Practicing Life — and
Tennis
When most tennis instructors hit a ball across the net
to a student, they wait for a backhand or maybe a volley in
return
Not Zach Kleiman
’76. Or rather, that’s not all he hopes will come back
at him.
TENNIS, ANYONE? Zach Kleiman
’76 combines tennis instruction with counseling to help his
clients address issues that may be affecting their lives off the
court. (Photo: Courtesy Zach Kleiman)
That’s because Kleiman combines coaching and
counseling in a career that makes him as carefully attuned to
students’ psyches as he is to their ground strokes.
“Having awareness of the body, using the mind,
connecting to spirit, bringing in psychology—those four
things are the work,” he says.
Kleiman, a Los Angeles tennis pro, has performed that
work for the past 30 years. He says it can be called
counseling—“tennexploration,” perhaps—but
his preferred phrase is “practicing life through
tennis.” But, he says, it’s not therapy, because he is
not a licensed therapist.
Each week he meets with some 20 to 40 clients for
sessions intended to improve their tennis game and to address
issues that may affect them on and off the court: problems such as
anxiety, phobias, anger, grieving, eating disorders, addictions,
and couples’ miscommunication.
Kleiman has worked in conjunction with seven therapists
over the years, receiving referrals and occasionally steering his
own clients toward therapists for further treatment.
“It’s much easier to get people to come to
me than to a therapist,” he says.
His efforts have stirred interest not only in other
tennis players but also in the media. Kleiman was profiled in the
August 2007 issue of Tennis Magazine, and he was the focus
of a 2006 Wall Street Journal article on mental health
practitioners who blend exercise and talk therapy.
“The ball becomes the exchange of
dialogue,” Kleiman says. “We don’t always have to
talk.”
Working with a client in her 30s who has always strived
to please her mother, he leads her in a drill he calls “Mom
or Me?” Just before she makes contact with the ball she is
asked to shout out “Mom!” or “Me!” to
declare “who activates the intention of the hit,” he
says. “We want to feel it emotionally and sensorially before
the results, not decide who we are or what motivates us after the
outcome.”
“It’s an opportunity to practice being
themselves,” Kleiman says of his clients’ sessions with
him, “to explore qualities within themselves they
haven’t been able to explore off the court.
“Some people come for tennis and realize
they’re learning about hidden aspects of their being. Or they
come for the personal expansion and realize they can play tennis.
They may start to love tennis and see the therapeutic value of
it.”
He does not confine himself to the tennis court.
Kleiman accompanies students to the driving range, the putting
green—even the billiards table—and counts among his
clients golfers, lacrosse players, basketball players, and the U.S.
Olympic fencing team, as well as people from the entertainment
world.
Kleiman recognized the intermingling of exertion and
introspection early in his own career.
“In the 1970s, I started teaching. I realized it
was much more than tennis, and I started to focus on ideas rather
than mechanics,” he says. “I realized the ball coming
toward me was an opportunity to express myself, not to
impose myself.”
His father first introduced him to tennis when Kleiman
was 10. The game frustrated him, and he quit and picked it up again
a couple of times. Finally a realization won him over to tennis
for good.
“I realized, this is bigger than me,” he
says. “It had very little to do with the proving of me, and
more about the expression of me. I didn’t have to prove I had
qualities. They were in me.”
Once Kleiman found his own zest for the game, he began
teaching friends, using imagery to help them identify what their
obstacles were. It was the start of the approach that he has made
his life’s work.
As a Rochester student, Kleiman played on the varsity
tennis team and completed a major, learning matrices, that he
designed himself, combining philosophy, literature, psychology,
education, sociology, and logic. Teaching and learning, with tennis
as a metaphor, were the subjects of his senior thesis.
After graduation he moved to California, where a
seminar with Tim Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of
Tennis and Kleiman’s longtime mentor, set the stage for
his career.
Today Kleiman is at work on his own book, tentatively
titled Practicing Life Through Tennis. In it, he recounts
the “journeys” he and his clients—who range in
age from 2 to 86—have taken through the game.
In the early 1980s, that journey took Kleiman to the
professional tennis tour. “I had a ball,“ he says.
But it is his daily lessons that he loves best. It is
not easy work, he notes, to help people open up, overcome
embarrassment, and confront problems. It has ample rewards,
however.
“My favorite moments,” he says, “are
when I see somebody light up. When the mouth opens just a little
bit, and they say, ‘O-oh, that’s what you
mean.”
Citing a comment by tennis star Andre Agassi, he
quotes: “‘Tennis is just two people in the arena,
trying to figure things out.’
“It’s what we all do on the court,”
Kleiman adds, “and off, with anyone.”
—Kathleen McGarvey
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