Sports pyschology is an interesting area. After being obliterated at tennis on Saturday, I was thrashed at squash this afternoon. Both times the severity of my destruction largely came down to totally losing my bottle. I know how it feels to be Tim Henman (without the admittedly rather impressive bit of having won enough games to have got through to the semi-finals of a major competition. I always feel he gets a bit of a hard press. Several times he has got down to being one of the best four players of his sport in the world and yet still he gets criticised for not being any good. A lot of people play tennis. Being in the top four is pretty amazing. But still for the purpose of my comparison he is a bottler just like me).
I hadn't played tennis since the defeat by my nephew and although i felt confident in the knock up and was making some good shots, when it came to the match I was pretty much unable to serve. My first service game consisted of four double faults. I have never done that before (at least not when I've been really trying to dolly the second serve in). I wasn't helped by the strings on my racquet breaking in the second set, but I was still disappointingly and humiliatingly awful. But I knew in my heart it was my own lack of confidence that was fucking it up for me. I lost my mojo. I found it briefly for a game or two and played OK, but my female opponent wiped the floor with me in any case. I was emasculated. My own guts had snapped as well as badly as the cat guts that strung my racquet. I know modern tennis racquets are no longer strung with cat gut, but I like to attach some cat gut to my racquet, mainly for superstitious purposes and also because I enjoy hang, drawing and quartering cats and other small animals.
I have been playing more squash recently and been getting OK and in the knock-up I again felt confident and was pulling off shots that surprised and impressed me for their accuracy and technique. I even started quite well and managed an early lead, but the minute that my opponent pulled back I lost all focus and energy. And once more it was psychological rather than physical. I fell apart. I thought maybe I'd never be able to play racquet sports again. Luckily on this occasion I did manage to pull back my energies and win one game, so I left the court feeling only 95% emasculated, retaining a valuable 5% of my testicular material, which hopefully can be cloned by science and turned back into fully functioning bollocks. Possibly I might even be able to get them to give me a big bunch of balls to make me more manly than ever. I fancy a clump of them, maybe of fifteen or so in number. I would be the best sportsman in the world, though of course vulnerable to a swift kick in the knackers. Maybe I could position a few of the extra testicles and other points in my body to avoid this painful eventuality, although this would just mean there was more chance of getting hit in a one of the bollocks. The testicles are not well protected where they are, but it's hard to think of anywhere else that they would be safer. Perhaps I could keep them in a locked box in my sports bag. But then I doubt that they would exude their magic testosterone powers from back there.
I have added this knacker-based ending solely because I realised that up til that point I was just giving you a run down of two quite dull sporting encounters that I've been involved with. I used to take the piss out of my mum and dad when they came home from tennis and gave a shot by shot account of how things had gone. So it's scared me that i am becoming the same. But they never discussed where you would best keep your testicles if you had a clump of them, so I am still in no danger of being perceived as being middle-aged just yet.
