Letter No. 3
Don’t Let Go of the Rope
I taught every one of my players to train with a towel and play matches with a towel. It was part of the ritual—a way to control emotion between points.
Because during the point, tennis is controlled fucking mayhem.
A 120-mile-an-hour serve. Track the ball. Split. Lunge. Return.
On hard courts: sprint. Load. Explode. Recover.
On clay: sprint. Slide. Explode. Recover.
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
Repeat the sequence over and over until somebody misses—or you rip a winner into the open court.
Then the point ends, and everything slows down.
Turn your back to the court. Eyes on the strings. Walk to the towel. Slow the breathing. Let the last point go.
During the point, anything can happen. Between points, you can control time.
Recover. Rebalance. Prepare. Then turn around and play one point with full focus and maximum effort.
Before a match, I would tell my player, “Go get ’em.” Then I would grab one end of the towel draped over their shoulder, look them in the eye, and pull.
“Hold on to it.”
I would pull harder.
“Hold on to it.”
They would pull back.
I would then slowly say…
“Don’t let go of the rope.”
The racket
I learned that lesson long before I knew how to teach it.
I started playing tennis around 14. That first summer, I played all day, every day—with my cousin Andy Kolakowski, his older brother John, and anybody else who walked onto our local courts. If nobody was there, I hit against the wall.
I couldn’t always afford tennis balls, so I searched through the tall grass behind the courts for balls other people had lost. It felt like treasure hunting.
At 14 or 15, I entered a local mixed-doubles tournament and was paired with the wife of Eric Boulin, the head pro at a club in Dover. We won. Eric invited me into his junior academy, and within about a year and a half, I was playing number-two singles for Smyrna High School.
My game developed quickly. My mind had not caught up.
Junior year, I played Bobby Zaragoza, the top player at Dover. I knew Bobby from Holy Cross Elementary School. Back then, I wasn’t a tennis player.
Now I was kicking the shit out of him.
I won the first set 6–1 or 6–2 and went up about 3–1 in the second. Bobby was tight. The pressure was getting to him.
Then he broke the strings in his third and final racket.
I was only a few games from winning, so I handed him one of mine—a Rossignol F200. It was a fantastic racket. I wish I still had it.
It was also better than the racket Bobby had been using.
Big mistake.
Bobby was already getting crushed. Now he didn’t even have his own racket. He had nothing left to protect and nothing left to lose.
So he relaxed.
He won a game. Then another. Suddenly it was 3–all, and the pressure crossed the net.
Now I was thinking about the match I should have already won. Bobby loosened up. I tightened up. He won a close second set, and I fell apart in the third.
At the end, he handed me the racket back.
“Thanks, man. Great racket.”
My coach Stu, who also coached wrestling, looked at me and said, “Don’t you ever give another tennis player your racket again.”
No shit.
But the racket wasn’t the real reason I lost. It changed the story in our heads.
Bobby stopped playing the score and started playing the point. I stopped playing the point and started protecting the result.
If I could coach that 16-year-old boy today, I would tell him: Let go of the last point. Let go of the score for a moment. Let go of the match you think you’re supposed to win.
But don’t let go of your attitude. Don’t let go of your effort. Bring everything you have to the point in front of you.
Controlled time
That became the foundation of what I taught for more than 25 years: keep your mind in the present.
When players got tight, they stopped breathing. Their bodies tightened, their feet stopped moving, and their racket heads slowed down. I taught the opposite: slow the breathing, move the feet, and accelerate the racket head. With topspin or slice, more racket-head speed meant more revolutions on the ball—and more control. It also forced them to loosen up. You can’t accelerate a racket with tight hands and a rigid body.
The ritual helped them get there.
Turn away from the court. Control the eyes. Go to the towel. Slow the breath. If you’re serving, bounce the ball the same number of times. Turn around only when you’re composed and know what you want to do.
You could see the score in the body.
I could walk up to a match without knowing the score, look at both players, and usually tell who was winning. One player was composed. The other was looking around, yelling, holding his breath, rushing, and abandoning the ritual.
The mind had left the present before the scoreboard finished telling the story.
Keep coming
You can turn a tennis match around at any time. That is especially true if you are fit enough to remain clearheaded when the match gets difficult.
I saw it constantly in serve-and-volley tennis. Early in the match, when the other player was fresh, it was easier for him to hit his target and pass you. You might lose the first set even while playing the right game.
But you kept coming.
Serve. Forward. Pressure.
Again and again and again.
Eventually, the opponent started thinking, Fucking hell. Here he comes again.
If you pulled out a tight second set, the third could become a romp. The pressure had been accumulating even when the scoreboard said you were behind.
That didn’t mean you always won. It meant you stayed in the match long enough to find out what was possible.
I remember traveling with Grant Stafford from South Africa when he was around No. 180 in the world. He once told me about a match he had lost to Patrick Rafter, who later became a two-time U.S. Open champion and No. 1 in the world.
Afterward, a fellow player offered the usual consolation: “Hey, bad luck. Tough match.”
Grant came back and said, “No, actually, I don’t consider it a loss.”
“What do you mean, bru? You went down in straight sets.”
“Because I learned something.”
That isn’t a participation trophy. Results matter. But if you stayed present, discovered something about yourself, or found a tactic you could use next time, you walked off the court as a different player.
The score recorded a defeat. The experience was not a loss.
The whole world fears a fighter
At Match Point International Tennis in South Florida, we trained anywhere from 35 to 75 players. Some were among the best juniors in Florida. Others came from national programs around the world.
Many trained twice a day and played tournaments on weekends. At one point, I went 30 or 40 straight weeks without a day off because I was traveling with players every weekend.
We taught tennis, but we talked about life every day. One thing I told them repeatedly was:
The whole world fears a fighter.
I didn’t mean the loudest or angriest player. I meant the player who fought for every point—the name in the draw that made an opponent think, Oh, fuck. I have to play this kid. Nothing is going to be easy.
That reputation earned points before the match began. It told the opponent that victory, if it came, would have to be paid for.
A fighter does not always win. That was never the promise. The promise was that as long as you remained in the fight, you still had the possibility of turning it around. You could learn, adjust, apply pressure, and come forward again. But the moment you gave up, the match was over.
The voices we carry
Even now, many of the voices inside my head belong to the people who coached and taught me.
Part of me will always be the kid listening to Coach Allen teach me about basketball and life. Part of me will always be the young tennis player laughing and learning with Eric Boulin. I will always be a student.
Their voices became part of mine. I passed them to the athletes I coached and the people I’ve helped in business.
Now I’m passing them to my son.
Nikko likes to grab a racket and shank balls into the jungle. I don’t care whether he becomes a tennis player. I don’t care which sport he chooses—or whether the thing he loves is a sport at all.
But someday, he will find himself in a match.
Maybe it will be on a court. Maybe it will be at school, in business, in a relationship, or alone inside his own head. The momentum will turn. He will get tight. He will want to look for the exit.
And I won’t always be standing beside him to grab the other end of the towel.
That’s why I want my voice to become one of the voices he carries.
Slow down. Breathe. Let go of the point that’s already gone. Bring everything you have to the one in front of you.
Then hold tight and…
Don’t let go of the rope.
— Rob