For Deaf Tennis Player, Sound Is No Barrier
For Deaf Tennis Player, Sound Is No Barrier
Lee Duck-hee, 18, of South Korea, is ranked 143rd in the world in a sport in which hearing the ball is considered crucial.
Lee Duck-hee, 18, second from right, eating lunch with his peers after winning a gold medal at the National Sports Festival in Asan, South Korea, last month. Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times
By BEN ROTHENBERG
NOV. 22, 2016
ASAN, South Korea — To improve its chances in the boys’ team tennis event at the National Sports Festival here, Mapo High School in Seoul brought in a ringer from Jecheon, two hours southeast of the capital. His name was Lee Duck-hee, and he had first caught the coach’s eye when he was in elementary school.
Mapo High’s players pressed against the fence along the dusty hardcourts and chanted their support while Lee crushed forehand winners past his bespectacled opponent in the final. The 6-1, 6-1 victory took little time — no surprise, given that Lee is the best teenage player in South Korea, and a professional who is ranked 143rd in the world.
“Seeing the level of skill, power and returning is totally different than high school level,” said Jeong Yeong-sok, his doubles partner at the tournament.
But even among the game’s elite, Lee, 18, is exceptional. He is deaf, and no deaf player in the sport’s professional era has reached these heights.
In tennis, simply seeing the ball is believed to be insufficient. Hearing the ball, the top players say, enables faster reactions — a crucial advantage in a sport where blazingly fast serves and powerful groundstrokes mean that even the tiniest fraction of a second matters.
“There are so many different spins in tennis, and I can hear a lot of them coming off someone’s racket because I know what they all sound like,” said Katie Mancebo, a college tennis coach and volunteer coach for the United States deaf tennis team. “But a deaf player doesn’t know that sound, so they have to focus more on what the other person is doing, how they’re making contact, and what the ball looks like as it’s coming over the net.”
“When I met him the first time, I had certain doubts that being deaf would prevent him from being a great player,” he said. “But I grew confident from watching him develop and improve. I was very confident he could do it.”
Though already the second-highest-ranked player of professionals 18 and under, Lee has become a breakout star. He has yet to play a main-draw match at an ATP tournament or a Grand Slam, though he reached the final of a Challenger event, the level below the ATP World Tour, for the first time in September in Taiwan, and has made two semifinals since.
But if he continues to rise, Lee will debunk much of what is understood about the intricacies of tennis.
Studies have shown that humans react more quickly to an auditory stimulus than a visual one. According to research compiled by the National Institutes of Health last year, the mean reaction time to visual stimuli is 180-200 milliseconds, and 140-160 milliseconds for auditory stimuli.
At Wimbledon in 2003, Andy Roddick said that his first reaction to an opponent’s shots comes from his hearing, as does his initial information about the shot coming toward him.
“You can hear how hard someone hits a ball,” Roddick said. “If they hit it hard and flat, it really makes a popping sound. That’s maybe one of the first things that tells you rather than actually seeing the ball. Like trying the drop shot, all of a sudden, I hear it not come off the racket. It’s part of the reaction process. I think you need to hear the ball pretty clearly to play at your highest level.”
Todd Perry, an Australian former doubles player who works as a coach, said that he often listens to his players’ shots to hear how strokes can be improved.
Lee and his mother, Park Mi-ja. She taught him to speak and to read lips, and she committed to help him build a career in tennis.
Credit Jean Chung for The New York Times
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