I am not going to lie to you, faithful reader, last week's performance was huge for us. Austin and I were getting down on ourselves after rigorous weeks of sacrificing school, social lives and sleep to pursue something we truly loved, cared for deeply and poured our hearts and souls into. We live for this stuff, and trying to maintain the lifestyle of a Legend without actually winning was getting difficult.
We took this near-victory as a sign from a higher power that we were destined for more. Among that, the weather and the fact that the only athlete we knew who was willing to play with us when we remembered we had to write this yesterday was a tennis player, we decided to take our talents to the Topliff tennis courts.
And by our, we really just mean mine, since Austin was out this weekend entertaining arguably our biggest fan, his mom. A mere hour before the match, he decided that a quick hour and a half tour of Harpoon Brewery with his designated driver and mother was a great idea for the team. Needless to say, between that and the festivities that went on the night before, he was sidelined for this one, and quoted as saying, "Totally worth it" and "It's not my fault their chocolate Stout tasted like chocolate milk." A quick aside to Harpoon representatives, if you are reading (and we know you are) we are looking for sponsors and our people will be in touch.
So this week's challenge fell on my shoulders, and my challenger was Justin Chan '16 of the men's tennis team. To those of you who have the pleasure of knowing Chan: yes, we did choose to play the only tennis player sidelined with a shoulder injury the afternoon after a huge party at a his fraternity. Two can play at your petty scheduling games, D-1ers.
In preparation for the match, I played some Wii tennis (at the pro level, because there are no other levels for legends), wore all white for the entire week in honor of Wimbledon, and even began to make guttural grunting sounds when working out and doing mundane daily tasks, since that's what all of the best players do (or at least the Williams sisters). Unfortunately for all our hardcore fans out there, we have not launched our own clothing line. Yet.
Anyway, the challenge was set for Saturday afternoon, and after all of our training early Sunday morning last week, a late afternoon start time put me immediately at an advantage. However, to even it out, Justin had just come from "practice," where he had already "warmed up." It didn't take me long to get warm, I just hit a few balls against the fence (or over it, I guess sometimes a legend doesn't know his own power) to get my shoulder oiled up.
Justin said he was recovering from something that sounded serious, and of course, we didn't listen to long enough to remember. End game, he couldn't serve or hit overhand very hard. All we could think about was that this could be the advantage we needed, since in tennis, serving is supposed to be an advantage. Losing a game in which you serve is known as a break in tennis, and as a Legend, I may have lost for the past couple of weeks, but I was certainly never broken, and didn't intend to be broken this day.
The match started out slow, and by slow I mean I didn't score much of anything. Justin may have been scoring some, I guess, but that was to be expected after all of the time he spent warming up and trying too hard. I started to pick things up a bit, with some more movement, and made some attempts to get up to the net and force Justin into a mistake. Problem is, Justin, like many other varsity athletes, doesn't really make mistakes, and capitalized on essentially every single one that I made. I went down 0-1 in the first game, but came back to turn up the intensity.
Turning up the intensity just meant I ran more and Justin started placing shots in harder to reach places. Things started to go downhill from there, and Justin continued to hit harder and harder shots, and Freddie's shots began to go higher and higher over the fence. The "best of three" challenge quickly turned into a "best of 5," and then a "best of seven," and then a very informative learning experience. Whatever, he's nasty. That isn't our fault.
The match ended with a big goose egg for me, and a few more than that for Justin, so I guess he won, technically. The Legends stand at 0-3-1, and have yet to register a win on the year. But we still had our sign. The season is young, however, and apparently even the Jets can win.
