Pickleball Wars

Pickleball Musings from a FB post I wrote in July. Here in September, this woman can't beat me, yet. We played to 11-6 recently (in singles, which is much different from doubles). It won't be long.

I'm creating a Frankenstein monster. For three weeks I have been helping a woman new to pickleball (she started 5 weeks ago she claims) who is younger than me by several years and much more fit (she runs for things but doesn't always get there) by practicing with her one-on-one for 75 minutes two or three times a week. Decades ago she played a little tennis.

She asked me to help her with her serve, which never went in, and her game which was all over the place. Serving rules in PB are dumb, so I dumbed it down for her. Just drop it (and then all the fussy rules don't apply) I told her, and hit it on the bounce up into that big rectangle over there diagonally and you'll instantly improve your game 100%. Because you can't score if you don't get your serve in, period.

But I want a deep serve (to keep her opponent back and on the defensive) she said. Just get it in, I said, and deepness, and a good shortness which is a tricky change of pace and can produce an ace, will come. That's what we did the first week; using my 8 practice balls I would demonstrate putting 22 of 24 soft serves in, and that was 22 serves I could pick up points on. She is a quick study, and being competitive, she simplified her serve by converting to a bounce serve and ditching the awkward high-shoulder drop, dropping the ball from waist-high instead (better control as to where the ball will bounce up to) and softened her service strike by foregoing smash or spin attempts, and now she never misses putting a serve in. And once or twice she gets an "ace" in each game because her serve suddenly bounces short and is unreachable.

Then we worked on rallying, off our serves. We don't keep score, we just serve to each other and hit it back and forth, back and forth and back and forth till it goes out or in my case, she hits a slant shot to the other half court on my side (she's good at those and never puts this "touch" shot out) that I eschew running for because I'm old, heavy and tired. She always pulls up short and cries, "Yes!" when she does this which makes me chuckle.

Then to get back, when she serves next I hit the return low and hard to the spot she just vacated as she moves towards the center of her court (i.e. behind her) and watch as she reverses, sprints for it, lunges and, barely missing it, cries out in exaggerated anguish. It's fun and funny.

So in two weeks she picked up serving, returning and rallying, and added her natural talent at slant shots (balls off to the side). But her backhand was weak and she jumped at the ball, waving at it in a backhanded stab that rarely made it over the net. Can't generate any power if your feet are off the ground, I told her. Plus she wasn't getting set for the shot, she was always moving towards the ball but never "arriving at it." So we worked on that this week and she came up with, on her own, incorporating a 2-handed backhand, which a few players have but not many. Her BH improved exponentially as we practiced (she got properly set by using the 2-handed technique) and today I watched as she played at Senior Drop-In games looking like Evonne Goolagong raking double-fisted backhands by Chris Evert, one after another. In only five weeks, I wondered?

I've been working for 11 long months to get to where I actually win occasionally, and I "only" lose 9-11 to the immortals now at Drop-In (being, of course, partnered with an immortal whom I cause to lose alongside of me) instead of 2-11. I've been getting backhanded compliments lately, Peter your game has really improved! Now I look at my "student" and wonder if I'll be able to beat her in August even. Didn't the monster creation kill Dr. Frankenstein?

I read more than a dozen books in 2020 . . .

. . . and these are the dozen that I thought were the most impressive, in order of best to less significant.

1.    The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe 1944-45 V3 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2013). The conclusion of Pulitzer Prize winning Atkinson's opus on the Allied ETO war effort from the American POV. The trilogy reaches its conclusion with complete victory over Nazi Germany in this stunning denouement that details the end of WW2 in Europe, from the D-Day landings to the fall of Berlin (to the Russians) with the Anglo-American armies poised on the Elbe River a short distance away and Germany prostate and utterly beaten.

2.    To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960). This book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and is a revered American novel, with small-town lawyer Atticus Finch fighting for justice in the Jim Crow south even as his two small children, Scout and Jem grow up in a racist town. Boo Radley, a reclusive figure who strikes fear in their hearts, saves them in the end in a morality tale that shows that often nothing is as it appears to be.

3.    An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942-43 V1 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2002). This Atkinson book about Operation Torch, the American landings in Vichy French North Africa, won the Pulitzer Prize for history. Atkinson is a florid writer--it's almost like you're reading literature, no history--and using all sorts of metaphors he describes the North African campaign where: a) the Americans got into the fight against the fearsome German army for the first time; and b) learned how to take on the Wehrmacht; c) learned valuable amphibious assault lessons against feeble, half-hearted resistance that the Vichy troops threw up; which d) stood them in good stead for invading Sicily, then Italy and then the Big Show, Normandy.

4.    American Predator: The Hunt For The Most Meticulous Serial Killer of the 21st Century by Maureen Callahan (2019). This true-crime book is a page-turner (I stayed up all night reading it). Utterly fascinating and chilling.

5.    Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania by Erik Larson (2015). The sinking of this passenger liner (reputedly carrying munitions to the Allies) in 2015 almost brought America into the Great War a couple of years before Woodrow Wilson, a president too proud to fight, finally successfully petitioned Congress for a declaration of war against Germany in 2017. The narrative recreating the destruction of the great ship is memorable.  Interestingly, infected American troops going Over There in 1918 brought on the deadly "Spanish Flu"pandemic of 1918-1919 which killed 60 million persons worldwide, triple the number of persons killed by The War To End All Wars. The flu had originated in the cattle farms of rural Iowa, where it was a local phenomena of "pneumonia" which spread to the troop barracks on the East Coast then to the trenches of the frontlines in France and then to the world.

6.    Bunker Hill: A City, a Siege, a Revolution by Nathanial Philbrick (2013). A long version of the Bunker Hill battle, fought on Breed's Hill in Charlestown across the bay from Boston, and the people and events leading up to it and resulting from it.

7.    The Longest Day by Cornelius Ryan (1959). The old standby reference for the D-Day invasion that liberated Europe from the Nazi scourge.

8.    Lincoln's Sanctuary: Abraham Lincoln and the Soldiers Home by Matthew Pinsker (2003).  An interesting book about "Lincoln's Summer Cottage," a little known National Historical Place on the northern edge of Washington which Lincoln rode to, usually alone, every evening during the summers because it was cooler there. He was shot at, accosted, and suffered a runaway horse before a guard troop was finally encamped there. The book touches on the emancipation proclamation, claiming it was largely written there.

9.    Abraham Lincoln and the Second American Revolution by James McPherson (1993). The redefinition of liberal democracy expostulated at Gettysburg.  A new birth of freedom.  All those white national January 6th fascistic traitors should effin' read this book.

10. The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy 1943-44 V2 of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson (2007). The Allied effort in the ETO continued with a leap across the Mediterranean to Sicily then Italy. But this was bloody war in a sock for the Allies because Italy has a mountainous spine and the Germans always had the high ground. The Americans on the left and the British on the right hammered away in frontal assaults on well-prepared and heavily fortified mountain strongholds for two years, lending little to the Allied success in beating Nazi Germany.  Vally after valley had a mountain range bristling with enemy guns facing it.  The idea was to tie down German divisions thereby helping the Soviets on the Eastern Front but the Allies expended more divisions in attacking than the Germans used in defense.

11.    Custer's Fall: The Native American Side of the Story by David Humphreys (1957). I'm a sucker for any book on Custer. I didn't find anything new here. Read Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt (1932) instead.

12.    The Life of Johnny Reb by Bell Irvin Riley (1943). This has long been considered a classic Civil War exposition by this Emory University professor using local sources of how the hardy, emaciated Rebel soldier lived and fought but I found it to be long, boring, unilluminating and racist.  I gave away my copy of his subsequent book, The Life of Billy Yank.