What Happened?

Sets 229-231:

Stuart vs. D. at Northwest Park. Winner: D. 4-6, 6-3, 6-2.

My Mojo: Started Out Great, Disintegrated.

My opponent showed up a little late, and I was starting to get annoyed about that, but the annoyance pretty much vaporized when he got there. I had not played D. in about a year, and was curious to see how I would do against him. The last time I played him, he edged me out in three sets that lasted about three hours. So I was pretty much ready for more of the same, though my game had changed some since last year.

In the first set, I started out dominating the play pretty well. I was really in the zone, and felt confident in my play. When I got up by 4-1, I thought that the rest of the match would be equally lopsided. But after that, he started creeping up more and more, and winning more games. I ended up winning the set 6-4, which I thought was acceptable, even though my play was starting to fall apart.

I have no idea what happened to my play in the next two sets. One thing that I think was a factor was that I had not eaten anything all day except for a couple of protein bars, which was all I could find in my desk that day, and I got too busy at work to take off for lunch. I hadn't really been too hungry, so I didn't think about it until D. mentioned that he had grabbed something to eat before the match. It sort of settled in the back of my head that I hadn't really eaten...

In the second set, I started out decently, but as it went along I started getting less and less of a foothold. For some reason the sun was really bothering me when I got to the sunny side, but the first time I moved over there in the first set, a cloud shaped like Great Britain started passing over the sun. I thought it might last for the two games that I served on that side. I watched the sun slowly pass over England and towards Wales, and it popped back out into the Atlantic Ocean not quite before I had finished the second game on that side. But for some reason, when the sun came back out, it didn't bother me as much as it had before. We settled into some long and grueling games, but I didn't get many advantages, and tossed away the ones that I did seem to get, though I did manage to win three games. And in the third set, I surged briefly and was ahead 2-0, but I didn't win any games after that. I was just dumbfounded. My shots were just not doing it for me. I was making a ton of errors, and nothing felt right. The last game of the third set was very long and arduous, and it seemed to go into a deuce/his ad pattern. I fought back from many ad points, but I finally just gzorched, had a spazz hiccup and lost the set.

We had a few score discrepancies in the last two sets. I let him have one, he let me have one, and I really don't remember much about any others, though there were probably one or two more. I honestly don't know who was right or wrong, or if they got resolved correctly. None of them really seemed life-or-death to me. In the third set, I may have let him have an extra game when I called the score 2-2 when it was probably 2-1. He seemed perplexed by that, and spent a good deal of the next game counting before he served, but seemed to accept the score. I didn't really think much more about it.

After the third set, I was kind of miffed at myself for falling apart so badly, so I just kind of left abruptly, not really wanting to talk. I mentally kicked myself in the car for not capitalizing on my advantages, but got over it by the time I got home.

The next day, he sent me an email going over some of the score discrepancies and drawing a chart where he showed that I had called out the score wrongly in the third set, and he said that he was going to score the third set as 5-2 instead of 6-2. But when I went to the site to confirm the score, it was listed as 6-2. Anyway, I had already put the match behind me, and if anything, the mistake was in his favor. He also said in his email that he was upset that I had called out the score while I was serving, which I don't think I did. I make a habit of calling out the score to alert my opponent to the fact that I am going to serve and to make sure he is ready. I probably do serve very shortly after that, if I have visual cues telling me that my opponent is ready. And I do recall something in the rules stating that the server sets the pace. It's all water under the bridge, as far as I'm concerned. I sent him back an email wishing him luck; no reason to harbor any hard feelings or start an argument.