Just little thoughts about my past:
Where do you find the stamina?
Where does endurance come from?
How do you finish the match, when the crowd is against you, the score is against you and it seems all of your best attempts seem to fall flat?
I watched a match last week and I was rooting for the underdog in that match. I could really relate to her. I don’t always root for the underdog. The other young lady was not the most skilled player, but her conditioning was clearly superior, which is why she won. I tuned in in the very beginning of the third set. It had been 2 and a half hours of grueling tennis. I love those kind of matches, although I haven’t three hours to devote to engaging my attentions to one match, unless it is a final of some grand slam. This was a qualifier match for the Open, hardly worth my attention usually. God had some sutures to apply to some open gaping wounds in my soul, that I hadn’t even noticed.
Hallelujah, for his attention to detail. This little girl may never play another match and her ministry to my soul would have been worth the humiliation of her loss. I owe her a debt of gratitude.
My first memory of a long match was a three hour grueling match against a formidable women at Rochdale. For weeks before the match, my father prepped me for a loss. You can’t practice as much as she is practicing, he said. You have school and so you might get a game or two. Minimizing my expectation was my father’s go to coaching style. He was a very young thirty something father of skilled athletic women and he was very proud of that status.
He had learned the power of persuasion from a doting, devoted quintuplet crew. I, perhaps more than they all.
The match came amidst many other responsibilities of freshman year at a new school. A brisk September, Saturday morning tourney match came upon us. My very first new can of balls. The investment of each match. Pop, fizz and that intoxicating freshness and greening of your mind and olfactory nerves is always exhilarating. I will never grow tired of that level of expectation. 40 something years later the sense of anticipation seems to still linger. We didn’t play 3 sets, we played a 9 game single set. It took 3 long hours for us to wrestle and crawl out from under the smoke of our entanglement. I had won. I could hardly believe it. I had beat my most formidable foe. A real woman and I at 14 had triumphed. My muscles and body felt wrung out, but my ambition had received a great and huge boost that would carry me through many battles won and lost over the high school season of play and growth.
Had I lost, perhaps my ambitions would have been more tempered. I can’t imagine that.
The young lady in the match that I saw the other night took me to that inevitability of having lost that match. I felt as though I had lost and several times I did lose, but perhaps if I had lost that match, I might have gone in another direction of life altogether. My father would have been right in his estimation of my skill set and perhaps I would have tried some other expression of life skills, completely. Who can tell?
