February 17, 2020 (Court Day #339)
Presidents Day

47 degrees. Overcast. There was mist on my windshield as I drove to Brommer Park. I arrived a few minutes after 9:00 and I was expecting it to be busy off the bat due to the holiday, but the parking lot had a mere handful of cars in it. As I walked toward the courts and turned the storage building, I could see I was player number 9. Odd man out. I was thinking, “Where is everyone?”

Leslie and her visiting nephew Justin taking on Wayne and Tim on the near court.

It would get very busy later though. We had at least 50 people today!

I was in a game against Allan and Tristan. After we played out a point, I walked up to the net and told Tristan, “In a tournament, your serve would have been a fault. Your foot was past the centerline. You need to be between the imaginary extension of the two lines. I’m not going to call you on it here though.” Allan wasn’t convinced. “When I started, I was told I could be anywhere along the baseline.” “No, it’s a fault.” Alan replied, “I’ll ask someone.” I was mildly annoyed and amused. “I’ve read the 2020 rulebook, the 2019 rulebook, the 2018 rulebook, the 2017 rulebook. It’s a fault.” To Allan’s credit, he did come to me later and admitted, “I asked 40 people and you were right.” I kidded, “It’s nice to be right once in a while!”

There was an older man named Ray whom I’d never seen before. After a game together, I told him I wasn’t left-handed. At first, he thought I was joking, but then I told him about my tennis elbow. He said he’d had it himself and went to a local man who used “trigger point therapy” to fix his tennis elbow. Ray said it fixed his problem. Ray had used a tennis ball to massage his forearm. He showed me what he did, which was rubbing a ball between the forearm braced against your body and a wall, I borrowed a club pickleball and we used a wall outside the court to demonstrate. The ball is supposed to help breakdown the bumps on the muscle. You find the spot and hold it until your fingers tingle. The concept is similar to the plastic self-massager that I bought on eBay.

The last three games were Olga and Juls against me and tall lefty Gregg. (I haven’t seen “3G” Gregg in months.) We lost the first, won the second decisively, and lost the third.

It was a enjoyable long session of four and a half hours under beautiful skies—it had gotten nice! Out about 1:30 p.m.!

Number of days on a court: 339
Number of total hours: 956.5

To start at the beginning of this blog click on “1st Post” in the menu above.