BOOK INTRODUCTION FINAL VERSION COUPLE MORE EDITS!!!!

Emotional intelligence has been in the news a lot lately, but most of the headlines don’t use that phrase. They talk about anxiety, depression, burnout, breakdowns, “stepping away,” “needing a reset.” Teenage rates of distress and self-harm have skyrocketed so sharply that the U.S. Surgeon General issued a national advisory calling youth emotional well-being the crisis of our time. Kids haven’t changed that much. The world around them has. We’ve handed them a life moving at 5G speed without the emotional pads and helmet to go with it.

You don’t have to look far to see how this plays out in sport. In tennis alone, former world No. 1 Naomi Osaka stepped away from the game after going public with her struggles. Mardy Fish had an entire Netflix documentary made about the panic and anxiety that nearly ended his career. Nick Kyrgios has wrestled loudly and painfully with his emotional life on and off the court. Ash Barty walked away from tennis as the best player in the world—for the second time—not because she couldn’t win, but because she could no longer stand the life that came with winning. 

The list could go on and on...and these are tennis' professionals 

This public outbreak of personal struggles comes at a curious moment in emotional health. Never as a sport have we known more, never have we been collectively more aware, and never have more resources been available to people wrestling with emotional issues—books, podcasts, apps, therapists, TED talks, AI bots, mindfulness platforms. We have “awareness” coming out of our ears, yet more and more players seem unable to manage their tennis lives emotionally. What gives? It’s not tennis; the demands of the sport I grew up with haven’t really changed. But society has, and quickly, with social media and the rest of modern life proving brutally demanding on a person’s inner world. Despite all this knowledge and all these tools, the numbers tell a simple story: we’re getting worse, not better. It’s like a New Yorker cartoon—a guy proudly charging his electric car, solar panels on the roof, perfect recycling bins in the driveway…while a massive factory looms behind him, belching smoke into the sky. You can feel the effort, you can see the intention, but something in the system still isn’t working. 

So what are we missing?

That question isn’t theoretical for me. Emotional intelligence—or more accurately, my lack of it—shaped my life in profound, sometimes dangerous ways. By eighteen I was one of the best young players in America: member of Junior Davis Cup, blue-chip recruit, freshman at UCLA, living the junior tennis dream I’d chased since I could remember. In April of 1983, I walked onto the court for the defending NCAA champion Bruins undefeated in dual match play, having won my first twenty-two matches, tying Jimmy Connors’ freshman record and standing on the brink of rewriting UCLA’s record book. I was on a roll heading for greatness. Even the newspapers agreed.

One year later I was living in my VW van, having quit the team, dropped out of school, handed back the scholarship I’d worked so hard to earn, drinking and drugging around the clock. From the outside, it looked like a collapse. From the inside, it felt like an inevitability that finally arrived

Which begs a series of obvious questions, not the least being what happened to me?

The short answer is: it had been happening all along. I was pursuing excellence in one of the most emotionally demanding sports on Earth with undiagnosed emotional issues I began dangerously self-medicating at fourteen. I had the game. I had the work ethic. I had the passion. What I didn’t have were the coping skills to manage the relentless stress of the elite tennis life. By the time I finally received proper help at thirty-seven, the damage was deep. It took a series of absurd miracles—and what I can only describe as divine interventions—to allow me to be here to type these words and share my story.

I got very lucky. Many don’t. And even though my story is extreme in many ways, the core lesson is simple and universal: when you place an emotionally vulnerable person under constant pressure, especially the pressure of the high-stakes tennis world, without giving them emotional-intelligence tools, their predicament only gets worse and never better

What makes today so alarming is that my collapse happened forty years ago, when nobody, my parents, my teachers, my coaches, the USTA or UCLA knew much about addiction, mood disorders, or what we now call emotional health. There were no safety nets, no systems, no First Ball To Last emotional intelligence programs. Today we know so much more. We’ve mapped the brain, studied stress, written libraries’ worth of self-help. Yet the emotional crisis in our players, especially our young ones, is getting worse, not better. We’re throwing more information and more content at a problem that requires something more basic and more radical: a lived, daily practice of emotional intelligence.

The seed for this project was planted on a book tour for my memoir, You Can Get There From Here. During a Q&A, a woman raised her hand and asked me a question that stopped me cold. “Given what you know now, do you think anything could have been done to help you back then?” My answer was no. It was 1983, none of the important people in my life back then had the first idea what to do with a kid wired like me. 

Then she asked the real kicker: “What about today? What if a kid like you rolled in town, all kinds of talent yet all kinds of problems on and off the court up today, same mix of brilliance and fragility you once were.. Are there resources in place now to keep that kid's life from spiraling out of control?”

I paused, unable to answer her on the spot. But upon returning home, I went looking. I talked to parents, coaches, directors, and players. I researched programs, read the literature, sat in conferences. And my conclusion, after all that? While some progress has been made, the honest answer is still largely no. There is no integrated, practical, tennis-specific emotional-intelligence program to assist players manage the oft-stressful reality of the tennis life.

Until Now. I decided to build the program I wish I and so many other struggling tennis players wish they had.

That’s what First Ball To Last is. It’s my attempt to gather everything I’ve learned in fifty years in this sport—as a nationally ranked junior, college player, pro journeyman, coach, journalist, author, and recovering human—and turn it into something usable. Not a theory. Not a motivational speech. But A toolkit. A framework. A program not just performance enhancing but life enhancing too

So much of the sports psychology and therapy world is corrective and reactive. Nobody wins a big tournament and then rushes to their sports psychologist. The pattern usually goes like this: struggle, white-knuckle it, exhaust every bad coping strategy, then seek help only after the wheels have come off. By that point, the issues have usually metastasized, becoming much harder to untangle. I’m grateful for the work that’s been done in that space—it’s saved lives, including mine—but we can do better than last-resort emotional triage.

Here's the catch. I know exactly what's going to happen to you during your tennis career. I don't know when or to what degree, but all the usual suspects will appear.  Excitement passion joy mixed in with  Burnout, indifference, injury, slumps, humiliation doubt. A lifetime of reactions in our sport for a lifetime. If we know what's going to happen, why not be proactive and preventative? Why not treat emotional intelligence as crucial requirement of success instead of leaving it all to chance with wildly mixed results? 

We all accept that you don’t go to the beach without sunscreen and a towel because you know the conditions. You also don’t head into the mountains without layers because you know it gets cold up there. Yet we send kids—and adults—into the brutal, swirling weather system of competitive tennis without emotional gear and hope for the best. We know this sport can be isolating, perfectionistic, unforgiving. We have seen what it does to our sport's best, yet we act surprised when junior players crack. That’s on us.

Over time, certain traits kept showing up in the healthiest, most resilient, most successful players and people I met—on tour, in recovery rooms, in life: resilience, humility, perspective, gratitude, self-control, adaptability, accountability, optimism, empathy, work ethic, the ability to let go, the courage to stay, a grounded sense of self, a healthy inner voice. Not one of those traits is genetically reserved for champions. They are all trainable. They can all be practiced. They can all be strengthened, especially in the rich, high-feedback environment of competitive tennis.

This book—and the larger FBTL program—is designed to make that training systematic. Think of it as building an emotional immune system. Instead of waiting for crises and then scrambling, we establish simple daily routines: checking emotional “vital signs,” practicing self-talk, building perspective, learning how to breathe under pressure, journaling, reflecting, setting clean goals, examining our roles as players, parents, and coaches. As the writer Henry David Thoreau put it, “As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.” FBTL is about building those mental pathways purposefully and with intent. 

I can’t promise we will ever be able to play like Federer or Serena. That’s not the point. What I can say, with conviction, is that you can learn to train, compete, and carry yourself like the healthiest champions you admire. You can leave the game, whenever your last ball is struck, knowing you squeezed everything real and meaningful out of your talent and your time.

And here’s the real secret: none of this stays on the court. The skills you build learning to manage nerves in tight matches, to bounce back after heartbreaking losses, to set boundaries with over-invested parents or coaches, to stay present in big moments—those are the same skills you’ll lean on in classrooms, in careers, in marriages, in parenting, in recovery, and yes, God forbid, even in Pickleball. When a player finishes their competitive journey, my goal is for them to walk into the rest of their life with an unshakeable foundation for life so sturdy that whatever they choose to do next, they know how to give themselves fully to it without losing themselves in the process.

This book is an invitation and a call to action—to players, parents, coaches, and anyone who cares about this sport and the humans who play it—to treat emotional intelligence as the central pillar of competitive tennis. From the first ball to the last, we can revolutionize how players compete at our great sport.