Down And Out In Bev...er...Northwest Park

OK.  I'm baaaaaack.  It's been three years since I last posted here.  It had started to become rote to me.  It was getting to be a chore.  I was unfulfilled.  Or whatever.  But here I am again.

The original aim of this blog was to chronicle playing 365 sets in a year.  And I did that with flying colors.  Then I slowed down in my playing, and didn't feel like blogging after a while.  Sometimes I just posted the scores.  Then I quit even doing that.

Why did I stop?  Life takes over sometimes.  It reminds us that there's a huge world out there, and that focusing on one little facet of it detracts from everything else.  And there was a lot of everything else in the meantime.  I could write a blog, I tell ya.

So now I have no real goal, which is OK with me.  I'm not reaching for a brass ring.  I can do whatever I want here.  I can post my games if I want, and not post them if I don't.

I've been on kind of a hiatus for a while.  I had escaped tennis elbow-type stuff for most of the duration of my tennis play, but toward the end of when I quit for a while, my elbow had been hurting.  I iced, used anti-inflammatories, exercised, and did all the things you are supposed to do, but it wasn't getting any better.  So I quit for a while.  It was probably about nine months.  I had quit blogging long before that, and I had reduced my game load also.  But here I am to bug you once again with my useless ramblings about a tiny sliver of the life of this mostly insignificant ball of seemingly sentient twitches, spazzing around in one little festering pocket of the universe.

I've played some tennis that I didn't blog.  Since I started playing again this month, I haven't really played any matches; I've just been hitting with some people and maybe playing some informal games.  Maybe I'll blog those, maybe I won't.

But back to our protagonist.

Sets (oh, that's another thing...I'm not going to keep a running count of the sets any more).

Stuart v. C. at Northwest Park.  Winner: C. 6-1, 6-0

My Mojo:  One Step Back.


Since I started hitting informally a short while back, at first my shots were complete garbage.  Nothing was going where it should have gone and everything was hitting the wrong part of the racquet.  "Erratic" would be an understatement.  So I dialed it back and just tried to get the fundamentals down.  After hitting a few times, I was getting the old feel back.  The last couple of times I hit, it was feeling really solid.  It was getting better and better.  Last time, almost everything felt great.  Footwork was better, shots were solid, and I was using really good spin control.

But not today.  It was definitely a step back.  It's a good sign to take two steps forward and one step back, I guess.  I just wish it hadn't happened today.

Not to denigrate my opponent at all, but I mostly beat myself.  I hit poor angles that made the ball go out when it should have gone in.  I was too low on the net tape.  My opponent helped me dig my grave by hitting everything back really solidly, capitalizing well on my weak shots, and playing for position superbly.  Toward the end the heat and my feeble excuse for play was just getting to me too much.  Even though the score was lopsided, at first it was pretty competitive.  But toward the end, it was exactly what the score reflected.  I just could not break out on almost anything, and they points just were not my friends anymore.  There was really no way out by the end of the second set.  I could probably do better against this opponent on a better day, but not today.