Never make predictions

Never make predictions, especially about the future.” – Casey Stengel, winner of 5 consecutive World Series.  We kicked off the season with two early losses and things looked bleak.  A few upsets later et voila – we’re back…

And what a great grand slam we got to see – I finally caught up on my sleep a few days after the fortnight with a 12 hour nap on Sunday.  I needed it as the Australian Open tournament is 16 hours ahead of our time zone which means play starting at 11am comes on at 7pm (EST) and how do you turn off an exciting match?  DVR?  I think not as it’s so hard to avoid hearing the results with our persistent connection to the web.

So, I’m sure you saw Hisense Arena – OK, I give, who is Hisense and how do they have enough money to sponsor a major sports arena?

(Apparently they are an electronics manufacturer / distributor)

I was totally Gobsmacked by all of the amazing comebacks.  I saw five matches where the eventual winner saved multiple match-out points.  If this doesn’t cement in your head the importance of keeping your cool during a tennis match then nothing will.  Remember John Blutarsky from Animal House, “Nothing is over until we decide it is.”  Apply this concept to our Mixed team and we are right back we we started from – déjà vu all over again!

There is a new iPhone USTA app that hopefully you’ve heard of.  It enables you to report match results from your phone without the match ID number.  It’s certainly version 1.0 but it’s a nice start.  It’s called “USTA League” and you can download it for free from Apple’s App Store.

Another diversion, my kids over the snow days went playing with other kids around our development.  My youngest told me they were going to the pond and I warned him to stay off of it.  Long story short, my son told me they went on the pond and even to the middle of it the next day. This pond is slushy, it was 42 degrees a few days prior and it’s 10’ deep.  I showed them YouTube videos of ice rescues and the danger of ice.  Hopefully this is a lesson learned and we’ve repeated this message several times.  The moral of this story is: life is precious – treasure what you have.

Since I seem to get positive responses (occasionally) when I add unusual content – here’s a song by Dire Straits that absolutely cracked me up.  I was trying to retro the song by replacing the subject of alcohol with tennis “Heavy Tennis” but I’ll just leave it alone (you’re welcome)!

Last time I was sober, man I felt bad

Worst hangover that I ever had

It took six hamburgers and scotch all night

Nicotine for breakfast just to put me right

’Cause if you wanna run cool

If you wanna run cool

If you wanna run cool, you got to run

On heavy, heavy fuel Heavy, heavy fuel Heavy, heavy fuel

OK – we played 2 ½ matches since my last post.  We still have to finish our 1/15 match against Idle Hour and I’m working with their captain John Ferringo to get this match finished.

We played the Wild Aces captained by Paul Wilson 1/21 at Springton.   We didn’t drop a set and I have to say Kathleen Glikes and Billy McElroy were our stars of the night.  They played #1 and our opponents smartly fed Kass a ton of shots as she camped out at the net.  Kathleen was a machine, Billy was aggressive and we won a nice match here against a super fun group.  Gary McGeehan and Ruth Portonova are long time stand out tennis players in our league and it’s always nice to spend time with people who “get it.”

On January 29^th we played the Rally Cats at Green Valley.  Again, we didn’t drop a set but we almost did.  In the first 15 minutes we were down or tied on every court.  There were a few contentious calls and I’m watching this match thinking, “not again.”  But alas, we settled in and rolled.  Our game balls for this match go to Cindy Caraher and Rob Attman who adjusted after a slow start and never looked back.  Post match highlights included my 9 year old son Gregory knocking back a few root beers at Outback and talking NON-STOP through dinner.  He’s such a good egg coming to the matches and it was great to see him having fun with our teammates.

We play the Pirates this Saturday 2/12 at 6pm at TA.  The Pirates recently got beat by a not so surprising UMLY team.  I blogged about playing for UMLY in the past and I mentioned that the 2011 team is not your Father’s UMLY team.  They are for real and have some terrific players including my ex 3.5 partner Brian Provost and ex Pork Chop (from our 2008 Nationals team) Tania Sawchuck. Let hope we can vault back to first place with a win against a formidable team who recently beat us in an ultra close match earlier in the year (and yes they saved a match point and came back to win it.)