Z took me 6-1, 6-4 yesterday. And it gets worse. I was up 4-1 in the second set, and then I just collapsed. Frankly it's not that I played that badly. The two sets took us almost two whole hours, because there were a lot of games that went to deuce and just kept going. It's just that Adam won most of them.
One thing I will say is that my mental state didn't help. Even in games where I was up, I'd let negative thoughts creep in and trip me up. Entirely unrelated negative stuff. For example, at lunch last week I heard that Sonya Manning, a Black woman in our high school class, had recently died of COVID. I'm pretty sure I have blogged about how poorly I knew that Black women in our class, since gifted tracking and then Honors and AP classes meant that I went effectively to a parallel segregated school within an integrated school. I knew lots of the Black guys because I was a striver on the basketball court. For years I played at lunch and went to gyms on weekend nights to work on my game, which made me a not bad but not great basketball player. So I knew the Black guys -- and Pam Clarke (but who didn't) -- but not Black women.
But Sonya Manning looked very familiar when I consulted the old Proconian. Why I let that thought creep into my mind on tennis games when I was up -- along with other similar negative things -- that's the question. It's a pattern of self-defeating behavior.
Generally, I was unable to consistently stick to a strategy of letting Adam make mistakes and beat himself. It just gets boring. He is better at that than I am. I give up and go for winners too quickly. The boring stuff works and makes for long rallies and lots of exercise benefit, but poor blogs.
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