For Deaf Tennis Player, Sound Is No Barrier

VIDEO: New York Times - Lee Duck-hee, 18, of South Korea, is ranked 143rd in the world in a sport in which hearing the ball is considered crucial.



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 beside along the dusty hardcourts and chanted in support while Lee, 18, crushed forehand winners past his bespectacled opponent in the final. The 6-1, 6-1 win took little time - no surprise, as Lee is the best teenage player in South Korea, and a professional 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.



Lee is exceptional among professionals, too. He is Deaf, and no Deaf player in the sport’s history has reached these heights. In tennis, simply seeing the ball is believed to be insufficient. Hearing the ball, top players say, enables faster reactions - a crucial advantage in a sport where powerful serves and groundstrokes mean that every tiny fraction of a second matters.

Wimbledon's Rob Walker takes a look at Duck Hee Lee. Video Credit: Wimbledon



“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.”



Joo Hyun-sang, the tennis coach at Mapo High School, said he was skeptical of Lee’s potential at first.



“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 not fully broken through. 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... Read The Full Story - New York Times.

The Deaf Body in Public Space - NY Times

Deaf News: The Deaf Body in Public Space from New York Times.



NEW YORK CITY -- “It’s rude to point,” my friend told me from across the elementary-school cafeteria table. I grasped her words as I read them off her lips. She stared at my index finger, which I held raised in midair, gesturing toward a mutual classmate. “My mom said so.”



I was 6 or 7 years old, but I remember stopping with a jolt. Something inside me froze, too, went suddenly cold.



“I’m signing,” I said out loud. “That’s not rude.”



As the only Deaf student in my elementary school, I had already stumbled across the challenges of straddling two languages and two modes of communication. My family was hearing, but they still empowered me by using both English and sign language at home.



A sign language interpreter accompanied me throughout the day at school, and my teachers created a welcoming environment for me to learn, but finding a place to belong with kids my own age often felt more difficult. I tried to speak to them, and occasionally they reciprocated the effort by learning some basic signs. But usually I felt separate.



I went home that day and asked my mother about what my friend had said. “Don’t worry,” my mother said, “she doesn’t know the social rules are different with signing. You aren’t being rude.” With that, matter-of-fact as always, she brought the conversation to an end. But I still felt a lingering self-consciousness, entirely novel and difficult to shake.



This was perhaps the first time I realized that other people could see me as obtrusive, as taking up too much space, when I was simply communicating just as I was.



When I reflect on this memory two decades later, I recognize how my childhood friend, whom at the time I had found to be so accusatory, had really gaped at me with a sort of wonder. My signing challenged the rules of social conduct she’d absorbed from adults, and to her I must have seemed ignorant or radically rebellious, or perhaps both. But pointing was a truly fundamental act for me; it was how I expressed what my grown-up scholarly self would call relationality - the idea of being in the world in relation to others. Through sign language, a properly poised finger allowed me to say you and me and he and she and they. If I did not point, how could I make a human connection? ... Read More at New York Times.