Thus the importance of getting the ball in play cannot be too
greatly emphasized. Every time you put the ball back to your
opponent you give him another chance to miss.

There are several causes for missing strokes. First, and by far
the largest class, is not looking at the ball up to the moment of
striking it. Fully 80 per cent of all errors are caused by taking
the eye from the ball in the last one-fifth of a second of its
flight. The remaining 20 per cent of errors are about 15 per cent
bad footwork, and the other 5 per cent poor racquet work and bad
bounces.

The eye is a small camera. All of us enjoy dabbling in amateur
photography, and every amateur must take "action" pictures with
his first camera. It is a natural desire to attain to the hardest
before understanding how to reach it. The result is one of two
things: either a blurred moving object and a clear background, or
a clear moving object and a blurred background. Both suggest
speed, but only one is a good picture of the object one attempted
to photograph. In the first case the camera eye was focused on
the background and not on the object, while in the second, which
produced the result desired, the camera eye was firmly focused on
the moving object itself. Just so with the human eye. It will
give both effects, but never a clear background and moving object
at the same time, once that object reaches a point 10 feet from
the eye. The perspective is wrong, and the eye cannot adjust
itself to the distance range speedily enough.

Now the tennis ball is your moving object while the court,
gallery, net, and your opponent constitute your background. You