Beat the Old Lady!

Ah, sports, my favorite pastime. My first memory of playing a sport is kicking around a white with blue eagle design soccer ball around in a hilly park in Montreal. A family picnic so long ago with my aunts and uncles and grandmother, treasured memories when they still appeared in my life with any regularity. My first memory of watching a sport was of course hockey.. the speed, the intensity, amazing and not lost on me. A friend of mine had a brother who was much older than us and his room was littered with shiny golden medals and trophies. When I was seven we moved from the big city to a small town called Kapuskasing where I really started playing sports with earnest. Soccer, hockey, baseball, badminton and tennis. I was passionate about these activities, and I had an insatiable thirst to win. I wanted those shiny golden things to litter my room. The team sports were easier than the individual. Its a great feeling to be on a team where we really click, and I tended to forget the importance of winning even as we got closer to winning championships ourselves. Beautiful. But when I'm alone in the individual sports.. just me, the racket, the ball, and someone I must defeat, more often than not I would falter in the last crucial step. The only person who remembers second place is he who earned it.

There was a time when my greatest nemesis was an old chinese lady. The sport was table tennis, the time was my senior year of high school, and the place was the chinese community center in houston. For 30 bux a month you get all the playing time and for the most part all the coaching you wanted or could take. Of course not everyone would be coached. But I was. Scott was awesome. I went there just about every other day for a few evening hours, balancing the gym and hockey at the same time. I guess I had high school to worry about too, but that was just a structured place to socialize by then. I would spend time practicing with scott, practicing alone perfecting my serve, and eventually scott would tell me to "go beat the old lady!"

The old lady was a master at just blocking shots. Well, she probably wasn't really a master, but she was pretty damn good at it. She played that damn pen-hold style with antispin rubbers. I am a player of furious passion, no matter the sport. In table tennis I will smash as early as possible and smash the returns. My reflexes would allow me to countersmash even the returns I could not see, so anyone fool enough to play an offensive game against me, no matter the years of experience, would have a very tough time. When people bring fire against my own, I consume them. But it so happens that in those few seconds of a table tennis point, the truly skilled players use their brain. If they too had sharp reflexes, they would try to go on the defensive, blocking, and underspinning back to me. Maybe it was because crouching tiger hidden dragon came out that year or so, but I always felt like a tiger pitted against a dragon. I would slash them, wound them, try to rip them apart, and burn through their ice, but they would slowly coil around me, choking the air from my fire. In doing so, they would enlist into their service the most powerful weapon of all, the shadow of my own mind.

I remember the time that I beat the old lady. I didn't have to tell scott because he knew. He had a little side office that he would hang out in when he wasn't watching players or coaching them. I expected some sort of fanfare from him but there was none. "About time!". I also remember all the times I lost to her, which was in fact every single other time I played her. We usually played best out of 5 or 7, and I can only remember a match or two where it wasn't 3-2 or 4-3 in games. It would invariably come down to that final game, inevitably those final two serves, and all but once with her with the smile at the end.

In basketball, it doesn't even surprise the people I know well when I miss an open layup or fail to make free throws. In hockey, I still remember the last shootout opportunity i had, when I made a beautiful deke and had the goalie sprawling on his back, all i had to do was just tap the puck in but instead i missed and hit it to the outside of the post to lose the game. These sorts of things greatly overwhelm the memory of the fantastic plays I do make. Scott was a wise man. He was Yoda with the body of E. Honda. He would tell me "stop thinking!!" and smash a ball at me, which i would somehow deflect. Stop thinking? I thought, and proceed to lose the next point. No really, stop thinking! Dammit, there goes another one. But he had me down. My mind was my enemy at those points; thinking about the score, about winning, about a castle in the air olympic gold medal career, about getting some physical attention from my gf, the whole gamut of possibilities. He would persist, and I would too. When I managed to attain a state of detached control, of unforced consciousness, of stillness in movement, I could play with such grace. Like a perfect dream, guiding the vessel of your body with your mind yet not being actively conscious that one is distinct from the other.

Maybe I had a suspicion of it, but I didn't really know at the time that beating the old lady was really mastering myself. Perhaps it was and is obvious to those around me, but it has taken a great many years for me to understand it in its fullest. To truly comprehend that nothing can be forced, to feel the rise and the fall with attachment to neither, to be one with the self, to understand without thought, these things speak of a realm of existence not confined to ourselves.

To know oneself is to know the universe.