Trying padel for the first time, badly

I lost the first set 6–0. I lost the second one 6–1, and I want to be clear that the one was not mine. By the third I had stopped keeping score, which everybody agreed was the right call.

I had not been that bad at something in public in about eleven years, and it turns out that is a problem rather than an achievement.

What being bad in public does to you

The first twenty minutes were genuinely unpleasant. Not the losing — the being watched while not knowing what I was doing. There is a particular feeling that comes with being the worst person on a court, and I had forgotten it completely, in the way you forget a smell.

That forgetting is the interesting bit. Somewhere in the last decade I had quietly organised my week so that I was only ever doing things I was already good at. Not deliberately. It just happens: you get competent, competence is pleasant, and the calendar fills up with the pleasant thing until there is no room left for being a beginner at anything.

It makes you worse at your job in a way that is very hard to notice from inside, because everything is going fine.

“You do not lose the ability to learn. You lose the tolerance for the twenty minutes before you do.”

Three things it gave back

I did not go looking for lessons. These arrived anyway, and all three of them are things I use on a Tuesday:

• A working memory of not knowing. I sit opposite first-time buyers every week, and every week somebody apologises for asking what an option fee is. I had stopped being able to feel what that costs them to ask. Two hours of being the worst person on a court fixed that for nothing.
• Patience with the flailing stage. Watching myself swing at a ball that had already gone past me made me a great deal kinder about a client who has read four articles and arrived with a theory. That is not confusion. That is the twenty minutes.
• Evidence that the twenty minutes ends. By the fourth session I could return a serve. Nothing else about me had changed. It is a small, stupid, extremely useful piece of proof to be able to point at.

Why it was padel and not something dignified

Partly because a court appeared ten minutes from me and half the people I know had started going. Mostly because of the shape of the thing: it is doubles, the court is small, the serve is underarm, and the walls keep the ball alive. Every one of those makes it easier to be bad at.

That matters more than it sounds. The reason adults stop learning is not that learning got harder, it is that the available beginner experiences are humiliating in a way that has no upside. Take up tennis at forty and you spend six weeks unable to keep a rally going, alone, at the back of a court. Take up padel and you are in a rally within twenty minutes, badly, with three other people, and the rally is the fun part.

I have started recommending it to clients for a completely unrelated reason, which is that anybody in the middle of buying a home needs one evening a week where the thing they are worrying about is a ball.

The glass, and letting the ball come back

Here is the one that actually made me put this down in writing. In padel the back wall is glass and in play. A ball that has gone past you is not gone — it comes off the glass and you can still play it, and the whole of being a beginner is that you do not believe that yet.

So you lunge. Every single time. You throw yourself at a ball that was going to come back to you in one second, standing up, at a comfortable height, and you take the hard version of the shot for no reason at all.

I do that at work. Somebody makes a lowball offer and the instinct is to answer it inside the hour, hard, with everything I have got. Almost always the better move is to let it come off the glass — acknowledge it, say nothing about the number, and let the next thing arrive from a standing position. Most offers are not the ball. They are the ball going past you on its way to the wall.

The people I play with, who are good, barely move. They spent the first year learning that and I have watched three of them try to explain it to me in one sentence, which is not possible. You have to lose 6–0 first.

Still bad

I want to be honest about the arc here, because there is a version of this piece where I get good at padel and it means something. I am not good at padel. I am now roughly the second-worst person on the court, and the improvement has come from one thing, which is standing still slightly longer.

That is the whole report. Find something you are visibly bad at, do it in front of people who are better than you, and pay attention to the twenty minutes rather than the score. It is the cheapest professional development I have ever done, and the only one that left a bruise.

— MG

UnapprovedMichele did not write this post. It was written to the card copy that already existed, to give the template something real to render, and the date on it is invented too. Read it as a shape to correct.