Gonna need a mon-tage…

Pop indeed. 6-3, 6-4. I had my usual mental slump halfway through the second set, but I trusted Newton’s view of the physical world and let the racquet put the ball in the right places. There was no mystical muttering, and a single obscenity audible only when Naz dropped the ball on to the netcord, where it rolled along almost a foot before lazily plopping into my court for a game point. Other than that, plain sailing and my first victory since last summer. It is all in the trusting. I should now, right now, run a beginners’ course on tennis basics. Soon it’ll be too late – all that raw info I still have laid out in orderly fashion in my frontal lobe will soon be swishing about in a nebulous, instinctive impulse. I want to pass this on. It’s gold dust.

That aside, Naz was struggling with his own game. We’ve both come a long way since we first played. He whipped in a couple of mammoth serves that hurt my hand to return them. And a few more that fizzed just long. When he gets that in the pocket, there’s going to be carnage.