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For the purposes of his instruction, the denigrating voice is designated as Self 1 (read ego), the natural body as Self 2 (read id). Unless you can shut Self 1 up or calm him down, Gallwey contends, Self 2 will be too nervous to play. To help Self 2 devote itself to tennis, Gallwey wisely offers practical exercises on how to relax and watch the ball. Among them: actually trying to see the ball's seams as it approaches; following its trajectory back and forth while imagining it is creating a huge linear, free-form painting in the air. Says he: "The ball should always be now." Gallwey was the captain of the Harvard tennis team (class of 1960). He later studied meditation with the Maharaji and traveled in India. Though he rejects the Self 1 Western view that your self-respect depends on winning, he has managed to reconcile Eastern passivity with the thoroughly Western notion that striving and competition are essential to excellence. "What have you really won when you win?" he asks his students. "What have you really lost when you lose?" As if to show that winning is no big deal, he stages a pushing match between his left hand and his right, then points out that if winner and loser do not push hard, there is nothing in it for either one. True competition, it follows, is really a sophisticated form of cooperation.
Aspirant players who wish to improve their game or their court manners without benefit of Eastern philosophy are free (at $200 for five days' instruction, plus room and board) to try Gallwey's most eminent competition. By California standards, it is just down the road, at Coto de Caza near Laguna Beach, a 5,000-acre mission-cum-tennis college presided over by Vic Braden, 47. Though Braden bears a faint resemblance to a vest-pocket Buddha and has a graduate degree in psychology, his methods epitomize two current hopes of Western civilization—a sense of humor and trust in technology.
Braden's indoor classrooms have enough electronic TV gadgetry, cameras, screens, replay devices and tapes to make the average TV newsroom look medieval. When his students are not having balls shot at them or stroking backhands into canvas practice funnels set up like spokes on a wheel, they listen to him lecture or sit in yellow and orange director's chairs and watch thousands of feet of film, much of it videotape, of themselves, some of it comic. Of the 3,500 people who attend the school each year, nearly 75% are couples. While teaching mixed doubles, Braden can be serious enough. But his films and lectures showing male chauvinism rampant on the courts make the women hoot with glee. The men grin and bear it.
And take the blame. For if there is one serpent most easily discernible in the Garden of Eden togetherness that Americans hope for from tennis, it is the American husband. Until the advent of Women's Liberation, when men began to be accused of a certain piggish dominance again, a sociologist's easy generalization about the American middle-class husband was that he had lost his domestic clout. It is hardly more than a decade, in fact, since wits began describing the commuting husband as a "yard man with sex privileges." Now it appears that whatever happened in the den and kitchen, this henpecked hacker remained master and monster through it all—at least on the courts.