Any opponent can be beaten on any given day

It was the spring of my junior year. Our high school tennis team limped into the second and… It was the spring of my junior year. Our high school tennis team limped into the second and final round of the conference playoffs, expecting a quick defeat and another season closed. We’d played our finals opponents twice in the regular season. They’d given us our only two losses, 5-2 both times.

They weren’t us and we weren’t them. Our team heard that seven of their 10 starters took private lessons. None of ours did. We used bargain and borrowed rackets. The windbreakers around our courts were tattered. We shared buses to practice with other teams.

Yes, we played hard and we trained, but never at the expense of a good time. We’d often rather drive balls into the pond, a la Barry Bonds, than work on backhands. We’d drill shots at one another until someone went down with the word Wilson tattooed on his gut.

Our jokes were crass, our language crude. We discussed professional tennis close to never. A crowd of misfits on the court, we shared even less off. But on that day, something fit together.

The wind crept through the wetlands of Cow Meadow Park, our territory. Then the enemy’s big, yellow monster pulled into our parking lot.

Having only six courts for seven matches, one contest would have to wait for another match to finish play before it could begin. The coaches picked second doubles, my spot. My partner Ryan and I took spots on the bench to watch our first singles player take on a genuine titan of tennis in our conference.

Realizing that, in all probability, every one of the other six matches would finish before us, Ryan and I knew that for our match to have any significance, our team would have to win three of six. Then fate showed up.

The other team’s first singles player went down with an injury. He cut his finger while opening the can of tennis balls. He cut his finger and couldn’t play!

Our captain won the match against their substitute handily, 1-0. We were on top. Ryan and I took the court. While we were playing, our second singles team lost, 1-1, third doubles won, 2-1, first doubles lost, 2-2, and third singles went down, 2-3.

When our fourth singles player came up with a win, evening the score at 3-3, Ryan and I knew the entire team match was ours to win or lose. It was just the way we wanted it.

The first set of the best-of-three match was close. They played us well. But we came out on top. The combination of my quickness and Ryan’s blunt, dominating power proved to be too much for them.

In the second set, we drove straight through them. The match ended with a serve from Ryan and a poor return from our opponents. Standing on the left side of the court, I watched the ball come over the net. I watched it drift toward the out-of-bounds line and across the whiteness that divided success and failure.

I’ve never prided myself on having a strong memory, but I can still feel today what I felt back then, three years ago. Pure excitement, it was like fire. We celebrated for weeks.

I’ve yet to tire of telling that story, and I can’t foresee that I ever will. It’s still so vivid, even if the exact details have made way for nostalgic speculation.

There are few moments in my life that stand out as important, and if asked why, I’d probably be hard-pressed to justify why that game meant so much to me. There was something indescribable about it – something that taught me more about myself then all the hours I spent in a classroom.

But standing there, holding my racket in sheer disbelief, watching my teammates flood around us wildly, I realized that I’d lost something.

For me, the greatest moment ever in sports was now a thing of the past. Nothing I’ve seen has compared, not Todd Pratt of the Mets homering in the 10th to put down the Diamondbacks at Shea Stadium, not sitting in the press box at Heinz Field, nothing.

And so this is why I keep going back, to watch and to play. And sometimes I feel like the cliched old man, scanning the horizon for a long-lost friend, continuing to look for something to give me half of what I felt back then on those old green and red courts, trying to take back what I lost.

Maybe I’ll get older and maybe, one day, I’ll stop wanting to be in that park watching that ball slip out of bounds. But I doubt it.

Adam Fleming is a columnist for The Pitt News.