.

What This Says About How We Teach the Game

I think this cultural preference has consequences that run deeper than commentary and applause. It shapes how many players come to understand what good tennis is, what bravery means on a tennis court, and what kinds of play are considered legitimate.

If the players who are celebrated are the ones who run everything down and never give up, and if the players who try to win points early are characterised as impatient, or as taking risks, or as not working hard enough, then what message does a young player receive? That initiative is a risk to be managed. That safety is virtue. That making the opponent play more balls is the intelligent, respectable choice, regardless of what those balls actually look like.

Some players eventually resist this. They develop an attacking game through instinct, or through having a coach who values it, or through discovering in matches that their legs won’t carry them through long rallies. Others build an entire game around avoiding visible initiative, and they do it for years, and the people around them keep applauding the running and the fighting and saying nothing much about the fact that the rallies they are surviving are rallies they could have solved earlier.

I want to be careful here. I am not saying that consistent, patient tennis is wrong. Some players solve the game through exactly that, through tolerance, through making opponents uncomfortable with reliability, through outlasting people. That is a genuine strategy and there are players at every level for whom it is exactly right. What I am questioning is the cultural assumption that this approach is inherently more admirable, more “gritty,” more real than the kind that tries to make something happen quickly.

Different players solve the game in different ways. Some through patience. Some through initiative. Some through the legs and some through the hands. Some through variety, some through consistency, some through the serve, some through the return. All of these can be intelligent. All of them can require courage.

The problem is when tennis culture only recognises one type of bravery: the bravery of not missing. Because there is another kind, the bravery of trying to make something happen, of stepping inside the baseline before you know whether it will work, of coming to the net when the outcome is genuinely uncertain. That bravery is quieter. It does not ask for applause. But it deserves to be seen.

You might also enjoy: Aoi Ito: When the Textbook Is Wrong.

References and Further Reading

Davids, K., Button, C., & Bennett, S. (2008). Dynamics of Skill Acquisition: A Constraints-Led Approach. Human Kinetics.
Greenwood, D., Davids, K., & Renshaw, I. (2014). Experiential knowledge of expert coaches can help identify informational constraints on performance of dynamic interceptive actions. Journal of Sports Sciences, 32(4), 328–335.
Côté, J., Baker, J., & Abernethy, B. (2003). From play to practice: A developmental framework for the acquisition of expertise in team sports. In J. Starkes & K. A. Ericsson (Eds.), Expert Performance in Sports. Human Kinetics.