I am deaf in one ear and played college tennis. I happen to be half-Korean also. I have known for a while that due to my deafness my balance is worse than the average persons and that is one scenario that is not mentioned in the article. I fail conventional balance tests where you close your eyes and have to stay up. I never thought about the sound of my opponents ball meaning anything as I couldn't decipher it clear enough to learn anything from that, but that might be useful. This article has made me realize that perhaps being deaf helped me with tennis. Perhaps it helped me read the game well as I had to rely on my vision and perhaps it resulted in me having better reflexes than I would have had if I wasn't deaf. I did have the best reflexes on the team fwiw but that's a small sample size (12 players). I struggled to hit overheads well compared to players at my level. I would feel disoriented when the ball was in the air and I was looking up and would be praying that my smash would go in lol. I felt I had less control over that shot compared to the people I was playing. I hope you might find my thoughts insightful on a small level :)
Not all people who don't hear well have a problem with balance. Of course because the mechanism for the balance sense is co-located with the hearing sense in the vestibular organ, medical difficulties in the vestibular organ often affect both senses. But this is not always the case.
A long, but interesting article about a deaf tennis player excelling in a sport that puts a value on hearing. I can certainly understand how hearing is an important part, as described by Andy Roddick in the article, "that his first reaction to an opponent’s shots comes from his hearing, as does his initial information about the shot coming toward him." But I agree with the author that this may be a case of the majority of players and coaches being able to hear and thus the sport puts more value on that then being able to predict (based on visual cues) where your opponent is going to hit the ball.
Kudos to Lee Duck-hee changing the sport.
>>People who were born deaf or hard of hearing may have a stronger sense of intuition in general, and tend to see subtle clues in a person’s face or body language better than people with normal hearing,” Stringer said. “They are more visual, because when one sense is compromised, other senses are heightened to compensate. If my hypothesis is correct, people who are deaf or hard of hearing may have an advantage in tennis because they can pick up visual cues faster and better as to their opponent’s plans, and may have better reflexes because they see things sooner.
Being unilateral deaf, I completely agree with your second statement.
There is one simple situations, where most of my hearing friends understand it: Traffic.
Most people rely on their hearing heavily to navigate through cities. I don't. For me there is basically changing nothing with the upcoming electric cars. But I often grasp hard into my friends clothes, when there is an electric car coming and we're crossing roads.
Meanwhile, I just say: "Oh, a Tesla." (which is not that common on European roads) and people stop. Way easier, than grabbing as much people as possible. Which is usually only two of the group.
Same for sports. In road racing, I'm very well at anticipating attacks and movements in the peloton. Often not only split seconds earlier than others, but whole seconds.
Besides these small upsides, I would give a lot to be hearing. There are more (socially) tough downsides to it [1].
> In an era of increasingly physical competition, only one player in the ATP top 50, 21st-ranked David Ferrer, is as short as Lee.
What a funny way to describe Ferrer, who was easily the best non-GOAT-level player on the tour for a large part of this century. Most players would kill have his game. All is not lost if you are 5'9.
Being Deaf myself I add that Deaf people often «read» people. I imagine that Lee just reads his opponents - for example the way how one swings the racket can be perceived much earlier than the sound of the ball hitting the racket.
