Grueling Even By My Standards

Sets 508-510:

Stuart v. V. at McCallum High School. Winner: Stuart 5-7, 7-5, 7-5.

My Mojo: Mood-Swingy, But Steady At The Right Times.

Geez, this was a marathon. Two and a half hours of constant running around the court. We had so many games that went back and forth from deuce to ad. A few of the games lasted between ten and fifteen minutes. This was just a wear-down extravaganza. But I actually feel pretty good right now, except for my toes.

When I got to the courts, I realized, to my horror, that I had put on the wrong shoes. I absent-mindedly put on a ratty old falling-apart pair of totally unsuitable shows with holes in the bottom and cracks in the sides. Stupid, stupid, stupid. But I had little choice other than to play anyway. It was time and my opponent was there. Crapola.

So I played the first set, and it was pretty lackluster play on my part. But my opponent was making a lot of errors. Near the middle of the first set I was up 5-3, and then I just lost focus. I lost the next four games before I even knew what was happening. And my opponent played really well, too.

By the time the first set ended, I felt like there was gravel in my shoes under both of my big toes. I took my shoes off and my socks were soaked in blood. I had worn all the skin off of the bottom of both of my big toes from constant bad friction due to my cruddy shoes. Great. That'll teach me to wear the wrong shoes. And it was only the end of the first set. I still had at least one more to go.

The second and third sets were where the marathon play really started. I started out the second set playing well, but being outplayed by my opponent. His net play was starting to really improve, and my serve was not quite on (neither my first or second serves), and I rely on my serve a lot. So I was down 5-3 in the second set. I had also been starting to get really irritated due to having to rub my skin-deprived toes against the courts over and over again, and because of the fact that my piece-of-crap shoes were not letting me change directions fast enough.

But I pulled it together mentally, and managed to go to a calm place. The next two games were probably the longest ones of the who match. They seemed interminable. We just kept going back and forth from deuce, to ad, to deuce, to ad again, over and over. And then the one of us who was ahead would predictably choke, or the one behind would get in a beautiful, unreturnable shot. I was beginning to wonder what circle of hell this was.

I squeaked out these two long games and brought the score to 5-5. This really helped my confidence, and I won the next two games fairly easily.

In the third set, my opponent seemed to get that steely determination that comes from being behind, where you just dig in and say to yourself, "Not on my watch." Of course, I don't know what he was thinking, but his play got really aggressive and error-free. And I was falling apart both mentally and strategically. My errors increased, my toes hurt like hell, and I found myself screaming cuss words upon flubbing points. I got mad in my usual way, though; I would scream out an obscenity and then feel sheepish and stupidly laugh. I rarely hold on to the anger. Next thing you know, I was down 4-1, and the first three games weren't even competitive at all. I think I only scored about two points in the first three games of the third set. Elvis was nowhere near the building.

But then I did the same thing I had done in the second set and just brought it home. I stopped making as many errors, and started playing steadily and methodically. I won the next game to get to 4-2, then lost another game, when my opponent surged. So now i was down 5-2. Then I played really well in the next three games. I tied it up at 5-5. Now I was confident again, but I never would have predicted this outcome from how I started out the third set. By this time, my opponent's body language was starting to seem defeated, and I was feeling like I was in it for the long haul. The next two games were tough, but I squeezed it through the birth canal again and pulled out the set. It was two and a half hours after the start of the match, the pads of my toes were absolutely shredded (hey, what is the worst that could happen? staph infection, amputation, death?), and I did it.