EXCERPT CREATING BUSINESS MAGIC

Chapter Five: Cheat Preemptively
GET THE RACKET BACK EARLY

With the principle of preemptive cheating now fully in mind, just how do we go about getting ourselves, our company, and our business one ahead? Consider the following master.
For two years, as he was training for the decathlon in college, David Morey worked in Florida for the legendary Australian-born tennis coach Harry Hopman, a man who could rightfully have claimed the title of the Obi-Wan Kenobi of one ahead in tennis. Indeed, Hopman literally wrote the book on how to win tennis matches using superior strategy. The title of his 1975 classic, Lobbing into the Sun, gives away one of the best tactics of strategic tennis. If you lob the ball high into the air, aiming at the sun’s highest point, you will blind your opponent and disrupt their retaliatory shot. Think tennis is just about two players on a rectangular court? For Hopman, tennis was an occasion to recruit the solar system itself as an ally.

Hopman truly did redefine first Australian tennis and then U.S. and global tennis. In his early years as an athlete, when he was supporting himself as a journalist, he and his wife won four Australian mixed doubles titles, and in 1935, went on to become the first husband-wife team to reach the Wimbledon finals. Overall, Hopman coached twenty-two winning Australian Davis Cup teams, and later, such greats as Lew Hoad, Ken Rosewall, Rod Laver, John Newcombe, Tony Roache, Vitas Gerulaitis, and John McEnroe.

Hopman relished his well-deserved nickname of the Old Fox, and he once flew his entire tennis squad from one Australian city to another after hearing an all-day rain weather forecast for his home city. His objective was to gain one extra day of practice against the local competition. This truly is thinking one ahead, but of all the one ahead advice Hopman gave to his tennis protégées,

Morey most remembers the simple adage he taught his youngest players: “As soon as you read backhand or forehand, get the racket back early...immediately...earlier than at first feels comfortable.” With this, Hopman taught future tennis stars, players like John McEnroe, not to react, but to anticipate, to position themselves before they must. Doing this alters reality by reducing the number of variables while also positioning the player to hit a winning shot. “Get the racket back early,” he would say again and again . . . .

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