The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis by Matthew Futterman is ostensibly a search for the “secret codes” that separate the very best tennis players in the world from everyone else. The problem is that the sport refuses to let anyone keep the codes for very long. Players figure out how to win, opponents adapt, tactics evolve, and eventually the solutions that once produced success stop working. The same seems true of the psychological tools required to survive at the highest levels of the sport.
That makes The Cruelest Game one of the deeper explorations of professional tennis psychology that I have encountered. Futterman is interested in what allows extraordinary players to perform under extraordinary pressure, but he is equally interested in what pursuing that level of performance does to them. His subjects include many of the most recognizable players in contemporary professional tennis, along with champions from earlier generations whose experiences helped shape our understanding of the mental side of the sport.
Early in the book, Futterman describes Iga Swiatek as experiencing two emotional states during tournaments: winning and misery. That observation establishes much of what follows. One of the hardest skills for an elite player to develop is giving themselves permission to lose. That is not the same as becoming comfortable with losing or caring less about the result. It is accepting that a loss can occur without everything else collapsing around it.
Futterman observes that many players seem to be on a lifelong mission to make the childhood they surrendered to tennis worth the sacrifice. The sport celebrates the phenoms who emerge successfully from that system, but the same machinery produces countless promising juniors who never become names that tennis fans recognize. Their childhoods were no less consumed by the pursuit simply because the payoff never arrived.
This book also explores the enormous financial infrastructure supporting that pursuit. Somebody has to bankroll every aspiring professional long before prize money begins covering the bills. Futterman’s previous work examining the business of sports serves him well here because he remains attentive to who is paying and who stands to benefit. He also explores some of the resulting conflicts of interest, particularly within organizations such as IMG that can simultaneously represent players, operate tournaments, distribute wild cards, and have financial interests in the results.
All of that makes the concept of the tennis phenom more complicated than the familiar story of discovering a gifted child. Greatness requires talent, but developing that talent requires tremendous investment and sacrifice before anyone knows whether it will produce the desired result.
Zheng Qinwen provides one of the more memorable perspectives on that bargain. Looking back on everything required to reach the top of professional tennis, she concludes that it was worth it. Asked whether she would do it again, however, her answer is no. That contradiction captures much of The Cruelest Game.
Futterman’s secret codes are not limited to psychology. Tennis itself is relentlessly evolutionary. Tactical advantages ebb and flow as players discover new ways to counter whatever currently works. Court positioning changes. Physical preparation expands what athletes are capable of doing with the ball. A strategy that produces an advantage eventually produces opponents trained specifically to neutralize it. Having the code today offers no guarantee that it will still work tomorrow.
The psychological understanding of tennis has evolved in much the same way. The Inner Game of Tennisfundamentally changed how players thought about the interference created inside their own heads. Alan Fox and generations of sports psychologists continued advancing that conversation. Futterman’s book captures another stage in that evolution. Managing thoughts during competition remains important, but the modern professional also needs something deeper that extends beyond what happens between the lines.
Winning and losing must be separated from the distinction between succeeding and failing. A tennis match produces a winner and a loser. It does not necessarily tell us anything meaningful about the value of either person.
I follow professional tennis closely, so I was already familiar with the broad outlines of most of the stories Futterman tells. What impressed me was how often he made those familiar events look different by changing the perspective. Players who have occasionally appeared petulant or self-destructive become more understandable when you place their behavior within the psychological environment in which it occurred. Futterman does not necessarily excuse their worst moments. Rather, he provides context and a fresh perspective.
Novak Djokovic may be the ultimate case study. Futterman presents him as the complicated and sometimes contradictory human being that he is, while exploring the psychological characteristics that helped make him one of the greatest competitors the sport has ever produced.
Futterman also does not shy away from the doping cases involving Jannik Sinner and Swiatek. Rather than simply relitigating the familiar arguments surrounding those episodes, he explores what living through them did to the players involved.
In tennis, nerves never really go away, even for the best players in the world. The difference is how they learn to respond. Anxiety does not necessarily mean something is going wrong. It can also be interpreted as a sign that an opportunity has arrived.
Perhaps that is ultimately what makes tennis so cruel. The sport demands that players care enormously about winning while somehow developing enough distance from the outcome to survive losing. They must devote much of their lives to becoming tennis players without allowing tennis player to become the entirety of who they are. They must learn the codes that produce greatness while understanding that those codes can stop working without warning.
No player controls everything that happens on a tennis court, much less everything that happens beyond it. What remains within their control is how they respond.
The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis is an insightful exploration of what learning to do that looks like at the highest levels of professional tennis. Futterman does more than explain why great players win. He examines what the pursuit of winning asks of them, what it sometimes takes away, and how the ones who endure eventually learn that being a successful tennis player requires first figuring out how to remain a whole human being.
The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis (<- Sponsored Link)
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