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Tennis as Osmosis: On Not Knowing What You’re Looking At

Kaya Noteboom

Section / Genre: Lyrical Essay

If I’ve ever watched tennis, I didn’t really. I have bad eyesight. Corrective measures like contacts and glasses once gave faces across the street a profound clarity. Now, even with my seeing aids, detail is a treat reserved for arm-length distance or less. This range is favored by individuals who, upon discovering my deficit, give the infallible test of quantifying fingers. With this task I do not falter. Three fingers. I pass with flying colors. Though inconspicuous, my impaired vision is a progressive blur generalized across common environmental conditions (brightness, fog, temperature, light), biological variables (tiredness, sobriety, stress) and most distances. Letters, faces, and fine movements—I am dependent on context to decipher their identities, their relative importance, making memorable tennis moments like Alcaraz’s 2024 Wimbledon win or Coco Gauff’s courtside Olympic dispute—moments I did see, in one sense—indecipherable. Impaired vision, in my case, is not the result of an ocular condition, but the casual breakdown of one sense that spurs the indirect honing of others. I have not seen the eye doctor for some years.

In order to watch tennis, I am dependent on a set of eyes that are not my own, and so it has become, maybe always has been, a partnered activity—very much like tennis. When I watch tennis, I temporarily give up my interpretive capacities. I suspend my ability to make sense of the situation according to my own judgment to instead lean on another, to trust their interpretation wholly. But this wouldn’t be true. It’s not that deep. It would be yet another aspect of experience that becomes true only retroactively; the product of wanting to have something to say, which is the opposite of giving up interpretation to submit to the sight of someone else. What happens is a reaction. It’s basic evolutionary biology. Mirror neurons, what have you. I see—not with two eyes but innumerable cilia—the person next to me, reacting to a game I cannot see, communicating a significance I do not fully understand.

It has never been my idea of fun and leisure to sit idle by the TV or the court. I have only arrived there because someone I wanted to be around wanted to watch a match or was themselves one of the players. I have been there for the hang, so to speak. The way I have been present to tennis is osmotic. Rules of the game have been explained to me and I have not committed them to memory. It’s not for lack of care, and it’s not for lack of bandwidth. I don’t remember the rules because—and I know this to be true—I prefer to understand, not just tennis but other things like music, geopolitical history, art movements, and football, through another person’s eyes. I am like a student who never intends to be taught for the bottomless thrill of being explained to, or being immersed in another’s fluency that I could have never approached on my own.

A new friend, a sportsman in his own right, has explained to me that his sense of smell, on account of his diminished hearing in one ear, is spectacular. He communicates this in the dark on a path ambiently lit by the Mount Tabor tennis courts. I try hard to remember to stay on his right side where the good ear has a better chance at picking up my words. I imagine his left ear, the cilia outstretched, extended like a racquet straining to make contact with the errant vibrations of my erratic speech. I’ve also been told exceptional things about my olfactory abilities, but I withhold this, not wanting to downplay his special thing through a commonality. Walking on his right, I ask aloud a question posed to myself, “I wonder what super-sense I’ve developed to compensate for my eyes?” pretending I do not already know the answer.

While thinking about watching tennis I remember an image, or at least I think I do, from Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women, a novel whose basic premise I have all but forgotten. Though I can’t recall a plot, I remember linguists, the best and most disciplined of them women, who whooshed silently through the air on cloth suspended from trees. Their fiber-based acrobatics, which would be silent save for a gentle self-generated breeze, counted in some logical system operant in the novel as a form of language, conveying relative importance without eyes, ears, or noses. Anyway, thinking about watching tennis reminds me of that.

This story originally appeared in the Portland Tennis Courterly’s Wet Issue. To purchase a copy, visit our online store.

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