With the Australian Summer of Tennis under way (rapture!) the notion of the "unforced error" is on the lips and in the reports of all the courtside TV commentators and tennis writers.
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The stagers of big tennis events amass match statistics and feed them to reporters and broadcasters and the fanciful "unforced errors" stats are always there with the unimpeachable stats for measurable things like aces and double faults.
But for your seasoned columnist, a lifelong student of tennis and for donkeys' years a tennis writer, tennis may be one of the very few areas of Life where there is never any such thing as an unforced error.
So for example there certainly seem to be unforced errors in politics, of which our prime minister's decision to desert the distressed nation and go on holiday in Hawaii is a fine recent example. How he regrets it now, this own-goal, and this pellet shot into his own foot! No one forced him to skulk away to paradise but now it looms as an error that will always haunt and hound his political career.
More about unforced errors in politics and in Life per se in just a moment.
But first let us look at the notion as it applies to tennis. This is also to look at how it applies to Life, since tennis is so much more than a mere sport. To say that tennis is just a game is like saying (and is just as blasphemous as saying) that Shakespeare's plays are just entertainments.
"Tennis gave me a soul," the noble Martina Navratilova thinks, a claim that sounds entirely reasonable about tennis, a spiritual activity, but that would appear silly if made about any other sport and sillier still if made about a career in politics.
Andre Agassi, tennis genius, noble human being and above-average philosopher, put it well when he mused "Advantage, service, fault, break, love - the basic elements of tennis are those of everyday existence, because every match is a life in miniature."
But back to our theme and to how commentators and writers duly gibbered and wrote about the "unforced errors" that our Alex de Minaur "committed" in last weekend's heroic loss to Rafael Nadal in the semi-final of the ATP Cup.
But what can be "unforced" about a misplaced shot when one is playing against the intimidating, bellowing, be-muscled, No 1 player in the world (Nadal), playing for one's country in the public gaze of millions, one's anxious heart pounding?
Earlier in the ATP Cup, Nadal was reported to have "committed 36 unforced errors" in scraping through 7-6, 6-4 against Japan's Yoshihito Nishioka. But I watched every moment of that match and didn't see a single Nadal unforced error while seeing dozens forced on him by his opponent (Nishioka, talented as anything, is the fastest two-legged being on Earth and is supernaturally tenacious) and other errors forced on Nadal by his own tormented genius.
And, just as there is no such thing as an unforced error in top tennis, perhaps there is never such a thing as a wholly unforced error in Life, per se.
Diana Spencer's decision to marry the awful Prince Charles and thus to enter the orbit of the weirdly unpleasant Royal Family looks superficially like her unforced error. Millions of us, to no avail, wore badges and sported bumper stickers pleading with her Don't Do It Di! And yet think of the enormous societal, cultural, psychological, class, gutter press forces brought to bear on her, only a giddy gel, by a proposal of marriage from the heir to the throne! To refuse him would have seemed to be somehow letting down the nation, the Commonwealth. Her bewildered sense of duty forced her to the altar.
It is tempting to think of the British people's muddle-headed referendum vote for Brexit as an unforced error. No one was forced to vote for Brexit, or to go out and vote at all. But of course every Leave voter was sent bustling to the polling place by forceful resentments both rational and irrational, and of course by the forceful lies of artful Brexitmongers and truthmanglers like Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.
How mere mention of the vile Farage somehow pollutes my usually pellucid column, like a decomposing kangaroo poisoning a billabong!
Then prime minister Tony Abbott's "captain's call" of trying to reintroduce knights and dames to Australia (earning him national ridicule and irreparably damaging his already dented, battered brand) perhaps comes as close as can be to a pure unforced error.
And yet perhaps that error of his, and the present prime minister's error in slithering off to Hawaii, are examples of how our personalities, especially when (as in these two cases) they are really awful personalities, incline us to and force us into errors of idiocy, satanically nudging us off the straight and narrow, leading us into temptation.
Meanwhile, whenever during the looming, intoxicating fortnight of the Australian Open commentators/journos talk of "unforced errors" dismiss their nonsense with a philosopher's cerebral scoff. There will be exactly as many unforced errors in the fortnight's tennis as there will be unicorns roaming Melbourne Park, the Open's venue.