Now, This Was Just Insane

Sets 60-62 (of 365):

Stuart vs. C. at Northwest Park. Winner: Stuart 6-1, 6-1, 6-2, 3-4 and 15-30.

My Mojo: Decent to Above-Average, Ending Up More and More Blind

Here I was thinking after the last match I played tonight that there was no way I was going to be able to play. The ground was pretty darn wet, and the air was so full of mist that my glasses just kept getting covered with droplets and fog. So I called C. about 45 minutes before the match. I didn't get him, but left a message expressing doubt that we'd be able to play. About ten minutes later, he called me back. I told him that it looked kinda borderline, maybe even on the wrong side of the border. He said he was on his way there and he would just check it out when he got there. Fair enough. I told him I'd head over there too, and we could decide when we got there.

When I got there, he was already there, playing against the backboard in the big wet. So I figured, what the hell, we'll play wetball. Tennis is a whole different thing when it's way wet outside. You never know what the ball is going to do. We hit for a while, and then started playing sets. Early on in the first set, I took a dive in a big patch of mud. I asked him if he wanted to move over to the next court, which at least didn't have huge amounts of mud there, and we moved over one.

The first two sets I was playing really well. I was holding my serve every time, and breaking his serve most of the time too. My placement was good, and my shots were doing pretty much what I wanted them to do. The match ended pretty quickly. We shook hands, but that was not the end.

I asked him if he wanted to hit some more or play another set. He said sure, he would play another set. So we played another set. Now, I was getting more and more blind as this thing went along. I don't know what was making it worse, but my glasses were just getting wet and foggy, and I just could not seem to shake it. Also, the balls must have weighed about three times what they normally weighed from all the water they had absorbed. Every time one of us put any spin on the ball, we could see the water just spinning off of the ball. We had opened a second can of balls and they had gotten soaked too. Despite all of these challenges, I won the third set easily.

So I asked him if he wanted to play some more, and we started a fourth set. This time, he not only played a lot tougher, but I also could not see a damn thing. There were too many shots that I just didn't know where the hell the ball was until it came down out of range. In the first four games, each of us won our serve, so the score was 2-2. Then he broke my serve, and he won the next game too. He was just hitting really well, and his placement was awesome. I didn't feel like my mojo diminished much, though I was starting to feel a little hungry, and the combination of his great play and my blindness was just whittling away at me. It was like I was suddenly playing a different player. So now I'm down 2-4. The next game was my serve, and I won it pretty easily to bring the score up to 3-4.

So he serves the next game and wins the first two points. He's up 30-0, and I win the next point, so it's 30-15. Right as he is serving the next serve, the lights go "Thud" and turn off. So we're suddenly in pitch black. We both laugh and I tell him that it looks like he's won this set. I look at my watch and it's 9:45. Why the hell would they turn the lights off at 9:45? Oh, well, I guess that's just what they do there. I'll file that away for future reference: the lights go off at 9:45 at Northwest Park. We leave the wet balls there. This was just insane. Not only did we play when I thought there was no way we would, but we play nearly four sets.

So he wins the last set, incomplete as it is, and he definitely earned it. I'm too anal to count it toward my goal though, because it wasn't finished. It didn't end with one of us winning at least six games like a normal set would, so Mr. Fussypants here won't let it count. That's why I'm only counting three sets toward the 365. This in no way diminishes his win of this last set; it counts in that way.