Tennis Match Quotes & Sayings

Part of the experience of enjoying a tennis match on TV is listening to the observations of an expert commentator
one who knows the sport, has a genuine passion for the game, respects the viewers' intelligence, knows when to talk and when to keep quiet, can make you laugh and is not afraid to call a spade a spade. — Dave McPherson

Co-dependent tennis is not a good game. When you serve the ball, someone should hit it back to you. If no one tries, the match should be over as far as you're concerned. Put your racket away, go home, find another game tomorrow. Stop returning your own serves, lobs, and volleys. Stop playing off your own energy, needs, and desires. Quit kidding yourself. — Lionel Fisher

When you're with another actor and doing something very intense, often you pull them over to your side, or they pull you over to theirs. But if you stay in your own truth, you can play that perfect tennis match. I always want to bring my power, but not in a way that eliminates the whole game! — Giancarlo Esposito

When I'm playing my best, like I was at the U.S. Open, I feel on top of the match and able to do exactly what I want. There are other times when you're not in control, but that is tennis and you have momentum changes in every single match. — Samantha Stosur

The key to the match might have been his serving. Maybe I should have concentrated harder on watching them go by me, I don't know. — Andy Roddick

If the pupil proves to be of so perverse a disposition that he would rather listen to some idle tale than to the account of a glorious voyage or to a wise conversation, when he hears one; if he turns away from the drum-beat that awakens young ardour in his comrades, to listen to another tattoo that summons him to a display of juggling; if he does not fervently feel it to be pleasanter and sweeter to return from a wrestling-match, dusty but victorious, with the prize in his hand, than from a game of tennis or a ball, I can see no other remedy that for his tutor to strangle him before it is too late, if there are no witnesses. — Michel De Montaigne

Tennis is a 100-mph chess match. — Gabriela Sabatini

Never give up. Take what life throws at you and throw it right back. If life keeps throwing then you have a tennis match going. Learn to like tennis. — Glenn Ford

Tennis was never work for me, tennis was fun. And the tougher the battle and the longer the match, the more fun I had. — Jimmy Connors

Those two volleys really could be the story of this match summed up at the end of it. — Barry Davies

Except in a very few matches, usually with world-class performers, there is a point in every match (and in some cases it's right at the beginning) when the loser decides he's going to lose. And after that, everything he does will be aimed at providing an explanation of why he will have lost. He may throw himself at the ball (so he will be able to say he's done his best against a superior opponent). He may dispute calls (so he will be able to say he's been robbed). He may swear at himself and throw his racket (so he can say it was apparent all along he wasn't in top form). His energies go not into winning but into producing an explanation, an excuse, a justification for losing. — C. Terry Warner

It's no accident, I think, that tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love, the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. Even the structure of tennis, the way the pieces fit inside one another like Russian nesting dolls, mimics the structure of our days. Points become games become sets become tournaments, and it's all so tightly connected that any point can become the turning point. It reminds me of the way seconds become minutes become hours, and any hour can be our finest. Or darkest. It's our choice. — Andre Agassi

For me, losing a tennis match isn't failure, it's research. — Billie Jean King

In Bruce's opinion, the only fun in dating was the sport of it. The more it was like a tennis match, where he had to wear down his opponent through expertise and sheer force of will, the better he liked it. — Francine Pascal

The pace of this match is really accelerating, by which I mean it's getting faster all the time. — David Coleman

During a match, you are in a permanent battle to fight back your everyday vulnerabilities, bottle up your human feelings. It's a kind of self-hypnosis, a game you play, with deadly seriousness, to disguise your own weaknesses from yourself, as well as from your rival. — Rafael Nadal I Farreras

When a child signs up for tennis, he or she is put on a team. I put them in a circle and then I make sure they name their own team. I would have them do their skill drills as a team and their fun drills together as a team, then they have to have a match at the end of every week. They can't just have what they call a lesson today every week. — Billie Jean King

Tennis takes care of everything. It requires agility and quickness to get to the ball, core strength to get power into your shorts and stamina to last for an entire match. In addition to toning your arms and shoulders, it's a total body workout for your legs and abs, and works your heart and core unlike any other sport. — Samantha Stosur

Each weekend I play at least one and maybe two sets of tennis a day. My doubles team was in the finals recently at my tennis club in Palm Beach and lost a tiebreaker after a three-hour match. I must confess, by the end of the three hours, I was relieved it was over. — Wilbur Ross

Tennis uses the language of life. Advantage, service, fault, break, love - the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature. — Andre Agassi

Sheldon entered the living room with Jenna's son, John
"What'd we miss?" Sheldon asked with a smile.
While Seth and David abandoned the group, all eyes went from Sheldon to Tracy to Sheldon to Tracy and back to Sheldon again.
It was like watching a tennis match.
And poor Tracy ...
Lisette had never seen her look so stricken.
"Well?" Sheldon prodded, when no answer came.
Sean cleared his throat. "Tracy's been having sex dreams about you."
Krysta swatted her brother on the back of the head. — Dianne Duvall

I can see that the tennis for the fans could be a bit boring, and these days you have these new modern things which you can do, and you have a lot of time, because you just play a match, and practise, and many times in between you can bring many things to the fans. — Tomas Berdych

The rule in life is like with tennis: One point won't lose you the match, but if you let it get to you, it will. — David Seller

After I won a match at a tournament I tried to repeat everything I did the day I won. Before my next match, I ate the same food, I went to the same restaurant etc. Sometimes it got very boring. — Goran Ivanisevic

Tennis is like, it gives you a lot of chances, but if you don't take those chances, it takes a lot of chances away from you. It's just the scoring pattern. We cannot dwell over a loss or a win for very long. We have no time to celebrate; we have no time to dwell; we have to move on. Wake up the next day and try and win the match. — Sania Mirza

I was annoyed and I was crying [her honest reaction to losing a tennis match at the US Open] — Shahar Pe'er

Everybody is great and the chemistry is different with everyone. That is the joy of acting - you really don't know how it is going to go until you turn up. It's like playing tennis, you can't plan for the match you are going to play until you are actually up against your opponent and what happens, happens. That is the joy of being on set. — Tom Hiddleston

In any case, it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief - code for being black in America - is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules. Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context - randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out "I swear to God!" is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship. Two — Claudia Rankine

I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. — David Foster Wallace

I experience the same level of intense concentration watching a thrilling tennis match as I do hunched over a heaping pile of warm socks diligently searching for exact matches. — Gregor Collins

Tennis is mostly mental. Of course, you must have a lot of physical skill, but you can't play tennis well and not be a good thinker. You win or lose the match before you even go out there. — Venus Williams

I was passionate about soccer. I still am. Odd, though - playing soccer always made me much more anxious than playing tennis. On soccer days, I'd be out of bed by 6 in the morning, all nervous. But I was always calm when it was time for a tennis match. I still don't know why. — Rafael Nadal

Acting is like a sporting match; a tennis game, but no one should win or lose. The game's the thing! — Jon Polito

The only way to quieten me is to invite me to a tennis match. — John Forsythe

I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around. — Boris Johnson

Wimbledon attracted Bill Clinton to the gallery at Centre Court Tuesday at the All England Club. NBC cameras showed his head turning back and forth with each volley. Even at a tennis match, it looks like he's denying everything. — Argus Hamilton

If I wore a sleeveless shirt, people would try to feed me after the match. — Andy Roddick

I sit up in bed, lean my back against the sill to better enjoy their verbal tennis match. I can feel the summery day through the window, deliciously warming my back. But when I look over at Bailey's bed, I'm leveled. How can something this momentous be happening to me without her? And what about all the momentous things to come? How will I go through each and every one of them without her? — Jandy Nelson

Once I caught my dad in front of the TV watching a tennis match, and I realized they were tricking us. Poor guy, he had to sneak in a tennis final - probably the French Open. — Clemence Poesy

[Lizzie Bennington to a reporter who has asked for her opinion about Jack Archer's celebrated thighs.] When you come back from a set down and bring the match to a final set tiebreak and are a point away from winning the match, only to have what looks like an extremely fit player call a time out because of a cramp and then watch that player sit back and casually converse and laugh while you do your best to keep your mental focus and your body moving so you don't grow cold and cramp yourself, I hardly think you'd concern yourself with his burgeoning manhood, let alone his thighs! — A.G. Starling

I haven't lost a war. No one got killed. I just lost a tennis match. — Boris Becker

On the page, 'Gone Girl' was a literary game: a tennis match of alternating chapters from Nick and Amy, with the reader offering to take each character's side every few pages. — Richard Corliss

I didn't cry when they buried my father - I wouldn't let myself. I didn't cry when they buried my sister. On Thursday night, with my family asleep upstairs, my eyes filled as Agassi and Marcos Baghdatis played out the fifth set of their moving second-round match. — Greg Garber

I never lost a tennis match, I just ran out of time — Jimmy Connors

Science fiction is a dialogue, a tennis match, in which the Idea is volleyed from one side of the net to the other. Ridiculous to say that someone 'stole' an idea: no, no, a thousand times no. The point is the volley, and how it's carried, and what statement is made by the answering 'statement.' In other words - if Burroughs initiates a time-gate and says it works randomly, and then Norton has time gates confounded with the Perilous Seat, the Siege Perilous of the Round Table, and locates it in a bar on a rainy night - do you see both the humor and the volley in the tennis match? — C.J. Cherryh

I certainly don't lose any sleep if I lose a tennis match. — Ivan Lendl

Is only a tennis match. At the end, that's life. There is much more important things. — Rafael Nadal

This woman was so cross-eyed. She can go to a tennis match and never move her head. — Phyllis Diller

I don't care now if I ever win a match in my life again. Whatever I do in my life, wherever I go, I'm going to be always Wimbledon champion. — Goran Ivanisevic

Somebody once said that good conversation should be like a tennis match, with each player gracefully sending the ball back across the net; instead, most conversation is like a golf game, with each player stroking only his own ball, and waiting impatiently for the other to finish. — Sydney J. Harris

Equipment's the biggest change. And the guys have been getting bigger, stronger, more athletic - so the game has become more of a track meet instead of a tennis match, in a sense. — John McEnroe

The choreographic process is exhausting. It happens on one's feet after hours of work, and the energy required is roughly the equivalent of writing a novel and winning a tennis match simultaneously. — Agnes De Mille

I often make the analogy with tennis. Every match the rules are the same, but no game is ever the same. Theatre is like that. Every time is different. — Kevin Spacey

I go to New York City, the Tournament of Champions, a significant milestone because it's a clash of the top players in the world. Once more I square off against Chang, who's developed a bad habit since we last met. Every time he beats someone, he points to the sky. He thanks God - credits God - for the win, which offends me. That God should take sides in a tennis match, that God should side against me, that God should be in Chang's box, feels ludicrous and insulting. I beat Chang and savor every blasphemous stroke. — Andre Agassi

Even if I play backgammon with my coach, I hate to lose. I won't talk to him for, like, an hour. So imagine how it feels when you lose at tennis. That makes me determined not to lose because I hate it so much. Even at a set down and match point, I always believe I can come back. — Ana Ivanovic

You don't simply tell someone to get out there and win the tennis match. You say 'move your feet' or 'watch the fuzz on the ball' to really get into the Zen of it. You pull all that together, and then you just might hold up the Wimbledon Plate ... It's not about winning first place but bringing every element of effort to whatever you do. — Diana Nyad

The finish line at the end of a career is no different from the finish line at the end of a
match. The objective is to get within reach of that finish line, because then it gives off a magnetic force. When you're close, you can feel that force pulling you, and you can use that force to get across. But just before you come within range, or just after, you feel another force, equally strong, pushing you away. It's inexplicable, mystical, these twin forces, these contradictory energies, but they both exist. I know, because I've spent much of my life seeking the one, fighting the other, and sometimes I've been stuck, suspended, bounced like a tennis ball between the two. — Andre Agassi

When I lost a tennis match that made me upset or hurt emotionally I would find myself going to the piano and playing for hours. It was my place of refuge and solace. — Aaron Zigman

Working with Brando was fun. It was like a tennis match. We played unbelievably well together. — Uta Hagen

Maybe, one other match better; but if you look at the tournament as a whole, I played very high quality tennis for seven matches and raised my game when I needed to. — Richard Krajicek