The pure madness of practice

"Shitty” days when nothing worked. “Crying” days when an injured body didn’t adequately respond. “Insane” days of running, weights, training. Days no one sees, for no TV cameras record, no audience cheers, just days when he’s trying to be some better version of himself.

These are some of the days of H.S. Prannoy on the practice court.

Practice days every athlete knows, loves, detests, wakes for. Days that dancers identify with for they’re familiar with repetition and the balm of ice after a day of dancing on pointe, a 50kg body supported on the tip of ballet shoes.

Days of breakthroughs and dented confidence, loneliness and camaraderie. Days that badminton star Prannoy, the world championship bronze medallist in 2023, is telling me about. He’s articulate, unfiltered, generous, but I interrupt: Wait, you cry on the practice court?

“Crying is very normal for me. There’s a lot of emotion. (Training is) not something you do for timepass.”

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The practice court is the sweaty foundry of personal greatness. It’s also the sportswriter’s privilege. Most people are like the cliched kid looking through the chink in the wooden fence. They’re not allowed in, but we sometimes are. A seat is taken and quietly we watch athletic actors rehearse their lines.

Drag flickers hiss the ball into a hockey goal. Thirty times, 50, till muscles have a memory. Divers mime movements. Tennis players curl serves into empty ball cans standing as targets on lines. Fencers dance to the clicking music of their foils. Swimmers count strokes and sing in their heads in the soundless water.

The making of brilliance is mostly magnificently unsexy.

Performance is what we buy tickets for, but practice is revealing rehearsal. Purpose, rigour, commitment are like the concrete piles driven into the ground to set a building’s foundation. In both places you hear the hammer of construction. Again, again, again. There is so much in this private space: eagerness, exasperation, love of learning, a fear someone else is doing it harder, an understanding that to go faster takes time. This is the factory of better.

There is a precision we can’t tell and a harmony we can’t see. But athletes feel it within and so do musicians. In Strings magazine, years ago, cellist Yo-Yo Ma says: “I think that part of practicing is great because it unites what you want to do in engineering, as in technically, where do you put your arms and your fingers and your body—micro movements—with that desire and the feeling of what it needs to be. That’s a wonderful process because it’s a constant of going toward something bigger than the notes and yourself, and very lovingly so.”

Prannoy is disentangling the many threads of practice. Like the athlete’s discovery of who he is. Some players, Prannoy explains, “come from sleep and hit the lines”. They’re naturally skilled, the savant offspring of Roger Federer. “But for me to do that I had to train for 10 days. There’s no point comparing. Everyone’s skill set is different. The only thing is to do the hard work.”

On the court he finds who he is. A grinder. So was Emil Zátopek, distance running’s finest exponent, who some days jogged in a tub of wet laundry. Zátopek once said—as recounted in Richard Askwith’s book, Today We Die a Little —that “when a person trained once, nothing happens. When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times he certainly develops in ways more than physical. Is it raining? It doesn’t matter. Am I tired? That doesn’t matter either. Willpower becomes no longer a problem.”

Practice, yes it’s madness.

What does practice tell Prannoy about himself? He pauses. “Most of the days (and he’s talking more about his younger days) are shitty days. Out of 10, maybe eight-nine days. Days you would be so irritated, frustrated, for the things you’re not able to do.”

There’s a skill that can’t be executed or a player in practice who’s awkward to play against. “As a young player you don’t know how to deal with it. But it’s a good thing to be irritated. It means you’re looking to improve yourself.”

Now he’s older, altered, wiser. “It’s OK to lose in practice, you have to be openly trying new things during game sessions. You have to feel those uncomfortable situations here, you don’t want to feel that in matches. You have to get comfortable being in uncomfortable situations.

“I hardly won matches in practice sessions. I’d get frustrated, break rackets, but I convinced myself I have to try new things. If I am 16-10, I want to purposely get to 16-16 and then try and get out of it.”

The practice arena is a place of joyous masochism and sweaty meditation. Muhammad Ali said he started counting sit-ups “when it starts hurting because they’re the only ones that count”. Abhinav Bindra says, “I only loved practice. I hated competition. I loved the purity of refining my skill.”

Later he found he was only a practice champion and had to fix that but all thinking athletes tinker with practice and grow with it. Prannoy, now 32, had days in his youth he didn’t want to train. “Because it was gruelling.” Badminton can appear delicate but its insides are rugged. “Lot of things you have to do are from an endurance perspective, that’s the killer side of it.”

But in the past four-five years he’s started to “enjoy” practice. “I love being on court.” Maybe he knows himself now, and his body, and can also hear what all athletes eventually do: That clock. “Psychologically the feeling kicks in that not many years are left.” There was a time he’d go on holiday for weeks, or a month. “Now ask me and I would say no.”

Days shitty and tearful on the practice court, days uplifting and revealing, he wants them all. Because everyone has only so many days left.

Rohit Brijnath is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold. He posts @rohitdbrijnath.

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