Tennis Camp with Vic Braden

Play, The New York Times Sports Magazine, today featured a first person account entitled "Vic Braden's Mental Mojo Experience," about attending a tennis camp at the Vic Braden Tennis College.

Those of you who have been reading ZooTennis from the start know I'm a huge Braden fan, and I have featured him in two previous posts--one a reprint of a column from Florida Tennis called "Inside Look at the Brain of a Champion" (link here), and the other when Braden was one of the stars of Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller blink. This article isn't as theoretical, or rather is theory applied specifically to one 3.5 player, since there is no way to get the Braden treatment without the background. But as I learned when I met him in 2004, and camper Paige Williams relates here, no matter how difficult the concepts, Braden's personality trumps it all.

Braden may be approaching 80, but he doesn’t look it. Past reports have described him physically as beaverish, and while Braden refers to himself as a “little fat coach,” we find him endearing — and hilarious, a natural raconteur. Which is a good thing, since Braden, also a licensed psychologist, is about to drop so much tennis-centric psychology, physics and geometry on us that we’d probably get a migraine if not for the laughing.

TAGS: tennis, Vic Braden, New York Times Play, blink, Malcolm Gladwell, Florida Tennis