Forget ABout Hitting Winners - Just Get In Back Over the Net

The past and present tennis players that are readers of this column (and I assume that is most of you) will enjoy this story today.

I gave up playing tennis quite some years ago when my son started to beat me. He was aged nine so I thought the time had come to hang up the Wilson. It’s hard to keep up parental control when you go down down 6.0, 6.0 to someone who is in short pants off the court.

“Stick to what you are good at” that’s always been Louise’s wise words to me. Never touched a court or a racquett since.

But what I have learnt of from a lifetime of watching from the sidelines is that you don’t win by trying to serve up an ace or hit a big winner with every shot. The rules are 1. Keep getting the ball back over the net. 2. Never hit the same shot twice and, 3. be mentally tough.

Pat Rafter was as tough as anyone and like all the champions he always had the last shot. And he let his opponents make the mistakes. Pressure will do that.

The lesson seems to have been lost on a few in the media in the last week. The unfortunate events initiated by the disgraced shock jock Kyle Sandilands is a good example. Don’t go for the big winner “down the line” as they say in tennis , the long steady game will win. It may be a bit boring sometimes but the odds are that it will be successful.

We’ve seen it in the long running battle between the TV networks. The late Kerry Packer set the Nine network on a thirty year run of making money by regular programming. Every night, the highest rating news was followed by the equally successful A Current Affair. David Leckie, CEO of Seven, in the six year battle to put Seven on top by taking the lead from Nine did it by regular programming every night. Mind you Nine is fighting back – David Gyngell has given up surfing and is now playing tennis.

Louise says that I should pause at this stage, as they do at the critical mid point of a tennis game, and deliver the match winning stroke which in her world is the use of a carefully placed long word: Ignominious! Indeed! That’s what the rise and rise the Seven Network was to Channel 9, because the people who Leckie got to do the job on Nine were the ones who had built Nine in the years before.

Back to tennis.

“Excuse me Roger you seem to be beating me, can I borrow your racquet.”

Not likely says the Swiss.

A good lesson for life and business isn’t it. Just keep getting the ball back over the net. Rafter and Hewitt and all our tennis champs back through the years – Newc, Laver and not forgetting my mate Ashley, did the same. They talk about never giving up, never say die and having the last shot.

Louise and I are off to have a game of tennis. Should be a hoot. I want the last shot, she wants the last word. Sounds like a five setter.

“C’m on” I say as I turn my cap to the backwards position.