:: Life on Planet Dan-E ::

:: Thursday, April 24, 2008 ::

:: I got Beat by a Thirteen-Year Old ::

I played another round of tennis tonight. I usually get grouped with the advanced crowd, there's a few guys who are better than me, a few who are worse. Tonight, about halfway through a kid joins our group and is easily able to keep up. Florida is a hotbed of tennis talent, since the warm weather allows for year-round practice. Anna Kournikova lives here (though her record indicates she hasn't utilized the "practice" part much) and there are lot of ranked juniors who also practice at where I play.

The pro had us play King of the Court and this kid immediately had us on the ropes. And by "us," I mean some of the usual crowd that shows up at these clinics: late 20s, early 30s (and on other nights even older) guys who are B-Level players. We thought he was around eleven, so he wasn't hitting very hard, but he chased down every shot and returned everything deep with a metronome-like consistency. We've seen kids like this before but few ever played this well against grown ups so we thought maybe he was ranked Top-10. I was trying to go for a little too much so I beat myself more than anything but even on points where I though I had him, he managed to send it back. One regular who's a little better than me was putting up a good fight but he wasn't doing that much better.

Not only that, the runt started talking trash.

Us old guys started talking about humbling the little twerp, not on the court but by treating him like our little red-headed cousin: dumping the water cooler over his head, or maybe giving him a swirly. Ultimately, we decided to give him a wedgie but never got around to it, unfortunately.

Our on-court (and psychological) beating went on for a few more minutes. One of the guys found out he was thirteen, and when I asked, he said he was ranked 30th in the state of Florida age 14 and under. Okay, so he's not in the Top 10 and he's a teen. That didn't make me feel any better. I was still losing to a kid whose balls haven't even dropped yet.

And here I was starting to think my game was improving. Oh well. I could always take up bowling.

Labels: anger, I'm getting old, tennis

:: Miscellaneous Ramblings by Dan-E at 12:11 AM [+] :: | 0 comments
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