The Inner Game of Tennis

"I keep multiple copies to give to players and coaches; I re-read it every off-season."

"Well, I would completely agree with Billie Jean. You know, this was a very controversial book in its day and still is today, even though it’s now sold over a million copies. Gallwey also has a group of books based on his ‘Inner Game’ methodology: Inner Tennis: Playing The Game , The Inner Game of Music , The Inner Game of Stress , The Inner Game of Work , The Inner Game of Golf , and Inner Skiing . The other person who has probably sold the most books in the history of sports psychology is probably Bob Rotella, but we’ll get to him in a minute. This was written in the early 1970s. Back then, top coaches and athletes were using sports psychology, but it had a real stigma. If you told people you went to a sports psychologist, you were considered mentally weak. However, the Eastern Europeans and Russians were famously using psychology to gobble up all sorts of medals in the Olympics and other competitions. They saw the value right away. When Gallwey wrote his book, he was kind of a pariah in the tennis teaching world because The Inner Game of Tennis was extremely misunderstood. I’ll come back to that. Gallwey was the first author to detail practical, in-the-trenches sports psychology techniques. He wasn’t really a theory guy or a data guy or a research guy, but practical techniques—his books are loaded with those. He was the first person to ever do that, period. When he did it in the 1970s, it was Earth shaking; it was shocking. Up until that time, all sports instruction was considered to have used what’s called the command method: ‘I’m the coach, and I tell you what to do.’ Gallwey was the opposite. He used the question method: ‘Tell me how that feels. When you hit that last backhand, were you early, late, or on time?’ He used a series of very clever questions to engage the learner in their own experience, thereby raising their self-awareness. I’ve used Inner ever since the 1970s. I use it daily. It’s one of my strongest approaches, raising the awareness of the learner and setting the proper goal. Here’s what we want the ball to do—a certain span, a certain height, whatever— that combination produces the performance. There’s no command needed; there’s ‘don’t do this, don’t do that.’ No ‘you’re messing this up.’ It’s all about asking questions and raising awareness. Here’s the kicker. Gallwey said: “Perfect tennis is just inside you, waiting to come out.” This is where he was misunderstood. He could have helped his cause if he had said a little bit more about that. People said: ‘Oh, so we all have perfect tennis, huh? All you gotta do is relax and it comes out, huh?’ People in sport equate a book’s value with the status of famous people who endorse it. Unfortunately, Gallwey didn’t have any high-level endorsements at the time. Then of course, he went to golf and skiing and music. He became more and more respected. I don’t know when he got this moniker; it might’ve been in the 1990s, but today he’s now considered one of the fathers of modern coaching. So Gallwey has been monumental in the field in multiple ways. Number one is as the ground-breaking practical guy. In the 1970s, he wrote the first book and just kept layering books like crazy. He’s known for giving technique after technique after technique in his books, a veritable how-to taxonomy of techniques. And then he got moved into business/life coaching and he was credited with that field. But very controversial, very misunderstood. I think now he’s way more appreciated than he was back when he was in his prime. He’s almost 80 or close to that now, but he’s still pretty active. Of all the books we’re talking about today, I would definitely rate Gallwey as the number one most important in this field. That’s the prime reason. They just failed in a performance, or they’ve had a series of failures and now someone’s telling them they’ve got a problem, and they better go see somebody. They’re in a slump. ‘Hey, if you don’t pick your game up, you’re going to be demoted to the bench,’ or ‘We’re going to drop you down a level on the team,’ or ‘You’re off the team.’ ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but you seem to be mentally weak.’ The athlete is hearing all these things, whether it’s from a parent or from a coach or themselves or whatever, and that’s the triggering event that’s most common. Transitions are another huge reason people call me. They just went up a weight class, an age group; now they’re going national, international. They went from high school to college, and maybe there’s nothing particularly wrong with their performance, but they don’t feel normal. They don’t feel grounded."

"I have read and reread Tim Gallwey's The Inner Game of Tennis for almost four decades. At its root, it's about closing the mental gap between potential and performance."