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