TWO
The Locked Door: The Secret Life of Snap Decisions
Not long ago, one of the world’s top tennis coaches, a man
named Vic Braden, began to notice something strange whenever
he watched a tennis match. In tennis, players are given two
chances to successfully hit a serve, and if they miss on their
second chance, they are said to double-fault, and what Braden
realized was that he always knew when a player was about to
double-fault. A player would toss the ball up in the air and draw
his racket back, and just as he was about to make contact,
Braden would blurt out, “Oh, no, double fault,” and sure
enough, the ball would go wide or long or it would hit the net.
It didn’t seem to matter who was playing, man or woman,
whether he was watching the match live or on television, or
how well he knew the person serving. “I was calling double
faults on girls from Russia I’d never seen before in my life,”
Braden says. Nor was Braden simply lucky. Lucky is when you
call a coin toss correctly. But double-faulting is rare. In an
entire match, a professional tennis player might hit hundreds of
serves and double-fault no more than three or four times. One