Philosophy and tennis are the two things that I love most.

Athletic self-blame

Andrey Rublev is the most emotional player on the ATP tour. What makes him special is the fact that his negative emotions are largely self-directed. During a match against Carlos Alcaraz at the 2023 Nitto ATP finals, he furiously slammed his racquet into his own knee six times after losing a point, leaving his knee with a visible scar.

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In his paper "The Trials and Tribulations of Tom Brady: Self-Blame, Self-Talk, and Self-Flagellation", David Shoemaker argued that the paradigm theory of other-blame, according to which the emotional nature of blame consists in resentment, indignation, and guilt, cannot accommodate athletic self-blame. He pointed out that "most athletes who blame themselves for poor performance don't feel anything remotely like guilt about it". He proposed that the emotion nature of self-blame is instead anger – more specifically, goal-frustrated anger. Applying this account to tennis, when Rublev slammed his racquet into his knee, he was being angry with himself for frustrating his own goal of, say, winning the match; and the very act of slamming himself was aimed at getting himself back on track to achieving his goal.

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But how is this possible? Most obviously, if Rublev slams his knee too hard, his self-made knee injury will prevent him from finishing the match, let alone winning it. It seems that his self-blame does not succeed in eliminating the blockage of his goal – it creates one, namely an injured body.

A quick answer would be that Rublev's self-blame fails to achieve its paradigmatic effect. However, there seems to be some tension between this diagnosis and the following observation: great athletes are mostly angry ones who are extremely good at self-blaming (and correlatively, self-destructing). Moreover, this connection might not be contingent. It makes much intuitive sense to say that (at least part of) athletic greatness consists in being always ready to self-blame – according to Shoemaker's interpretation, being angry at oneself for frustrating ones own goals.

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So how do all of this fit together? Is Shoemaker's analysis of self-blame correct? Does Rublev's case verify Shoemaker's analysis or give us a reason to reconsider it? Is self-blame a gift for great athletes, or is it a curse? I am eager to find out.