What I Did on Spring Break
Deborah Sobol | March 26, 2010 
I traveled to the desert for my spring break this year and found myself in an oasis of greatness against a backdrop of immense beauty.
I unpacked my bags at the La Quinta Resort and Club, an old and established resort just east of Palm Springs, which modestly boasts its history of being a “desert escape” for the Hollywood stars of the 1920s–50s. The escape part appealed to me—quiet, warmth and lots of light.
Frank Capra rented a casita here in the 1920s and settled down to work on such classics as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” This inspired me to settle in my own casita and create the batch of advanced seminars I have long wanted to offer as part of Studio 1301’s Teaching Institute.
There is an additional bonus for me in La Quinta in mid-March: each year it is the site of the first major tennis tournament of the year in this hemisphere, the BNP Paribas Open. Not only is tennis in the air, but a great majority of the Top 20 ranked men and women stay at La Quinta and practice here as well. Imagine the energy created when all of these athletes gather to work in one place!
My students are familiar with the term “artist-athlete.” I introduce it to them at the very outset of our work. It refers to the wonderful synergy created between one's ongoing physical training at the keyboard and one’s artistic development. It dissolves the myth that one “learns technique” and then just devotes the rest of one’s life to working on repertoire.
Each day for two weeks here at La Quinta, I walked over to the tennis center on a break from writing, and observed these great athletes at work, from a distance of only 20 or 30 feet! As an "artist-athlete," I appreciate effort; and, I love nothing more than learning about my own art from observing the world around me. Imagine my delight when I could watch masters from a completely different discipline go about their daily work and note the striking similarities to the worklife of a professional musician!
All great artists have “mastered” their technique—and spend time in their daily practice pushing the envelope with it, to better inform their art.
Great tennis players are no exception. Over the course of a week, I watched Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic, and Fernando Verdasco start their practice day. Here's a snapshot:
- They arrive at the court with their hitting partner, who is essentially a superhuman backboard tasked with the challenging feat of returning their balls back to just the right place, so the technical drills do their job.
- They spend about an hour working their way through all the fundamental shots: baseline forehand, baseline backhand, crosscourt of both, forehand volleys, backhand volleys, overheads, and serves.
- They work hard at each segment, take a break every 10 minutes or so to sit down and hydrate and rest, and I assume, check in with themselves about how their bodies are working that day.
Sometimes they spend more time on one aspect of the fundamentals than another—like lining up three orange cones in the service court and hammering 35 serves at each cone at 120 miles per hour, over and over again in a humble rhythm.
One can palpably feel their focus in all this technical work—it is even more powerful than the shots they are launching over the net.
After an hour or so, they stop, confer with their hitting partner and sometimes their coach, sign a few autographs for the pack of eagerly waiting kids and head to the fitness center, where they will do another type of physical training.
Later in the day, if they don’t have a match to play, they will usually return and work on specific “shots” —those aspects of their game repertoire they will want to have handy at a moment’s notice. They reinforce their natural gifts, pushing them further, and work hard on the areas that don’t come naturally. (For example, Roddick has an infamously powerful serve; he works hard on quickness and net shots, which are not his natural forte.) Sometimes, they’ll grab another colleague from the tour and “run through” a practice match, to the delight of all.
The daily practice routine of these tennis stars is essentially the same, day after day. (I stopped to think how many days in anyone of these top 20 players’ lives started like this, from the time they were very young.) Roger Federer, the number one player in the world—and perhaps of all time—covers the same fundamentals daily.
As I began the creation of my summer seminars at Studio 1301 (one of which is a technique boot camp), one thing rang joyously loud and clear—there are many parallels between the “technical work” of a great athlete and a great musician:
- Daily revisiting the fundamentals, with trust and humility before the process;
- Persistence, focus and thoroughness, covering all aspects of the technique;
- An intuitive knowledge that this work will push the “art” further and inform the level of play to the point of “mastery.”
A side note to any students who still think that technical work is for the very young and inexperienced: I remember a conversation about technique I had several years ago with the great Japanese violist, Nobuko Imai, who said the longer one’s career, the more important the technical work.
This was echoed this past Sunday in La Quinta, when a 31-year-old veteran tennis player, Ivan Ljubicic, won the men’s singles championship. (31 is old for singles players!) This master from Croatia had defeated the physical powerhouses in their early twenties (including Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal) in stunning upsets to arrive at a finals match against another of that group, Andy Roddick.
When asked what he did to prepare for this success, he replied, “All I did was work on my body—three times each day—to be strong and quick.”
An inspiration for “artist-athletes” everywhere!
Ivan Ljubicic photo credit: Matteo Dudek
Reader Comments (3)
How nice written. It gives courage and stimulus to work more on technique, right?
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