Loving the game is often a negative, because if you love the game too much you might not learn your lesson from losing.
You might say "I lost but I had a lot of fun and enjoyed the match".
If you enjoy tennis even when you lose, that means you are too accepting of losing.
There are no prizes for loving tennis.
You often see club level players who love tennis and they love playing their favorite shots.....but that doesn't help them improve necessarily, because they are ignoring their weakest shots and are therefore not improving.
Compare that with Rafa's typical answers to similar questions:
“There is no formula. It is important to have the passion for what you do,
if you do not feel the passion for tennis it is impossible. But you have to surround yourself with the right people and who will help you every day, because there will be times when you will be tired and there are people who make you reach the highest level. You have to be a worker and have a good team “,
“All my career everybody has said that because of my style I will have a short career, but I am still here.
I am still here because I love what I am doing. I still have the passion for the game. I am going to keep fighting and working hard to keep enjoying this tour and keep having chances to compete at the highest level.”
“If you don’t have the will to improve, you don’t understand sport, because sport is always about improving,” he says. “That’s the meaning of sport. It’s playing with the dream of doing something better than what you were doing before.
When you’re not working with the passion to do something better, I think that sport loses its sense.
“I don’t understand going on court just to practise,” he says. “I go on court to improve something. That’s the way that I understand my career, the way that I understand sport.
I really don’t find the motivation to go on court if I don’t have the goal of trying to do something better. And when the day arrives when that is not the case, that’s going to be the day that I’ll take a boat out and go fishing.”
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