Argentina play England today.
Lionel Messi is widely considered the greatest football player who has ever lived. Most of the game he seems to do nothing.
He just walks around. While everyone else chases the game, Messi walks. The walking is not rest. The walking is the work.
Pep Guardiola, who coached Messi for four years at Barcelona, has described his walking, especially in the early stages of a game, as a form of cartography — an exercise in scanning and surveying, taking the measure of the defence, noticing where the vulnerabilities lie, and calculating when and how opportunities might be seized. “After five, ten minutes, he'll have a map in his eyes and in his brain,” Guardiola has said. “He'll know exactly what is the space and what is the panorama."
As you tune in to watch Argentina vs England later today, to watch any sport with a ball, to watch any great pickleball rally, to scout your next opponents at Jamboree, think about how you actually "watch" and listen. How we move when the ball is not on our paddle matters more than what we do when it is.
Composers and musicians talk endlessly about the idea that silence between notes is what actually makes the music. Gord Downie once said he wanted to be reincarnated as a sigh in a Leonard Cohen song. Miles Davis put it in more emphatic pickleball terms: “It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play.” Notes = shots. “Don't play what's there, play what's not there.”
Compare this to James Ignatowich bouncing around the kitchen. Messi walks. Ignatowich hops and bounces. Different expression of the same idea: they are always reading, never simply waiting.
When you watch your opponents from the sidelines, when you watch watch a pickleball highlight — pick one player. Don't look away.
Watch Vivian David.
First we learn to read the moment. Then we learn to read the rally. Every athlete leaves clues before they ever touch the ball. The more intentionally you play, the less you’ll find yourself watching shots and the more you’ll find yourself mapping the terrain of a match.
In your practice session this Saturday morning at Fairgrounds, think about how you can translate what you’ve watched from the the sidelines to how you walk and read and process from inside the rally.