
For Deaf Tennis Player, Sound Is No Barrier - DiabloD3
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/sports/tennis/deaf-player-lee-duck-hee-south-korea.html?mc_cid=80af5b2eb3&mc_eid=a93f16eea4
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typage
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 :)

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_nalply
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.

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tswartz
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.

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rawland
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].

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilateral_hearing_loss#Profou...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unilateral_hearing_loss#Profound_unilateral_hearing_loss)

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hyperbovine
> 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.

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_nalply
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.

