Slippin' and-a Slidin', And Some Thoughts About Anger

Set 67-69 (of 365):

Stuart vs. J. at Patterson Park. Winner: J. 3-6, 7-6(1), 6-3.

My Mojo: Average, Frustrated by Sliding on Damp Courts, Tending Toward Blown Cool.

It rained last night. It didn't rain very hard, and it had stopped by the time I woke up around 6:30 in the morning, but the courts were wet. Just a little more than damp, really, but enough to really slide around on the courts, especially when I was trying to change direction quickly. By the time we got on the courts at 8:30 a.m., there hadn't been enough sun and there was too much moisture in the air to let the courts dry. The courts stayed damp through the whole match, but a few patches had gotten dry by the end of the match.

The first set was pretty straightforward on my part. Each of us won on our serves until we got to 2-2. Then I broke his serve, and won the next game on my serve, to make it 4-2. We each won our serves again, and the score was 5-3. Then I broke his serve one more time to win 6-3.

In the second set, he started hitting a lot more drop shots and angles. They were really getting to me, because I couldn't get enough momentum to get moving on the slippery surface. I was not able to get my feet started, and when I tried, I just slipped around like a cartoon character on a banana peel. One thing that was really weird about the second set was that every single regular game was a break. Neither one of us won any games on our serves. So we broke each others' serves every single game, and got to 6-6. I don't think I've ever played a whole set of breaks before. In the tiebreak for the second set, I just tensed up and couldn't get anything to work. He won the tiebreak 7-1 to win the set.

Now, I figure there are three things you can do with your anger when you are playing tennis. And just about everybody gets pissed off at some point when they are playing. You can:

1) Express it momentarily, either internally, or with a short verbal outburst, and then move on and let it dissipate. This is what I usually do.

2) Let it linger and eat at you. This hardly ever happens to me, but it has happened occasionally. But when I've seen it happen to other people (or to me), the person who does this hardly ever wins. It just corrodes their game.

3) The best thing you can do with your anger is turn it into steely determination, and dominate everything that happens fom then on. This is the hardest to do, and I am only able to convert it this way every once in a while, but when I do, it's golden.

I mention this because the last option is what I was able to do at the beginning of the third set. I could do no wrong, and everything I hit was pure gold. But it only lasted two games! I won the first two games really easily. Then I went back into uncertainty and confusion, and he won the next two games. I was hitting shots again that were letting him get back to his highly successful strategy of hitting lots of drop shots that I could not get to because I slipped on the court trying to get motion started, or pulled me wide so he could slam shots down the open end of the court, and again I could not recover because the court was too slippery to change directions quickly enough. I was trying to keep a wide stance to help my balance and push off my back foot, but I just could not get started quickly enough enyway, and my feet slipped around too much. He later told me that his strategy for dealing with the wet court was to keep his steps small and quick. Anyway, his strategy in the third set seemed to be working much better than mine was. Toward the end, I started telling myself that I needed to play more for placement than for power. This might have won me a game, but I was still down 5-3. For the last game, I told myself that I needed to eliminate my errors. And I did. I didn't lose a single point in the last game on one of my errors. He won it on his good placement of shots, and won the set 6-3.