Timothy Gallwey was working as a tennis instructor near Monterey, California, in the early 1970s, wearing white cable-knit sweaters on the court, when he decided to write The Inner Game. Gallwey had been captain of the tennis team at Harvard, where he majored in English literature, and was taking a break from a planned career in academia. After a few months of teaching, he grew frustrated that while his pupils were listening to, and trying to follow, his advice, they weren’t seeming to make significant improvement. “I was beginning to learn what all good pros and students of tennis must learn,” Gallwey wrote in his manuscript. “Conscious trying often produces negative results. One question perplexed me: What’s wrong with trying? What does it mean to try too hard?”
When Gallwey finished writing his book in 1972, his publisher predicted it would sell 20,000 copies, mostly to tennis hackers looking to improve their forehand. One million copies later, it has become the most influential tennis book ever published, praised by professionals — Billie Jean King told Gallwey the book was her tennis bible — and amateurs alike. Jimmy Carter admitted to reading it to help in White House matches with Zbigniew Brzezinski, his national security adviser, while Rainn Wilson — Dwight from The Office— told the Los Angeles Times that training under a coach who had given him the book was “basically like playing tennis with Yoda.” Gallwey himself is still an in-demand teacher and guru — trying to schedule an interview with him for this piece was like trying to get a few minutes of face time with an entertainer on a press tour.
The Inner Game was published in an era when “sports psychology” was a phrase few had ever heard. Its release was a relative sensation, and 40 years later, now one book among many in the ever-expanding self-help section, it continues to sell thousands of copies each year. It tops Amazon’s sports psychology category, and falls behind only recent best-sellers by Jimmy Connors and Andre Agassi in the tennis category. (On the list of tennis instructional books, Brad Gilbert’s Winning Ugly is a distant second.) The trade paperback alone has sold more than 150,000 copies since its release in 1997, according to Nielsen BookScan. Though pro tennis players are ironically loathe to talk about the mental side of their game, chances are good that many of the competitors at Wimbledon have read Gallwey’s book.
And yet, despite such ubiquity, few people are able or willing to explain why they find the book so useful. Its proponents are hesitant to boil the Inner Game down to a formula in part because, the theory goes, thinking about the Inner Game defeats the very purpose of the Inner Game. When pressed, though, they offer something like this:
Performance = Potential – Interference
The upshot is that every professional athlete, and most amateur ones, already know how to perform — to properly swing a racket, shoot a basketball, or go up-and-under around an offensive tackle. The potential of an athlete with the physical gifts and technical training of a Roger Federer, a LeBron James, or even a Lawrence Jackson is practically limitless. The difference between that potential and their actual in-game performance is everything that can go wrong in the chain of communication between the brain and the body. “Performance rarely equals potential,” Gallwey says. “A little self-doubt, an erroneous assumption, the fear of failure — that’s all it takes to greatly diminish performance.”
Gallwey’s book is a rough guide for how a properly functioning mind should operate. He dedicated the book in part to his spiritual adviser, Guru Maharaj Ji, leader of the Divine Light Mission, an Indian religious movement, who, Gallwey wrote, “showed me what Winning is.”
With chapter titles like “The Discovery of the Two Selves,” “Quieting Self,” and “Trusting Self,” it should come as little surprise that the book is about the self. Specifically how one self can get in the way of another self, all within the same self. These are Self 1 and Self 2. To summarize, Self 1 is the brain, while Self 2 is the body. Self 1 instructs, Self 2 acts. We get into trouble when Self 1 tries to tell Self 2 how to do something the latter already knows how to do — when we try too hard.
The issue is given an allegory in Chapter 3, with a section describing “the balanced movement of a cat stalking a bird”:
Effortlessly alert, he crouches, gathering his relaxed muscles for the spring. No thinking about when to jump, nor how he will push off with his hind legs to attain the proper distance, his mind is still and perfectly concentrated on his prey. No thought flashes into his consciousness of the possibility or consequences of missing his mark. He sees only bird. Suddenly the bird takes off; at the same instant, the cat leaps. With perfect anticipation he intercepts his dinner two feet off the ground. Perfectly, thoughtlessly executed action, and afterward, no self-congratulations, just the reward inherent in his action: the bird in his mouth.
Lawrence Jackson says that he finished the entire book on his first read, but now, when he goes back to it, reads only this chapter. “When you see a cat going for its food, it’s not thinking, ‘OK, I have to jump now,’ or ‘I have to do this,’” Jackson said. “As soon as the prey moves, he moves. That’s what it’s about, knowing what you have to do and just reacting.”
Like Jackson, many of the million copies Gallwey has sold have gone to people with little interest in improved groundstrokes. “I knew when I wrote it that it was not just about tennis,” Gallwey says, estimating that about half of the 1 million copies have been sold to people outside tennis: NFL quarterbacks, Major League Baseball players, or high school rodeo champions, like Shelby Adney of California, who won the state breakaway roping title in 2008, and said The Inner Game was her favorite book. In 2006, Phillies second baseman Jimmy Rollins saw Gallwey being interviewed on television, bought the book during the offseason, then won the National League MVP. “It gets me out of my way,” Rollins has said. “It is like therapy, almost. It simplified me.” After going 0-for-10 in the first two games of the 2008 World Series, he reread the book. In the next two games he went 5-for-9, scoring four runs, and the Phillies took the MLB title.
Beyond just sports, Susan Batson, an acting coach who has worked with Nicole Kidman and Juliette Binoche, calls the book “an essential guide” for actors. “I suggest the book to actors who are in a struggle with what I call ‘civilian issues,’” Batson said. “I can’t do it. I don’t think I can. I’m not good enough. All those civilian issues that block the actor.” Al Gore gave the book to aides on his 1984 Senate campaign, hoping it would help them eliminate the distractions of a frenetic campaign and focus on the tasks that actually mattered. In both cases, the Inner Game becomes a means of eliminating extraneous concerns in the hope that people trained to perform a specific task — perform Shakespeare, get out the vote — will be able to complete those jobs at their peak ability. (The internet didn’t exist when Gallwey wrote his book, but one imagines The Inner Game of a Desk Job recommending limiting one’s open browser tabs.) In a 2009 paper titled “The Components of Optimal Sexuality: A Portrait of ‘Great Sex,’” published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, researchers mentioned The Inner Game as a guide to improved bedroom performance. As one participant noted, “There’s an intense focus on what’s happening right here, right now, that just excludes everything else.”