A Cunning Plan

The plan I had set out for my Tuesday evening was devilishly good. I would send Titus Andronicus hurtling from the speakers at an obnoxious volume, bake a pecan pie, then in the two hours it takes to cool I would go to Chi-Slam Table Tennis Club, where I would work up an appetite fit to demolish a freshly baked pie upon my return. It was a plan so masterful that I had to restrain myself from raising my little finger to my mouth and squinting Dr. Evil style on the train home from work.

With the pie baked and my ears ringing, I set off to Chi-Slam an excited man. Excited to test my ping pong game against some quality opposition and excited to discover whether my pie tasted as good as it looked upon removal from the oven.

At Chi-Slam, I decided it would be a good idea to play myself in against a moderately weak opponent before tackling some heavyweights. A large, rotund, bald man with visible globules of sweat colonizing his head, who was huffing and puffing away on table one seemed to fit the bill nicely. I set upon challenging him and after a short knock-up in which he bunted the ball around innocuously we began a game. Having played tennis so seriously for so long, I should have known better than to judge a player by his strokes and appearance. Here was a class player. 0-1. 0-2. 0-3. 0-4 I went down. No matter what spin I put on the ball he handled it comfortably. 0-5. 0-6. He is flicking my serves back for winners! 0-7. 0-8. Shit! Is he going to bagel me? 0-9. 0-10. Game point. Uh-ho. So much pressure. 0-11. Bollocks. We changed sides but the pattern of the game did not change. My opponent simply did not miss. After a few attacking forehands I thought I was finally on the verge of winning a point, when his high defensive shot span off the table so vigorously that the ball completely eluded my paddle as I went in for the smash. At 0-9 in game two I had lost 20 points in a row and was sweating more than my opponent. Then finally I won a point. Immense relief, followed by my remark of “this will be the turning point”. It was not, although my 11-8 loss in the third game was somewhat more respectable.

Not to be discouraged by my earlier humiliation, I bounced back to win a tight encounter 3 sets to 1 and then faced a well-built German man who was rather good, but unlike my first opponent this was obvious immediately. We were trading forehands crosscourt at an alarming pace, and then all of a sudden he would step back from the table and unleash a whirling topspin loop that kicked so aggressively off the table that any scientists watching would have been baffled. Ardy, the club owner, even came over to tell me that he was a good player. And he doesn't just say that about anyone. Unfortunately there was someone waiting to play the winner, so we had to play a game.  I was worried about a repeat of earlier events, but I did myself proud and won around five points in each game, even though the German did go somewhat light on me (for instance serving without any spin).
         “You play good tennis, huh?” he commented as we shook hands. I was encouraged by my progress over the course of the night and was determined to improve so that the word “table” might be added to his parting sentence next time.

Just one question remained unanswered. What would my pecan pie taste like? The pecan pie is my favorite pie and I was strongly hoping that my rendition of it wouldn't deter my fondness of this king of comestibles. Any worries were extinguished with the first bite. It was immense. Maybe even the best pecan pie I had ever tasted. I took down a quarter of it and went to bed a happy man.

A delicious pecan pie. Probably should have gotten my shadow out of the picture.