HOW DO YOU MISS THAT!!!!!

right so...by God's good grace and stroke of luck, I happened to be playing tennis, pretty much in a parking lot with some locals...the court was too small there were no service lines, but whatever it was tennis...one of the guys there is connected with SONABEL the electric company...He is the one that invited me to play in a tennis tournament Saturday night.

Happily I do not have my own racket so I had to borrow one when I arrived at the tournament. Next stumbling block, it was a doubles tournament and I don't have a partner here. No problem they just gave me a random one. Cool, mine turned out to be from Lebanon. Now then the rules.

This was no ordinary tournament, this was a vicious best of four games wild African battle. So you would play no more than four games for your set, and you need only one set to advance. If it ends 2 games to 2 then you play a tie break.

First round, my partner introduces himself by saying, "I'm not very good". Wonderful. We won our first round 7-4 in a tie break. Now then there were loads of teams there should have been at least three rounds. Oh no, there were just two, so our second round match was the championship match, and I really don't understand the math on that one...Also the team that we played in the finial was not a team that played in the first round...it was two guys that both played in the first round but they didn't play together.

Any way, this match ended 2-2 so we entered a tie break. We were down match point at 6-4 with me returning serve, which I did beautifully and won us a point. We were now down 6-5 with me serving, which I did beautifully. I hit a lovely kick serve to our Cuban opponent's back hand which he immediately popped up in the air just as I wanted. The ball, came floating down slowly toward my partner standing at the net. If Santa Clause himself had dropped this ball off it couldn't have been a bigger gift. My partner lined-up, wound-up, and hit the ball roughly as hard as he could toward the open court behind the net player and out of reach of the Cuban. One problem, he hit it too high and it sailed out by roughly a mile costing us the match. BOO! I say, boo.

Sadly we had to settle for the second place prize, a white ball cap with the SONABEL logo on it, rather than the grand prize of a white ball cap with the SONABEL logo on it.

Oh well. The president of the club invited me back to play anytime I want and he said he would let me know when the next tournament would be. Maybe it will be a singles tournament. The first thing they said to me was "nice court right?" To which I replied "uh...yeah? it's lovely" and it was just trust me, compared to my parking lot tennis the day before it was lovely.

Main thing to remember here, finding tennis in Africa, big big plus.
peace,
Ben