*dogs lose 4-3, comes down to the sixth singles court.
ZA POPULI ZA DIEU
Slinging slices of pizza out into the crowd was a very great thing thank you to the university, the alumni association, the athletics department, the coaches and staff here very grateful to the operation for slinging slices of pizza into the crowd for free.
THE STORY OF THE PLAYER IN THEIR CONTROL OF LOOSE BALLS AND GAME FLOW
In tennis, at every level but the highest ones, the players themselves are responsible for retrieving the balls between points. Because there is a potential for a second serve if the first is out, each point ideally begins with the server in possession of an extra ball, so that they can attempt a second serve if need be without the distraction and effort of finding a ball. At the end of every point, the ball that’s been in play is either at the net, rolling around in the court, resting at the back of the court, or has ventured onto an adjacent court (or has been hit out of facility). Within each of these possibilities, there are many different potential actions a player can take, all of which have to do with self-care, concern for others, and ritual. Some want to push unwanted balls into corners (if on a corner court), for some combination of wanting the ball to be further out of the way or in order to take more time between points (or again, because that’s what they do and it’s comforting to do it over and over). The player will normally have a strategy regarding pace, and will either slow down when their opponent is hot, or go fast to tire out an opponent or to feed on momentum.
Something kind of related but different and deeper is how players interact with balls not in play, how they think about the organization of the game and the court, of the burden they might be to other players, to the prospect of making the game as easy as possible on all courts, and especially in this latter gesture, how they might make the game smooth and easy for their opponent. For instance, in sending a ball to their opponent before/after a point, do they hit it directly to them, in a neutral way, with no spin and not too high (have they put it right on the opponent’s racket?)? When they are frustrated, do their manners rupture, and they strike the ball harder than usual over to the opponent’s side, for them to retrieve? Do they create gradations of hostility? (I’ve seen someone smack a ball in frustration after a point in a match where matches were going on simultaneously on either side, and the ball ended up venturing into the adjacent court and the point had to be replayed. This actually cost their teammate a point. In fact, I’ve seen the same player do this very thing twice in one match, both got called “let”, and in both instances they interrupted a point in which their teammate had an advantage.)
There are many aspects to this dynamic of the game, and they illustrate both the subtle mental games that can play out along with the official score, as well as the character of the players who decide how they’re going to conduct themselves in this subtly complex game-within-a-game.
FUNCTION OF ‘SHOT’ IN TENNIS DISCOURSE
There’s a byproduct of every use of “shot” in various sports. Some are better than others.
In the gun sports, like skeet shooting, “shot” is literally the aimed shot of a firearm, and this is by far the worst, most alienated feel of the word. There is nothing to behold in the end of the shot, in the shattering of clay and what it says about the shooter’s ability. The practice leading up to it smells like metal and seems unimportant and expensive.
In hockey, the shooter shoots an imprecise puck off a slippery surface and hopes that it passes across a vertical border into a net, past a goalie. The shooter wants the puck to score at all costs, even if this means it deflects off another player, even if it passes through myriad deflections and diversions on the way to the goal, all this in a sport where the players constantly put their bodies on the line in a way unheralded in most sports.
I don’t have much to say about a soccer shot, except that it combines the better aspects of the hockey shot with some of the elegance of the basketball shot, up next. But generally I am subordinating shots at goalkeepers to the pure shot.
The function of “shot” in basketball is quite good. There are many different sensations attached to passing the ball through the horizontal boundary of the rim. There’s the violence of the dunk, the beauty of logic/chance at baskets that incorporate the rim, and the non-violent perfection of the rimless swish. Every gesture of defending the rim goes back to the team and the complex relations of offensive and defensive strategy.
The superiority of the tennis “shot” has to do with the complexity of its elegance. Tennis strokes take years of repetition to develop. The spins and contours of each shot are formed by sophisticated racket technology and supreme physical ability, above all footwork and hand-eye coordination. The game is built on shots—they do not come at some violent endpoint. So while it can be said a basketball player can find a shooting rhythm, the basketball player will never find a rhythm or need to find a rhythm like a tennis player, who will have to execute possibly many successive successful shots in a row to win a point in a game that essentially amounts to physical chess.
Lott-mudd 