Waiting for Godot

Sets 63-64 (of 365):

Stuart vs. S. at Northwest Park. Winner: Stuart 6-3, 6-1.
Ladder Match #5

My Mojo: Steady and Solid

Everybody must have been stir-crazy on this first day of beautiful weather after so many days of rain, sleet and ice. S. and I made plans to meet at 5:15 at Northwest Park, but I got there a little early, and there was a huge wait. All of the courts were taken, and there were about eight people waiting for empty courts. Luckily, four of them got scared away by the wait. And it was a long wait, too. We were supposed to be the third open court, but I thinksomebody snuck in on a court when we weren't looking. We ended up having to wait about an hour to be able to play, and we had to play on the worst court of the four there; it had some lights burned out and a little bit of water on it. I got out my towel and sopped up as much of the water as I could. It didn't completely dry it up, but at least it made it just surface water rather than a pool.

The first set was tougher than the second one. We went to a lot of games that were close and I just edged over. I was holding most of my serves but he did break me on one. It seemed like he was hitting a lot of shots long at first, and he tightened up on that a little. He also started out the set with two double faults, but corrected quickly. I was not making too many errors, and for almost all the ones I did make I could point to something clear that I had done wrong and corrected well throughout most of the match.

In the second set, he won the first game (he had won the first game in the first set too), but then didn't win another game after that. For the last three games, it seemed like he was just trying to get out of there and was not aiming as carefully and was playing quickly. However, he started trying some shots with a lot of power that worked occasionally but didn't work most of the time.