Because of my knee injury, I’ve been playing some tennis this summer. For some reason, tennis doesn’t aggravate the knee, which is pretty surprising. Anyhow, I played a lot of tennis as a kid, to the point where I was taking lessons and clinics and such, playing probably 3x a week for a few years. I got to be pretty decent, but I never did much match play. Mostly clinics and lessons.
Two years ago, I took a clinic at Harvard with Catherine. I really enjoyed it, and later that summer I did this match play thing they had set up. You just showed up, and they matched you with another person to play a set. Usually you would get to play 3 different opponents in one evening. It was a lot of fun, especially since I don’t have a lot of experience playing matches against strangers. I lost most of my matches, but I felt that I had played respectably.
A few weeks ago, I got an email from the tennis camp saying they had a tournament this week. For $15 you could play every evening Monday-Thursday. Same deal as before, where they set you up with an opponment, and you play a single set. 3 “matches” every night. I didn’t go Monday, but yesterday I decided to give it a try. I showed up and was matched against an older man, who was OK but frankly I thought I was better. He beat me 6-1, with me being extremely nervous and making lots of errors. My second match, I beat this guy about my age 6-2, with him being very inconsistent. I didn’t play particularly well, but I didn’t have to in this match. My final match that day, I played doubles and we lost 6-2. But that match I served pretty well, and I was feeling more confident.
Today I went back and was first matched against one of the guys I had played doubles against yesterday. I lost my first service game, again because of inconsistency, but after that I settled down, and I didn’t lose another service game all night. At 2-3 I broke him back, and at 5-4 I changed my strategy to go for bigger shots, and I won the set 6-4. My second match, I played a young guy who hadn’t played in a long time but who had clearly been very good. When I was hitting around with him, I had trouble staying in the rallies with him. So when I served first, I decided I was going to serve big since I didn’t think I could beat him by just hitting the ball back. Well, my serve was on tonight, and I won that first service game. It turned out that this guy was wildly inconsistent, and I ended up winning 6-0. More importantly, I was just killing my serve, and this set gave me a lot of confidence in my serve. The final match was a doubles game with me and this woman against the inconsistent guy I had just played and his friend. His friend was quite good, and our strategy was basically to keep it away from him. In this match, my serve was just nasty. I was hitting a big flat serve for my first serve, and a slower slice for my second. By the end, I was so confident in my serve that I was going for big slice serves, just trying to throw off the pace a little bit. My ground strokes and volleying were only OK in this game, but my partner was good and my serve was great, and we won 6-3. After the game, the better guy on the other team came up and asked to play me tomorrow. Regardless of the outcome, it’s flattering to hear that he wants to play me.
This was one of the best nights of tennis I’ve had in a long time. I don’t think I’ve ever served this well, and that confidence transfers over to the rest of your game. Every few years this happens: I start playing tennis again, I get really excited about it, and circumstances change and I stop playing. It’s hard to play in Boston in the winter, but maybe I can make it happen this year. We’ll see.
