I Finally Hit Stride In The Third Set

Sets 354-356:

Stuart v. D. at IBM. Winner: Stuart 3-6, 7-6(4), 6-1.

My Mojo: Shaky At First, Then A Gradual Crescendo, Then A Surge At The End.

All day, I had felt terrible. I felt not quite sick, but at the very least, super-dehydrated. i had been to a group lesson the night before where I was really fatigued for most of the night and couldn't even grasp the rules of the drills we were doing. I actually got in an argument (not really heated, just a dispute) about something that I was totally in the wrong about, and it took a long time to sink in because my mind was just not grasping anything; that's how tired I was. I never quite recovered and felt cruddy the next day, but I spent all day drinking a LOT of water. I almost canceled the match, but about a half an hour after I got off work, I suddenly felt better. I guess that I really just was dehydrated and the water worked.

Starting out this match, I felt like I was having a difficult time getting my bearings. My serve was complete crap. This was strange, because during the warmup, my serve was dead-on. But it just keeled over dead as soon as the first game started. At least my second serves were getting in (even though they had virtually no power at all) and I only double-faulted a few times. My ground strokes were not that great either, and I was hitting my backhands with slice just to get them to the point where they were fairly accurate. This was probably the high point of my game--the fact that my unusually sliced backhands were going just about right where I wanted them to. My service problems were really frustrating me. The first set was really lackluster, and I dropped the last half of it with an inability to get anything decent happening. My opponent was really moving in well, also, and was deadly accurate when he got to the net.

The second set started out much like the first, and before I knew it, I was down 4-1. I thought it was pretty much over, but I just took some relaxing breaths on the changeover and determined to try to be a little more aggressive and play for position. I squeezed back by my fingernails in a couple of games, but won the next three to bring it to 4-4. Then he won the next game. I simply steadied myself, prepared for everything as early as possible, and I managed to win the next game just by making less errors than my opponent did. We had a lot of long rallies in this game.

So it was 5-5 at this point, and then he surged back and won the next game. Now it was 6-5. My serve was still failing me. I resolved not to let that get me, and just decided to play a game that started with groundstrokes instead of serve. Once again I won another game to take it into the tiebreak.

Suddenly, in the tiebreak, my serve came back. I walloped off a few decent serves when I had the serve, and got advantageous positions off of them. I also managed to break his serve enough to get ahead. Though he started catching up for a couple of points, I kept the edge, and won the tiebreak.

So we were in a third set. I felt like my game was just starting to warm up at this point. My serve got a little better and I managed to pop off a few good ones, but it didn't completely get solid; it just faded in and out. But I was able to get advantages in most of the rallies and I won more easily that I had won the second set. Plus, my physical condition felt better than it had the whole match, and I had no problem sustaining long rallies and running like crazy to get to far-away shots.