We would like to invite NSMTA members to write for "My Most Memorable Match.” This match can be a victory or a loss. It can be about your experiencing ecstasy or agony or any other emotions. It can mark the turning point in a tournament or even in your career. Any singles or doubles match at a sanctioned junior, adult, senior, or super senior tournament or team event is fair game. All we ask is that you bring this unforgettable match back to life with vivid details and your unique perspective.
Please send your "My Most Memorable Match" story to website editor, Paul Fein.

If you would like to contact the author of an article below, please click on their email address.

A Match with Two Winners
Jeff Heely
jheely17@gmail.com
May 2020

A tennis player’s career can be marked by great matches, upsets, grind-it-out wins, and even playing in settings that are unforgettable.

Years ago, I was having dinner with Charlie Hoeveler and Geoff Cykman. Charlie has more than 50 gold balls and Geoff also has a slew. I have zero.

I asked them both the same question: “What’s better, losing a great match where you learn something or winning a sloppy match?” (Not that those are the only two options, of course.)

Geoff leaned more towards the former and Charlie the latter.

 The following summer I had the chance to play Geoff in the round of 16 at the Gerald Stratford Memorial Tournament in the bucolic settings at the historic Olympic Club in San Francisco. Geoff had, I believe, just captured a gold ball and was playing some incredible tennis.

Geoff really brings three strengths onto the court: phenomenal conditioning, a forehand that wears you down, and a tactician’s mind. I knew that I had to have a game plan that I could execute and the conviction to stay with it to have any chance of an upset.

My plan was simple; I would serve and volley at every opportunity. Back then I had a 110-plus mph serve and a pretty wicked twisting second. On Geoff’s serve, I would steer my returns wide to Geoff’s forehand exposing his backhand and grind, grind, grind.

The first set saw us exchange one service break each, and we headed into a tiebreaker. I got an early mini-break and served it out to capture it 7-4. The set had lasted a bit over an hour and a half.

In the second set, Geoff broke me once and prevailed 6-4. I felt like I was in a heavyweight boxing match. The second set lasted just over an hour. We were both drenched with sweat from throwing everything we had into every game.

The third set was a tennis version of Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed—like boxing but without the blood. Neither of us would quit. No service breaks, but plenty of break points for both of us. We headed into another tiebreaker to decide the match.

The breaker was a classic—big serves and grueling rallies. I served at 5-5, came to net, hit a solid volley to Geoff’s backhand. He raced over, set himself up perfectly, and sliced a crosscourt backhand passer in about three feet from the ad-court corner.

Geoff served for the match. He rolled in a heavy serve to my backhand, raced to the net and executed a forehand volley behind me, up the line to secure the victory. Match time was 4 hours, 10 minutes.

We met at the net and shook hands. With arms on each other’s shoulder, we walked off.

It was the best loss of my life. Thanks Geoff!

Geoff and I have been fast friends since that memorable match.

Internal Drama
Tupper Schoen
tupten@hotmail.com
May 2020

Sometime around April of 1999, I decided to enter a small regional tennis tournament. Though 44 years old, I entered the Open singles as there were only NTRP events 4.0 and below otherwise. At that time, I was slowly healing from the double whack of chemotherapy and radiation treatments for Hodgkin’s Disease, which I had finished in September the year before. 

I entered to “test” my skills and my energy. I was determined, and even a little bit confident, because I was hitting the ball well. All the while, I knew my endurance level was very sub-par. I generally never played in tournaments due to the nature of my job as a restaurant manager. Weekends at work were the busiest time making tournament play pretty inaccessible.

When the draw appeared, though it was very, very small, I saw that I was scheduled for two matches on Day One! That was a shocker, as I absolutely planned on one per day. So, I arrived at 8 a.m. for the first match on Friday with a different mental attitude—survival. We warmed up, I put two and two together, and four told me, “Be error-free, play as few points as possible, play only the percentages.” I did just that and got off the court fast. My next match, at 2 p.m., was the semis against the No. 1 seed!

When I arrived at the courts later, the weather had changed dramatically. We were in northern New Mexico in April, and the westerly wind was now howling at 20 to 30 mph and, though not gusting, blowing relentlessly.

My opponent was a lefty, tall and strong-looking. I recognized also, and immediately, a bit cocky. His lady friend lurked there on the sideline. When he strutted on court for the warm-up, I assessed: big forehand, slice backhand. His serve warmup suggested a big flat first ball.

I lost the first set 6-4. I was in there though, or so my mind said. But at the changeover after the next game, I began an internal dialogue that would last throughout the rest of the match: “You can beat this guy, but you need to be realistic. Two more sets? There is absolutely no way! So, shake his hand and retire.” 

Yeah, but remember, he was cocky from the get-go. That fired me up. So, I got up and we played on. You may infer correctly, I was really exhausted.

Well, remember that wind from the west? Now in total survival mode, I completely changed tactics and started hitting all my serves when on the north side of the court with only a looping slice out wide in the deuce court to his backhand. The wind did the rest and took the ball waaaay out there. All he could do was chip a floater, I came in and volleyed to the waaaaay open court. No real difference in the ad court either, as he was pulled way, way across the center line and with only a weak chip, I moved in to finish. He did not make any adjustment. Easy money.      

Playing on the south side was much harder and forced me to dink and conjure ways to avoid his mighty forehand. At every changeover, I sat and assessed my energy. The internal dialogue was becoming more and more insistent, imploring me: “Give it up and shake hands.”

My energy was totally spent, yet I had somehow won the set 6-3.

We sat between sets then. Now, my inner voice said, “ Good enough, you simply cannot play another set. You made your statement. Shake his hand. Get up, now!”

But another voice spoke and told me: “Fight on!” That voice was a little weak. But I listened, and I got up to play the third set. What I remember about that set is the thing that really sticks in my mind and makes me perk up even now as I write. I was wasted, clinically, in a way I had never felt before.

So here was the scenario: I walked slowly, head down, to receive serve every time, and never raised my racquet or looked up until he was in full motion. A funeral procession, if you will. Then I responded to the ball. When a point finished, my arms and racquet slumped and I walked to receive the next serve, never looking up, ever, until the toss. And so, the set went like that.

I played the wind perfectly and when I could not avoid his forehand, I never chased his shot, letting it become a clean winner. Energy preservation was the goal now. Every point was a new chore, and at every changeover, the smart side of my brain was now begging the other competitive side to shake his hand.

I slogged away in this fashion and lost the set 6-4. But, in my heart and soul, I knew that I had won my match.

A Match I Haven’t Forgotten
Jimmy Parker
prkrtennis@aol.com
May 2020

It was sometime in the late Fifties, and I was playing one of my first national-level junior matches in Champagne, Illinois. It was “The Westerns,” the tournament that preceded the Nationals at Kalamazoo. I was a skinny fourteen-year-old, barely five feet tall. My opponent was a strapping fifteen-year-old who was six feet tall and with hair on his legs. His name was an ominous-sounding Buster Turk.

Buster was a Floridian who already had a reputation. He carried his pool stick case around with him to tournaments, and made money by hustling at local pool halls. He liked to play pranks like pouring cans of piss down the steps of our dorm.

When Buster and I checked in at the main site, they sent us to some remote courts to play our match. By the time we were late in the third set, there was not another soul around. No USLTA umpires patrolling, no spectators, nobody but us.

At 5-all, 30-40 on my serve, I hit an approach shot and headed for the net. The ball landed about a foot inside the sideline, deep to his backhand. I was happy with it. That is, until Buster stopped the ball and called “Out.” I whined in disbelief, “Buster, that ball wasn’t even close to being out!”

Buster calmly sauntered to the net, leaned down, and pulled a switchblade out of his sock, and flicked it open. He was now waving about twelve inches of gleaming steel.

​I was looking up at him towering over me when he repeated somewhat forcibly, “It was out.” I stammered something like “W…Well, B…Buster, maybe it was out.”

So as you can imagine, I was so rattled that I had no chance of breaking his serve the next game, and he walked away with the win. But the story doesn’t really end there.

I think it was the same year, but now Buster was playing the Orange Bowl in Miami Beach. He got so upset with the umpire’s calls that he ran over and pushed the umpires chair over backwards. The poor old guy went rolling out doing a backwards somersault. Buster was banned from tennis.

But the story doesn’t end there either. A couple decades later, I was reading my Sports Illustrated, and there was an article about a guy named Buster Turk who had spent some serious time in the slammer. He was out, had gone back to school, and was the oldest student playing junior college tennis in the United States.

Who knows? Buster may be out there playing senior tennis these days!