Saturday, March 27, 2010

Some of the Best things in life are Free


I had been playing tennis for about 4 months, almost 4-5 days a week, and I was ready to graduate from my 60$ wilson racquet for beginners to a more advanced one. The best way to go about doing this was to get a demo racquet from one of the sports stores(Dicks sports in this case). A demo program as the name suggests is where they let you try out some racquets for a nominal fee before buying one. I picked a few demo racquets and left my existing one with them for restringing(all the racquets lose their tension over time and you have to restring them).
Of all the racquets I had picked I liked the Prince O3 Red the best. It was head heavy(throwing in some techie terms to up the cool factor) and seemed to give a lot of power to my shots. But at 220$ it begged the question, "was it worth it?". Still undecided a week later I went back to return the demo pieces and get my restrung racquet back. But we had another thing coming, the restringer informed us that he had misplaced my racquet and that I should try coming back another time. He seemed really sorry and he let me keep the demo racquet for another week. Only I knew how happy that made me. The next day Vinay and I were going on our first tennis vacation to a tennis camp in the beautiful Catskills mountains in Upstate New York. I was thrilled to go to the camp with the Prince racquet.
The camp was fun and I returned to Dicks with the demo racquet and a 220$ question mark on my head. The stringer, during this time, had managed to find my original and guess what he tells me.... "Since you guys were so nice even though I misplaced your racquet, I am going to let you keep this Prince racquet for free". I couldn't believe what I had just heard. Vinay and I actually ran away lest he would change his mind.
The Prince racquet has served me well over the last 4 years, its been my best weapon on the court :)
I have tried several other racquets with the quest of more power or more control but this "Prince" is the one and the fact that it was free makes me wanna jump with Joy

Friday, March 5, 2010

One more

Yesterday was another one of those nights when I was really thankful that I play tennis.
This match was against Ed and Susan(mixed doubles). I know Ed as a very good player so I was little surprised when we broke his serve right away in the first game. My partner Steven so rightly said hey just because we broke him doesnt mean anything, he is one of those guys who just won't go away.
We managed to stay on top the first set and win it 6-4. But sometimes winning a set against good players drains you so much mentally that you tend to take a breather and if in the following set your opponent is first to serve, it could mean trouble. They are eager to make a statement and you are still riding on the high; not a good combination. We lost the 2nd set 6-0 :( !@#$.
The third set was going to be an uphill battle and what with these being timed matches(2 hours for mixed doubles) the odds were stacked pretty high against us.
I played some really agressive tennis in the 3rd of which I am proud. I felt I had really grown up in the last 2 years or so. If this were a match I played about 3 years ago I would have surely given up, pacified myself saying "I will practise more off court" , "Will take more lessons" etc etc but this time I fought, I told myself everything lies here and now.
We were tied up 4-all in the 3rd set when the buzzer went off signaling end of the match. The tie made the 3rd set invalid and they won by virtue of more number of games in their pocket.
It sucks to lose but the battle we put up there did something good for my spirit :)