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Undaunted, my wife and I bought $10 rackets with plastic strings and leatherette hand grips and began batting balls back and forth. My neighbor offered no instruction, not even the commonplace mantra: “Keep your eye on the ball! Bend your knees!� He did, however, give me a book — not a conventional how-to manual, more a Zen compendium of suggestions for accessing the tennis talent that resided within me. “The Inner Game of Tennis,� by W. Timothy Gallwey, published in 1974, sparkled with concepts that seemed to be as old as Emerson — as in Ralph Waldo, not Roy. “Do the thing and you shall have the power� was its underlying premise.

My friend’s court, lodged like a jewel in a copse of oleanders and cypress trees in the south of France, was a perfect spot for beginners. Its gritty surface guaranteed a slow bounce that made every shot playable if you were ready to run. Loping around in my old Converse All Stars, I immediately loved the geometry and pace of tennis, and understood why so many writers were devoted to the sport. As I was 30, it was much too late for me to master picture-perfect groundstrokes.

But “The Inner Game of Tennis� convinced me that didn’t matter as long as I got every ball back across the net. In tennis parlance, I became a “pusher,� a craven retriever, a devotee of drop shots and lobs. Too ignorant to apologize, I was soon the nightmare of more experienced players, the kind of guy who wins with pure, or impure, intuition. My neighbor never complained, but one defeated opponent shook my hand at the net, snarling, “You make a beautiful game very ugly.� Later a teaching pro took one glance at my strokes and suggested, “Take two weeks off, then quit the sport.�

Still, the message of “The Inner Game� gave me faith. It convinced me that I only needed to get out of my own way and allow my autodidactic game free rein. For the next 50 years, Gallwey — a tennis star at Harvard and a coach who went on to write several other books about developing one’s “inner game� in sports and beyond — freed me to ignore the strictures of classic instruction and simply play singles three times a week. This isn’t to claim that I ever achieved more than a 4.0 U.S. Tennis Association rating. I was what the English called a “useful� club player. At my best, I could occasionally beat — or at least take a set from — a former Division 1 college player. To celebrate my 65th birthday, I humbled a local teaching pro 6-1, 7-6 — all because he lost his patience and refused to respect my improvisations.

It delights me now to read the 50th-anniversary edition of “The Inner Game of Tennis� and reacquaint myself with the brain-teasing koans with which Gallwey, now 86, shaped my unshapely game. Opening the book at any page, I rediscovered insights worth pondering:

“The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.�

“When we unlearn how to be judgmental, it’s possible to achieve spontaneous, focused play.�

“Exercise no control; correct for no imagined bad habits. Simply trust your body to … toss the ball up, focus your attention on its seams, then let the serve serve itself.�

“Once you learn how to learn you have only to discover what is worth learning.�