Playing Last

Even though I've only been in the league two years, I think I have a fairly good grasp of every imaginable league-night scenario. There are so many ways of looking at wins and losses. For my Tuesday night team at Sophie's this season, it's most often been a matter of looking at how bad we got beat. Certain kinds of matches feel certain ways. For example, there's the feeling of being the only winner on your team on a night when your team loses 1-4. Then there's the opposite, the feeling of losing when everybody else on the team wins. My text messages to Yvonne afterwards are always some variation of "I won but we lost" or "We won but I lost." This past Tuesday my text message read "We lost, thanks to me."

It was a roller coaster night. Grace won the first match decisively, beating a SL5 2-1. Then the second and third matches went way south, with a combined score of 1-7 (via our SL3 getting whupped 0-2 by another SL3, followed by one of our SL4s losing 1-5 to their SL6). In the fourth Chris came back to tie it, setting up a rubber match showdown.

Now, this is where the title of this post is relevant. It would have been easy for me to sit out the evening and put up an iffy SL3 against the SL5 they had put up. But since I had sat out the previous week, I wanted to play. And I had a really long and productive practice session the night before so I felt good. I decided to put myself up. Somehow after nailing a nice cross-corner bank on the 8 I found myself ahead 3-0. But I'm not sure what happened after that. Obviously it was something to do with my will/nerve/resolve being stretched to the limit. Because at one point I overheard Chris say to somebody "Cary's ahead 3-0 and only needs one more," and I remember wishing he hadn't sounded so confident, it felt like a jinx. Then, somebody I hadn't seen in a long time had come in and was wanting to ask me photography questions. So I had to do one of those pretentious "not right now" stiff-arm gestures in the fourth game as I was trying to close the deal. Of course I lost that game and felt like a total ass. And I kept allowing myself to get distracted by looking over at the television to follow the shrinking percentage by which Obama was losing Indiana.

A couple games later on I overheard Chris tell somebody else "Cary won the first three and the other guy still needs two more." I cringed, not wanting an announcement of the score. Looking back, I remember playing some remarkable safeties that elicited some encouraging cheers from my teammates. One time after one of these safeties, my opponent picked up the cue ball and handed it to me. At which point I played another safety right back at him. I don't remember making any gigantic mistakes. No repeated gaffes when down on the 8 ball, not really any scratches that I can think of. In fact, I felt it was one of my best matches of the season. The games were all pretty short and I have to say the match had a nice, efficient rhythm to it: games alternated between exactly three and five innings throughout the entire match.

But my opponent just bore through it, eeking out wins, chipping away at my lead and confidence the entire time. Never once did I get a real opening to bring it home. I have to hand it to him, he exhibited tremendous do-or-die poise to be able to come back from such a deficit. The last game was a blur, I don't remember much other than praying he'd miss the final 8 ball (it went in for the win). In a shake-it-off lighthearted moment afterwards I made a joke to somebody, saying how intimidating his British-sounding accent was (hands down, the best players I face in bars are consistently from either England or Ireland.) I apologized to the guy who I had stiff-armed earlier, and was happy to hear him say he totally understood. I pleaded my case to him what a seemingly airtight win I had just blown. He, and fortunately others on my team, were of the thinking that "it happens," and I got some nice compliments along the lines of my matches being enjoyable to watch.

Still, it's been three weeks in a row now where we've lost in the final match. If the past three weeks had each gone just a little differently in the end we'd be at 6-7 instead of 3-10. Hardest of all is that in two of the last three weeks I've been the one to play last. Lesson learned? Perhaps make some other people play last. It just seems like our team has gotten into a routine where certain people always need to play first or second, whereas on average I play far later than everybody else. This season alone, I've played last six times, fourth twice, third and second once apiece (never played first). Then there's the whole "Well Cary, maybe you should drink less beer during league nights." But I do truly pace myself before I play, and usually just nurse an entire beer or seltzer water throughout my match (unlike some people I've played with who pull out cash and bark out drink orders when things aren't going their way).

I think I just have a limit on how much pressure I can take before I get tired of playing and start losing my focus/determination. Seven games of league pool under the pressure of the rubber match is a long time, it's not uncommon to go over an hour. This week I often found myself thinking about how tense it must've been for my teammates to sit there on the edge for so long. This is all something I need to work on, especially as a SL5 playing other SL5s or higher. I hope in the next season, under a different captain (I'm 99 percent sure I'll be switching to Monday nights at Sophie's), things will be different. Then again, we're looking at a roster comprised of the following Skill Levels: 6555443 plus room for one more (compared to my current team's roster of 54444333). There's going to be some late, late nights. Hopefully the outcome of some of those late nights I'll just wait to find out the next day.