"What part a' New Jersey you from?"

So I played that guy (see 3 posts back if you don't know) in tennis last night. He was very serious about tennis. He was in incredible shape for being 57 years old, and he was about a 3.5 player (NTRP ratings, if that means anything to anyone). I think he remembered every tennis event that has happened to him for the past 30 years and told me about most of them. He had several racquets which he had ordered as demos from the internet (he tries them out, then sends them back), and he kept switching back and forth between them (I think he used 3 racquets in one game, once), saying how one didn't have enough control, and that one was the lighter and helped him when he was getting overpowered, etc. He even busted out his roll of lead tape, which Sampras (and others) used to make his racquet heavier. He was, in short, a very silly man.

Anyway, the entire match something had seemed strange to me: he kept looking at his watch before games and before a lot of points. I figured since he had called me that he probably didn't have anything else to do tonight, and he didn't look old or sickly enough to be on a medicine schedule. However, in the third or so game of the second set, I had just hit a winner and was walking toward the net to switch sides, when he told me that the score was 40-30, and that wasn't game. I thought about it, walked back through every point with him and showed him that I had already won 4 points, it must have been 40-15 when I last served, and that was game. He agreed, and he said, "Oh, I must have pushed the button wrong." I really had to work hard to keep from laughing aloud at that point -- he had been keeping score on his watch. I have played competitive tennis for about 10 years now and have never once heard of a watch that keeps score for you. Apparently this thing was extremely complicated, because I later asked him what time it was, and he finally answered me after about 15 seconds of frantic button-pushing.

Anyway, for those of you who play tennis, you can maybe appreciate this post a little more. The moral of the story is that tennis money is better spent on lessons than fancy watches, racquets, and lead tape (this applies to most of the 25-handicap golfers with too much money I've ever heard of, too). He was a very nice guy and I had a good time, despite sort of making fun of him here. But who wants to read about nice he was? Also, God bless Texas 5-A sports.