Sandbagger, part II

(Here's part 2 of the mini-series on my tournament experience. Part 1 can be found here.)

Sunday dawned bright and early and I headed over to the Muni courts for my 8:30am match with Marco. Previously all the 4.0 matches had been relegated to the courts at Pershing Park, but now we were going to join the rest of the field at Muni. I frequently play at Muni. In fact, most of my matches with Marcus happen there. The problem with Muni is that it is *right* next to the freeway. There's currently construction going on to erect a sound barrier between the courts and the cars whizzing past, but right now it's a zoo. The first three courts are a little sheltered, but anything beyond that and you're dealing with noise, wind, and courts in need of resurfacing. They sent Marco and I out to Court 8 to play. On our walk to the court Marco told me that he knew Gary. In fact, he had been sitting courtside and watched our doubles match yesterday. Gary told Marco that I was "going to kick his ass". I laughed and we started to warm up. My dual 6-0, 6-0 wins from yesterday had made a statement, and whispers were flying around that there was a ringer in the 4.0 draw. Marco hit the ball hard but was wildly erratic; pretty much the perfect opponent for me. I ran off my 3rd 6-0, 6-0 win and was into the semifinals in less than an hour. I was ecstatic; I'd never been this far in a tournament, and so far I had played almost the minimum number of games. I was hopeful that fitness wouldn't be a factor. But things were about to get much tougher.

Since I finished so quickly I went to scout out my next opponent, the winner of the Andrew-Stan match. Andrew had lost the first set but looked to be making a strong push in the second. He is an energetic, young guy who likes to force the action, I noted. Stan is much older; I guessed he was in his 60s, and seemed to be a pusher. He floated balls back, dinked other shots, but looked to be a little slow. I figured if I faced off against him, I'd just make him move. Happy with my analysis, I went home to stretch and cool down.

Throughout the tournament I had been pushing myself to hydrate as much as possible, to the point where my stomach would feel slightly unsettled because of it. At this point I had drunk something like four bottles of Gatorade, and the equivalent of eight bottles of water, if not more. Factor in almost constant nerves, and I was going to the bathroom like crazy. I headed back to Muni for my 11:45am match and found out that Stan had advanced. I was going to play the old-man pusher. Now that we were at Muni, we ran into the scheduling difficulties that frequently crop up in the tournaments. Due to a backlog of matches, we started almost an hour later than scheduled. I had peed three times just while I was sitting there waiting. They sent us out to Court 11 - I didn't even know there were 11 courts there (Ed. note - there are actually 13)!

Up close I could see that I had mistaken Stan's age; he was "only" 48. We warmed up as the temperature climbed. Saturday had been unseasonably warm; 73 degrees at the end of February, and Sunday was shaping up to be more of the same. The conditions had yet to affect me, but the sun was beating down on my suntan lotion-less face. Still, both of us looked pretty strong in the warm up. So far all the guys I had played had been very nice guys. I dislike arguing line calls and gamesmanship, and luckily none of that stuff had entered into my tournament experience. Yet.

How did I fare against the old-man pusher? Did I wilt in the noonday sun like week-old flowers? Check back for the next part of the saga! The series continues with Sandbagger, part III.