Victory?

So I beat Zinn today, 6-4. Or, rather, it might be more accurate to say that I didn't beat myself. To be sure, some days he beats me, but more often it is lapses in my own discipline that do me in. Trying to hit winners at stupid moments, forgetting where I am in the game, just getting bored 12 strokes into a long rally and making a bad decision.

Often it's because I have mental models of what I think should happen and I just let them ride. I get three or four games in hand and then I'm like "since he usually beats me losing 6-3 or 6-4 is not really losing, it's just par for the course." Much like I have told myself my whole life that I'm not good challenging in the air for balls on corner kicks, so I've never developed the skills and instincts necessary to do it right. I just let Josh, Leveau, and Konanc handle that back in the day. On defense I can talk shit and mark the big strong guys and act like I'm good at challenging for the ball, but if the ball actually comes close to us and they are in fact good at it, they will win.

There is one other thing about tennis today, though. So I won today, which I usually don't, and I did so by staying disciplined in these long, defensive, chess match rallies in which I waited for Adam to make a mistake. Often enough, he obliged. But when I lay my head on my pillow tonight, there won't be many dramatic highlights for me to replay in my head. I just didn't hit a lot of winners. So there wasn't a lot for my dreamscape, and in the end I have to decide what's more important. So much of my life consists of doing boring, sober things consistently and not making mistakes. Should my playtime?