The difficulty of tennis relative to other sports is one of my perennial topics of discussion. It is also something I can probably be rage-baited into arguing. I will be blunt that those who doubt or dismiss tennis as “easy” irk me. This topic is a great candidate for a deep dive on my end.

Andy Roddick’s “Served” podcast broached this issue after last year’s 2025 epic and frighteningly long Roland Garros men’s final. I probably won’t land where Roddick or David Foster Wallace¹² did on the difficulty of tennis, but *spoiler alert* I will discuss the real difficulty of tennis in this series.

Preliminary Ideas:

1. Individual Sports Tend to Be Harder for an Individual Athlete than Team Sports Are – This obviously favors tennis
2. Contact Sports Tend to Be Harder than Non-Contact Sports – This is not in tennis’s wheelhouse
3. Outdoor Sports Tend to Be Harder than Indoor Sports – The elements are unpredictable
4. Sports with No Specified Time Limit Prevent Stalling as a Tactic for Victory

Helpful Resource:

In 2004, ESPN’s now-defunct Page 2 compared sports across 10 categories and arrived at tennis as being the 7th most difficult sport.

Why I May not Arrive Where Roddick and Wallace Do/Did

I think ATP and WTA professionals do many amazing things, but I do think combat sports in particular probably occupy a place few humans would want to go in any serious sense. My list of “Tend to Be Harder” would give a nod to combat sports, being both individual and obviously contact sports. MMA had not taken off in 2004, but my guess is that if ESPN redid this list, MMA would be ranked above or near boxing at the top, and Pickleball would be ranked somewhere well below tennis.

MKG was largely viewed as having a disappointing NBA career, but was putting in this type of work. The work should give one an idea of how physical the games he was preparing for are.

I think basketball, like tennis, requires an athlete to be good at many things simultaneously. Basketball is a team sport in which a player can be subbed out of a game if injured, and victory is not taken away. Elam Ending aside, basketball almost always has a set time limit, allowing for “stall ball” to be employed if a large lead is built. Players can specialize in one or two skills and still have a long and lucrative professional career in basketball. All of this leans in tennis’s favor, but high-level basketball is far more physical in terms of contact than most backyard and intramural warriors of the hardwood would care to admit. The sheer physicality and contact of high-level basketball is something that tennis (aside from the post-match handshake) lacks.

Ice Hockey … If moving on clay is unnatural, what about moving on ice? What about moving on ice while skating? What about doing all of this while people are colliding with one another? Ice Hockey is a high-speed, high-reflex, high-stamina, and highly violent sport being carried out in conditions that are not second nature to any human. Most humans run, jump, and even swim at some point in their lives, outside of any sort of competition. Ice is not something humans instinctively take to.

How I will Go Forward

I will ask people who played multiple sports their points of view on the matter. Former NBA player John Lucas II was an NCAA all-American in both tennis and basketball. His views will be explored. Those I am sure I can get responses from are people I know. This will give my data set a localized quality, but I am going to dig in and see where I land. Out of the gate, I generally like the 2004 ESPN Page 2 conclusions, but I will not just take their word for it.

Roddick is absolutely correct. Tennis is not a soft sport. People inconsistently batting the ball back and forth at a park is not tennis unless we’re going to also say people playing pitch and catch is baseball or throwing a Nerf football with buddies is football.

1. In tribute to DFW, I will add a lengthy footnote expanding upon his 1996 piece in Esquire, “The String Theory.”
   I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is [35] and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) fixed positions, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables–i.e., a shot’s depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racket, height of backswing and angle of racket face, as well as the 3-D coordinates through which the racket face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out and out, on and on, and then on much further when the opponent’s own position and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in [36]. No silicon-based RAM yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange; smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then it can really be done only unconsciously, i.e., by fusing talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art. ↩︎
2. Why not go further?
   If you’ve played tennis at least a little, you probably have some idea how hard a game is to play really well. I submit to you that you really have no idea at all. I know I didn’t. And television doesn’t really allow you to appreciate what real top-level players can do–how hard they’re actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical imagination and artistry. I got to watch Michael Joyce practice several times right up close, like six feet and a chain-link fence away. This is a man who, at full run, can hit a fast-moving tennis ball into a one-foot square area seventy-eight feet away over a net, hard. He can do this something like more than 90 percent of the time. And this is the world’s seventy-ninth-best player, one who has to play the Montreal qualies.
   It’s not just the athletic artistry that compels interest in tennis at the professional level. It’s also what this level requires–what it’s taken for the one-hundredth-ranked player in the world to get there, what it takes to stay, what it would take to rise even higher against other men who’ve paid the same price number one hundred has paid.
   ↩︎