What’s On The Faces Of Tennis Players?

There’s a case to be made about elite tennis being the loneliest sport. It’s the closest you can get to solitary confinement, as Andre Agassi noted. But how can one be weighed down by the weight of loneliness, when you’re surrounded by thousands of spectators that also include your loved ones, your coach, your physiotherapist, and the crowd that may or may not like you, but won’t mind giving you applause after a great point? It’s you, and your stupid racquet as an extension of your hand, against the entire world. Naturally, the racquet becomes the biggest collateral of your frustration and agony. But even banging your racquets isn’t free of supervision, for it attracts the code violation penalty. Racquets do have feelings too!

Saving break points is not easy, returning a ferocious serve is hard, mounting a comeback after losing two sets is harder, but restraining yourself from breaking the racquet— the perfect visual description of a great emotional discharge—is perhaps the hardest. That was my sole takeaway from the fourth-round clash between Andrey Rublev and Alex de Minaur. Rublev played well, chalking off the first set rather comfortably, then played badly in the next two sets, unleashing a river of unforced errors, generously giving away whatever advantage he gained in the first hour of the match. When the bulb starts flickering, he wouldn’t check the switch, the wiring, the screw, or the electricity. Instead, he would simply smash the bulb. This self-destructive tendency of Rublev makes up for an absorbing watch. Sometimes frustrating, but never not interesting. When things were not going in his favour and shots were not going where he desired in that phase of play against Minaur, one could discern a great sadness on Rublev’s face, marked with a tinge of frustration and hopelessness. The negative emotions manifested themselves not only in his game, but in his on-court demeanour too. Rublev was cussed with himself, he screamed at his team as if he were begging for mercy. He also contemplated the idea of racquet obliteration on numerous occasions, but just showed enough willpower to stop himself at the threshold point.

Watching Rublev in action should be a full-time job in itself, for it makes you undergo an intense emotional toll, taking you through the labyrinth of gloom and glory, like one of those tragic Russian literature concerned with the tragedies of life. Facial expressions are deceptive, and gauging one’s state of being by their face is an inexact science, a stepson of quackery, and yet, when the subject is Rublev, you can always guess when he’s in trouble by a mere glimpse of his face. His face is a sorrowful mirror, reflecting the innermost turmoils of his being with great clarity.

On the other extreme of Rublev, there’s a set of players whose face barely shows anything. Through trials and tribulations, they remain firm and composed. There’s no dearth of such players, yet no one embodies this school of play as perfectly as Roger Federer. Whether he is playing like a dream or playing like trash, Federer hardly looked perturbed on the court, never letting elated joys or deep vulnerabilities show up on his face. There would be nothing more than a silent nod of approval after he conjures up the most insane, impossible stroke. You blink and you miss this ecstatic face of Federer. But this has never been the case with his nemesis Rafael Nadal. The Spaniard loves to soak himself and cherish the immense adulation of the crowd after he does freakish stuff. Since Djokovic mostly played against the prevailing atmosphere among spectators, he would shush the crowd after winning great points. Beyond these celebratory acts, there’s not much written on either Nadal or Djokovic’s face. For such players, body language gives cues with greater accuracy.

In 2016, Hillel Aviezer, a psychology researcher at Princeton University, posited that perceivers often misjudge the emotional situation of players from facial expressions, but reading body movements is more accurate. Aviezer took the full images of tennis players, but cut out everything except the face, and asked people to predict whether it was a triumphant face or a losing face. The prediction was more accurate when people saw the full image of an athlete. “When people saw the body alone, they easily knew if this was a positive or negative emotion,” explains Aviezer, in an old interview with NPR. If a player is undergoing extreme emotions, the facial character becomes ambiguous. “When emotions run high, the face becomes more malleable: it’s not clear if positivity or negativity is going on there,” he said to the New York Times. “People have this illusion that they’re reading all this information in the face. We found that the face is ambiguous in these situations and the body is critical.”

This perhaps explains how it’s difficult to determine anything from the facial expression of a tennis player. But in some cases, even body language isn’t reliable. For instance sometimes when Djokovic is not playing his best game, his body language always suggests he’s harbouring some deep discomfort and he might just quit, but minutes later, you see him performing at the peak of his power, running down on both wings, up and down, stretching every sinew to make an unreturnable return.

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