A Long Match, A Whack To The Forehead, And We Briefly Get Locked In

Sets 218-220:

Stuart v. G. at Travis Country. Winner: G. 6-4, 3-6, 6-3.

My Mojo: Back And Forth At First, Fizzled At The End.

Aargh...I just spent about forty-five minutes writing a big long post for this match and it didn't save, and it got deleted. I saved it and then I got one of those "connection timed out" errors, and then when I went back, it was gone. How frustrating. I guess I'll try to reconstruct what I just wrote. And this time I'll save to Word before I save on the blog just in case.

The last time I played G., we had a grueling and long match. I was prepared for the same thing this time, and it is a good thing I was, because we had another long three-set match. This time we played for about two and a half hours.

In the first set, we were keeping pace with each other well. We were going back and forth in games and keeping the score relatively even at first. We had a lot of long rallies, and a lot of games that went back and forth from deuce to ad. I lost some focus at the end and lost the set 6-4.

I started off well in the second set. I was playing strongly, and able to aim my shots deep and hard to keep an offense going. In the middle of the second set, I caught one of his shots from a weird position, and had to swing at the ball really hard from an unusual angle. At the tail end of my swing, I whacked myself in the forehead pretty hard full on with the side of my racquet. I let out a yelp, and the commotion was loud enough that someone came from outside the court and asked if I had just hit myself in the head with my racquet. I said that I had, and both the bystander and my opponent asked if I was all right. I felt OK though my forehead was throbbing some and was bleeding. The bleeding did not let up for several games, and my opponent kept asking if I was all right. I kept playing, and played some of the best tennis I had played during this match for a while. My focus was great, and I was playing even more offensively and aggressively than I had so far. I ended up winning the second set 6-3.

In the third set, I was starting to lose energy, and I was not able to keep hitting offensive shots that would allow me to set the tone of the points. So he was taking control of the points more, and he was hitting shots that ran me all over the court, not only from side to side, but from front to back as well. On one point, he repeated the combination of a drop shot (pulling me to the front of the court) with a deep lob three times, and though I was able to scramble to get the first two of these pairs of shots, I stumbled on the third and hit it into the net. Though I was low on energy, I was able to get to most of the shots, but I was being run all over the court. Toward the end, I tried to do the same to him, but my energy was so depleted that my accuracy was not good, and I hit a lot of shots out or into the net.

Near the end of the third set, G. noticed that someone had taken his key to the court that he had left in the lock. He managed to summon the last other people on the site just as they were getting into their car to leave, and they found his key on another court. It would have been really bad if we had been locked in. Not only would we have faced the prospect of having to climb over the fence when we were done, but we would have had to do it in the dark, as the lights were about to time out (which was the reason that he was going to leave the court and noticed that his keys were gone). After the lock-out fiasco, which took about five minutes out of our set, I never did regain my game, and I lost the set 6-3 to lose the match.