This is the climax of the tennis season – not just the dénouement of the Wimbledon championships, but also – less heralded, yet equally important for those involved – the final stages of our club tournament in west London. These are two weeks of maximum tennis intensity, when days are brightest and (almost) longest. I shall be watching from the sidelines, having managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in the first rounds of both singles and mixed doubles.

Pakistani cricketer Kamran Akmal displays neat footwork at Lord’s last month

Defeat taught me a lesson, or probably more than one. I entered the singles event at the last minute, more on a whim than a well-considered plan. I was not expecting to win even one round and, when victory was in sight, lacked the resolve or killer instinct to close it out. I am still quite grateful that I avoided embarrassment at the hands of the tall, relentless New Zealander who knocked out my vanquisher in round two. In more ways than one, the lessons I learned had to do with getting into the right position.

Most of my duff shots go wrong because I am not in the right position to make them. Positioning is about 80 per cent of the game, most professionals reckon. In tennis and in cricket, that starts with the feet. You may hit the ball with a swing of your arm (or arms) but if your feet are not correctly planted, you have little chance of connecting. Very often with club players, the imagination and the arm outrun the humble, plodding foot. Getting into position begins with grounding.

Positioning is not the glamorous, visible flourish but the all-important, invisible foundation. Never forget that the split-second positioning of a Federer or Murray rests on countless hours of preparation. This applies well beyond tennis or cricket.

The enemy of getting into position is impatience, a trait more associated with the young than the middle-aged or elderly. On the very few occasions when I have advised young would-be writers (and I always counsel them not to follow in my erratic and stumbling steps), I have tended to stress the importance of preliminary groundwork. Surprisingly few who have aspirations to get published seem to think it might be a good idea to look at what sort of thing gets published and where. The existence of various publishing industries with their legions of editors, advertising people and agents comes as a shock to them; they want to burst on the scene like meteors, or like the rebel angel Mulciber who “dropped from the zenith like a falling star”.

One of the funniest stories I heard concerned getting into position. It was told by the biographer Michael Holroyd to a group of 13- and 14-year-old schoolboys – and it was about how he passed his driving test. He did this in a most unusual manner, not by demonstrating his competence at driving, but by showing that he knew exactly what to do before turning on the ignition – how to sit in the car, check all the mirror positions, the functioning of the seat belt, lights and so on. The examiner was so impressed, or non-plussed, or simply bored, by all this that he handed Holroyd his pass with the car still stationary.

Holroyd’s story also hints at the downside of positioning. Some people become so good at this art that it turns into cynical manoeuvring – what is called jockeying for position. The positioning, in the case of certain politicians and courtiers, becomes an end in itself, with the purpose of the position forgotten. Some, perhaps most, political careers come to be defined by a series of positions held – not by what was accomplished through them.

If we neglect the importance of getting into position, we risk impotence, making grand and flailing and futile gestures that make no impact on the world. If we attribute it too much importance, we risk becoming masters of the dark arts of manoeuvre with no moral compass. But to what end should our compass be turned?

For Socrates, as he faces his own execution in the most dramatic of Plato’s dialogues, the Phaedo, the end is clear. Philosophy, not an academic discipline but the love of wisdom and thus of living well, is nothing more or less than a preparation for or even practice of death, melete thanatou. We may object to this; surely the point of preparing and getting into position is to live well, not to die well.

But what if living well and dying well are really the same thing? This is the suggestion made by Spanish poet Antonio Machado in the autobiographical poem he called “Portrait”. When he embarks on the last voyage, he wants to be found unencumbered by baggage (ligero de equipaje), “almost naked, like the sons of the sea”. These lines convey not gloom or terror but a sense of freedom and excitement. What applies to the last voyage obtains for each and every journey.

harry.eyres@ft.com
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