Mad Professah on the court

Mad Professah has been busy this weekend playing in the Los Angeles Open III with my friend and doubles partner Delmar Thomas. We entered the C singles and doubles divisions.
On Friday, I was on court for nearly 6 hours in 3 different matches. I won my first match in 2 hours, 20 minutes (4-6, 6-1, 6-4) and my second match in 1 hour, 45 minutes (7-5, 6-0). Then Delmar and I played doubles and (as usual) won the hard way, by losing the first set and winning the next two: 1-6, 6-4, 6-2. Last year, we won the D division doubles title and were hoping to repeat this year.

On Saturday, unfortunately it rained and instead of 3 tie break sets, singles matches became one pro-set (first to 8 games with lead by two, tiebreaker at 7-7). I lost my proset 8-5 (1 hour, 15 minutes) while Delmar won his and then demolished my previous opponent in the quarterfinals 8-2 (I think I tired him out in our close match). Afterwards we played our quarterfinals doubles match versus the #1 seeds and again lost the first set, this time 2-6. Happily we were able to come back and win the second set 6-3. Unfortunately, despite being up a service break, we lost that break and were broken again to lose our first match ever as a doubles team: 2-6, 6-3, 6-2. The match took nearly two hours and was closer than the score indicates (I'm starting to learn most tennis matches are!) and we acquitted ourselves well. Mad Professah was very sore after 9 hours of tennis in 36 hours.

Today, Delmar continued to the semifinal match and in a relatively close match beat the #1 seed 6-4, 7-5 (despite being down 3-5 in the second set and eventually saving 4 set points). The finals match was a mismatch, with Delmar winning easily 6-2, 6-2 (27 winners, 31 unforced errors).

We amusingly called ourselves the Williams sisters, and I'm happy that one of us had to make it to the semi-finals and eventually win the tournament without one of those ugly Venus-Serena matches we had to sit through in the early years. Congratulations, "Serena"!