Finally, A Win

Sets 105-106 (of 365):

Stuart vs. A. at Pharr. Winner: Stuart 6-4, 6-0.
Alternate Ladder Match #1

My Mojo: Decent, But Nothing Special

I found another ladder on the web. This one doesn't seem to be as popular locally as the other one, but there are a few players there. It is also national, whereby the other one is just confined to Austin.

We had agreed to meet in Patterson Park, and I was waiting there, but he called and said he would be about ten minutes late. Then he called again and said he was stuck in traffic. He ended up getting there about thirty minutes late and going to Pharr instead, which was across the street from Patterson. I could have considered the match forfeited under the rules of the ladder, but I wanted to play, so I just forgave the lateness. But he didn't want to play at Patterson; he didn't like the courts there. I told him we would have to pay to play at Pharr and he hadn't been aware of that. Luckily, Pharr was about to close, so A. (not the A. I was playing, but the A. who worked at Pharr) let us play for free. Since we had limited time, we agreed to play no-ad scoring.

A. had a great serve with a lot of power and kick, and hit most of his shots with a lot of topspin. But he didn't score the games in the conventional way. Instead of saying "forty-love," he would say "three to zero." I was standing about five feet behind the baseline just to be able to return his serve, and I missed a lot of them at first. And he didn't vary them, but just put a lot of punch into them, because if he had thrown in some soft ones, I would have been screwed standing that far back. But that was the only way I could figure out to get them. So he hits great serves, and good topspin groundshots, but doesn't score the game right, and doesn't qute know how to changeover at the end of sets. And he doesn't know that the local tennis centers usually charge money to play. I'm thinking, where did this guy come from?

We had a tough first set that I won 6-4. Each of us won the games we served up to 4-4, and then I broke his serve toward the end and won. I think I figured out how to deal with his power game a little better in the second set, plus he started making a few more errors. I won the next set 6-0, even though we did have some hard-fought games. Since we were playing no-ad, we didn't have games that went back and forth from deuce to ad, but I bet we would have if we had been playing conventional scoring.