Yesterday's results from the court reflected the following: 6-0, 4-6, 1-6. In fact, it was in many ways more lopsided even than that: I was up 4-2 in the second set, meaning I had won 10 games to Z's 2, then he came back and finished up the match 10-1, including an 8-0 stretch. W, you may well ask, TF.
A lot of it was good old mean reversion. I am by no means that much better than Adam. In fact, if you go back and tot up the aggregate of the by now hundreds of sets and games we have played just during the pandemic, objectively you'd have to say he's better than I am, or that at least that he wins on average. I would certainly hope that if you were going to say that he is better than me, that you'd do it outside of my range of hearing or, at the very least, not on my blog.
Fact is, the second half of the match I didn't feel like I played that much worse than the first half. I'd be very interested in hearing what a good tennis player or coach observing us would say.
But one thing that is very clear was that internally, in my mind, I was having trouble processing dominating him and winning that soundly. If I had beaten him 6-0, 6-2, for one thing he would for sure have insisted on a third set, and rightly so, and there's no way I could have kept it up. I barely got through to 6-0 without flubbing it. I am not mentally trained to dominate. I definitely like having parity with friends.
It takes me back to the last time I was playing an awful lot with a good friend: 2008-9 when David and I were playing several times a week in Princeton, even as he was the broker selling our house. Mostly we were even but some nights one or the other of us would have a hot hand. David definitely got frustrated when I was crushing him, and he showed it and acted out. I can tell Z also gets down on himself a little but, as the numbers show, he is a very disciplined competitor and knows how to manage and channel his emotions, so I really needn't worry.
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