Since I first started working with Yi, I’ve enjoyed asking about the outcome of tennis matches. The dual between individuals, as much psychological as technical – it’s something very natural to divine about, and the outcomes teach me a lot about the hexagrams involved.
You may know my husband doesn’t believe in the efficacy of divination. So of course I had to mention to him how accurately I could call a tennis match, didn’t I?
You can probably guess what happened next. My success rate, which had been over 90%, plummeted. There were readings I couldn’t relate to the match at all. One that quite definitely described the arc of a player’s performance over the course of a tournament rather than the one match I’d meant to ask about. Sometimes I called it wrong, more often I had no clue how to call it at all. Something was obviously up… now I’d set this up as some kind of ‘demonstration’, Yi was not playing. (Not the kind of discovery calculated to impress a sceptic, of course. Non-repeatable experiments don’t prove anything.)
So when the next match I wanted to watch came up, I asked Yi ruefully, without expectations, and definitely without telling anyone I was asking:
‘Look, just so I learn something, how will Henman do here?’
55, line 3 moving.
‘At Feng is profusion,
Sun at noon, seeing the froth of stars
Your right arm broken,
Not a mistake.’
‘And what about Grosjean?’
36, line 2 moving.
‘Brightness injured, injured in the left thigh.
Using a horse for rescue, its strength means good fortune.’
Henman was incapacitated by an injury to his right shoulder, and lost. Despite the injury Grosjean was carrying to his left thigh.
Game, set and match, Yi.