A couple of weeks ago, my husband and I sat on the couch, browsing on our laptops for Christmas present ideas for our daughter. (Well, I think he was browsing. He may have been reading about the Patriots.)
In my searching, I came across a ten-foot-long phone charger. I’d never thought about how inadequate the dinky iPhone chargers are until I saw this one. My daughter doesn’t have many outlets in her apartment. With this mega-charger, she’d be able to sit on the couch with her phone while it’s plugged in across the room. Brilliant!
What’s more, this cable was zebra striped! So cute! (If you’re going to give a functional item as a gift, you need to jazz it up a little.) I mentioned it to my husband as I started to order it.
Turns out, he’d seen another long charger a few weeks earlier. He forwarded me the Amazon link. His charger was all black and not the slightest bit cute. But it did have great reviews–80% five stars.
I clicked back to my zebra cable and scrolled through the comments. I believe “STAY AWAY!” and “Cheap crap” represents a fair sampling of reviewer sentiment.
“But…zebra,” I appealed to my husband.
He shrugged, without looking up from his laptop. “What can I tell you, Deb? Sometimes you just have to settle for quality.”
Naturally, we got the sensible cable and not the fun one.
And then I began obsessing over this phrase: Settle for quality.
In tennis, quality is high-percentage tennis. I’ve said it before–quality’s a little boring. But quality beats cheap zebra crap every time.
Think about an amazing tennis match on television. If you’re like me, you probably imagine sizzling returns that clip the inside of the line, breathtaking volleys that clip the side of the line, cracking overheads that clip the baseline. Basically, a lot of line clipping.
But how much risk do the pros really take? Are they really going for the lines, or do they settle for quality? I decided to get my nerd on and find out.
I sat down with my trusty iPad in front of the television and watched the ATP Finals doubles match between Murray/Soares and Farah/Cabal. These aren’t just skilled doubles players. These are doubles pairs that have finished in the top eight in the world. These guys should be blowing us away with their shot-making, right?
I studied the placement of each shot in the first set, noting safe shots (those that bounced at least two feet from a line) and high-risk shots. Then I did some basic math. Here’s what the numbers tell us:
There was a total of 55 points played.
In 34 of those 55 points, every shot in the rally was hit to a big, safe target (two feet or more from a line). In other words, 61.8% of the points were played 100% low-risk.
But 13 of those points were decided by service winners–serves so good that the receiver couldn’t get the ball back in play. Those should be excluded from the calculation. That leaves us with 55 minus 13, or 42 total points. That means 80.9% (34/42) of points with a rally were played with all conservative shots.
Out of the entire set, only 8 rallies included a high-risk shot. Let’s look at what happened in each of those:
- Team A hit a high-risk shot close to line. Team B managed to get it back. Team A then netted the next volley. LOST
- Receiver hit a makeable return long. LOST
- Same scenario as #1. LOST
- Player hit a high-risk shot close to the line and WON
- Team A hit a high-risk shot close to the line. Team B got it and hit a winner off it. LOST
- Player hit a high-risk shot close to the line and WON
- Player hit a high-risk shot close to the line and WON
- Player hit a high-risk volley past the line and LOST
The team who went for the higher risk shot ended up losing the point 5 times out of 8.
In only 3 of the 42 rallying points did a team hit a high-risk shot and win. That’s a mere 7% of the points.
Admittedly, this was only one set out of the thousands that the pros play every year–a pretty small sample size. Still, I found this exercise instructive in two ways.
One, the pros win their matches with bread-and-butter tennis. There may be a highlight reel shot here or there, but the bulk of a match is decided by steady, high-percentage play.
And two, although the pros hit winners, they’re usually safe winners. That’s something I didn’t even know existed–a safe winner.
In other words, these elite professionals settle for quality. Maybe I should, too.