SB Tennis Misadventures

A post on my own tennis misadventures...

The other night was our league match again, and I played at #2 with this other young guy named Ryan. The two guys we were playing were pretty old, in their 50s probably, so I thought we'd roll them. The match starts and one of them turns out to have a pretty big serve, a decent forehand, and good volleys. Actually they were both quite good at the net; they had really soft hands and hit a lot of drop volleys that I wasn't expecting. Anyway, I lose serve and then Ryan does too, and we lose the first set 6-2 in like 15 minutes. Second set we get our act together and go up an early break, and I'm thinking we're gonna roll, but we just keep the one break advantage and hold out to 6-3. However, the other team figures out that we're not that great on overheads. I'm average, ditto for Ryan; we just can't put these things away. We hit a hard serve and *poof* they launch one skyward. Then they keep lobbing us until we hit it hard enough that they can't return it, or we miss. And of course when you miss an overhead you feel like a total ass, because you should win that point outright.

Third set comes up and I get broken immediately. We're caught in this vicious lob cycle and can't seem to break them. I'm serving again down 1-3, 15-30. I serve, *poof* goes the lob. I'm tracking this sucker down and drill it... into the bottom of the net. That was just it for me so I grab the ball, whirl around, and launch that sucker out of the courts. I had only meant it to hit the back fence, but I took a squash-shot forehand to it, and the backspin made it keep rising. It sailed over to a dude's house across the street, bounced off one of his pillars, and rolled back to our side of the street. That tension release must have done a little good because I came back from 15-40 to end up holding, and we all held serve. They served for the match at 5-3, but we played a miracle game to break back, held into a 3rd set tiebreaker, and finished it off 7-5! By far the most competitive match I've had in that league.