It is a rare, rare day. Victory is in the air. I felt it this morning and only ran 1 1/4 miles to keep myself spoiled for the match to come.
It is very hot and humid. The wind is like a blowdryer on high on your skin.
More importantly, it is that time of the month for Mrs. Scylla and her energy is at low ebb.
Grandma comes over to babysit, and we leave for the club.
“Do we have to put the top down?” my wife asks. She loves air conditioning, and hates what the convertible does to her hair and skin.
“It’s a beautiful day, let’s go for it!” I say as we leave, top down.
My wife sits next to me irritated and slightly unhappy as the wind whips the hair into her face, and tangles it up during the 20 minute ride. It is ungodly hot, and I know that the sweat is going to make her back stuck to the seat. She hates that.
We warm up, and I’m purposefully moving slow, missing some shots. I don’t give her the pace she wants on the ball and this frustrates her further.
Finally we’re ready to play.
“So, what are we playing for?” I ask casually.
My wife, the Angel of Death’s eyes narrow predatorily.
“One hour deep backrub.” She says.
“I’ve been invited to play poker this Friday. If I win, I get to go.”
My wife pauses a moment. Friday’s are family night. It’s an unusal request, but I haven’t gone out with the guys in years, and this is supposedly a great poker group, and I’m a poker demon. I want this bad.
She’s calculating the risk factors now, the heat, the time of the month, the sun. Thinking about my warmup she decides it’s a small risk.
“You’re on.”
“3-2-1, right?” I ask.
She nods.
3-2-1 represents the number of games she’s going to spot me. 3 in the first set, 2 in the second, 1 in the third, if it gets that far.
We spin, she serves.
After 8 years, we know each other’s game very well. Lest you think I’m a wuss for taking games from my wife, I’m a strong 4.0 almost a 4.5 player. My wife is the tennis goddess, best player in the club, male or female, and wins most of the tournaments withing 50 miles of us.
Her serve is for shit though. It’s not a weapon, she just gets the ball in play deep enough and hard enough to avoid someone killing a return. My usual strategy is to chip and charge. Usually my wife passes or lobs me on the next shot if I haven’t executed properly. To day I want to win, and I’m taking a different tack.
I hit her a high soft floating forehand to the baseline, and retreat. I keep hitting soft shots, left, right, deep, short. I’m trying to make her expend energy. In spite of my change-up she wins the first game.
“What are you doing?” She asks. “Is something wrong?” I shrug. We switch sides. It’s my serve.
I guess now’s a good time for some background info. I’m 6 feet tall and 210 pounds, all muscle and bone. I have my grandfather’s Polish peasant, Neanderthal type build, but my father’s stamina. By personality, and physique, I am all about power. My tennis buddies call me “Rocket man,” for my serve, which I secretly think of as “The Thunderbolt.” I charge the net, and swing at volley’s. I expend tremendous energy, and hit shots with lots of pace. I run down everything. I’ve always had great stamina, and now that I’m training for a marathon, it is for all intents and purposes limitless. This is why I get less games as the match goes on.
There’s a problem though. Life being a mere metaphor for tennis it is consistent to not that this problem plagues me in real life as well.
I may be a battering ram, but a battering ram posesses neither grace nor subtlety. Despite, or perhaps because of my gifts in other areas I am only average in what players call “touch.” I do not flow organically. My swing is mechanical, not organic.
Picture a medieval warrior. I’m the guy they’d buckle up in heavy armor, strap a shield to one arm and a heavy battleaxe to the other.
My wife’s stamina on the other hand, is only slightly above average. She’s well-conditioned but not gifted here.
But how does she play?
Picture Cyrano De bergerac with his rapier. Such is my wife with a tennis racket. The racket is an eextension of her arm, a part of her body, and she moves with a pure natural predatory athletic grace that few women posess. Most good female tennis players move like men when they play. Those of you who are older may remember Evon Goolagong. She moved like a female panther on the courts, not like a man.
My wife moves the same way. Every motion flows into the next. There is none of the start/stop movements, or overmuscling of shots. She moves as seemingly effortlessly as a ballerina, and the natural flow of her swing imparts deceptively wicked power to her shots.
Today though, I want to win. I wanna play poker, drink beer, and smoke cigars this Friday. This is my dream.
I serve. I give heer the second serve right off the bat. No thunderbolt, I just spin it in.
My wife is unprepared and has to rush in to get the shot. I lob one over her head. I win this game after 3 or 4 deuces, hitting evewrything soft and making her move.
The Angel of Death is adapting though, and she quickly takes the next game. She’s onto my strategy. She knows I’m drawing to draw her out, not letting her feed off my energy but expend her own. She’s determined, but maybe a little scared. It’s hot, and I might just wear her down. She’s decided to go all out and finish me off quickly.
I make the most of my 3 game advantage, but she wins 6-4 in the first set. There was a lot of deuces. A lot of long points, and it cost her a lot of energy.
I’ve saved my energy. THis was the advantage I wanted. In the second set I give it everything I have.
I unchain the thunderbolt.
This is a scary decision. After 8 years my wife knows how to handle my serve. She’s more than capable of taking a serve from me that would be a winner everywhere else, and ripping it cross-court, or down the line.
Though it hasn’t been clocked I’m sure my serve breaks 100 mph easily.
To combat this, I’ve had to escalate things. Like Scotty in the engine room of the Enterprise, I’m doing dangerous things to get a whee little bit more power on this bad boy.
More power = less control.
I toss the ball very high. The perfect toss feels like it’s just barely to far in front of me and to the right. I lean away from the ball, cocking my arm back to its limit. At the last moment I push it a little further dipping the racket head.
I shift forward, rotate, and instead of letting my arm swing naturally, I add muscle force. I am barely holding onto the very end of the racket, trying to get as much height out of the point of contact as humanly possible. I jump, and as my swing hits apex, my cocked wrist snaps forward. When executed perfectly, the ball explodes a crater of hard true, and bounces unpredictably from the flat (no spin) serve.
On a good day works half the time. When I try to give it something “extra” like today, maybe 25%.
Today is a good day. By playing with reckless abandon, and expending ungodly energy I eek out a 7-5 victory.
The final set is war. The thunderbolt serve is unsustainable. It hurts my shoulder terribly, and there’s only so many times you can swing as hard as possible. I am judicious in its use. My wife’s lobs paint the lines. She is exhausted, and I’m still able to run down everything. She’s on the ropes.
It’s 4-2 in the third set. I hit a shot down the backhand line to win the game. Knowing the cruciality of the point my wife runs it down, slides like a gazelle, and in a timeless moment as she winds up, and she checks my position our eyes meet.
This is one of those rare perfect moments in sports. The ones that make it all worthwhile.
I am positioned perfectly in my even court, at the top of a bounce on the balls of my feet. Depending on what she does I am where I need to be for a quick sprint to cut off a cross-court shot and put it away. I am uncommitted at this moment though, and could just as easily bouncee right to crush any attempt to pass me down the line.
My wife is on the run. She’s exhausted and moving too fast, and the ball is to far in front of her for her to slow down and hit it well. She will have to hyperextend if she wants to return the shot. She’ll be overcommitted and will have no chance of getting into position to hit another ball.
She’s dead meat, and we both know it.
In slow motion my wife’s eyes close. She’s running on kinesthetic awareness now, sensing everything with radar.
She extends to commit and her head cocks to the right, as her two-handed backhand comes off the backswing. It’s all or nothing, a full power shot. Anything else is hopeless. For a moment, I feel pity. The Angel of Death is going down, and there’s something a little sad about it, the end of an era. Sad that power and brute force should destroy such beautiful grace and precision.
But that’s what I’m here to do.
As I come down from my bounce and watch her head cock, I begin to move, and then stop.
It’s a fake! She’s faking right! I know that move. I settle for the down the line shot that I know is coming.
Crack! She hits her shot, exclaiming loudly with the effort.
I am in perfect position for the down the line shot that never comes.
She hits the winner cross-court.
My wife faked right, and then went right.
Think about that a moment.
I’m still shaking my head at the impossibility of such a thing.
It was a whole other level.
Needless to say I won’t be playing any poker Friday.
As my feet touch
