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| How about that Swedish mullet ? |
So I was taken aback when, on my second day on the new job, one of the secretaries asked me, "Do you play tennis ?" "Well, I used to pl... Yeah, I play," was my confident answer.
You see I had spent the whole month in November in Florida. A trip home to mom's, whether for a weekend or a month, usually involves overeating. So imagine a month that includes Thanksgiving. I had to be rolled onto the plane to Colombia. I needed exercise...so I was more than willing to get back on the hardcourts and grease up the ol' tennis elbows. You know, just to hit the ball back and forth... to ease into the sport.
Three days later, she visited my classroom to tell me that I had a match that night in the community's mixed doubles tournament. What ?! The tournament was called, like every other sports competition at Albania's mine, the Coal Cup (Copa de Carbon).
And she told me that my partner for the tournament would be Loogie. Uh, I remember "Booger" from the Revenge of the Nerds films, who did his own personal bit of mining, but I'd never heard of anyone being called or calling themselves "Loogie". I was worried.
That evening, I indeed met Loogie, or as I later learned : Lugui, which is short for Luguarda. It made me feel better that her name was in no way related to mucus. She was in her 40's or 50's, with short curly hair, perhaps the only woman in Colombia with short hair. Her laugh, omnipresent and loud and closer to a cackling guffaw, came out at the end of every statement or question she made. She played like a 45-year old woman who plays at most once a week. She hit some good shots, some bad ones, too, and she couldn't care less if we won or lost. She was the perfect partner.
Then we met some of the other teams : generally a desperate housewife who swung an expensive racquet and owned a different color tennis skirt for each day of the week and her arthritic husband with a distended bariga.
I played poorly, every game. But I can run faster, jump higher, and move quicker than any old arthritic goat. So we won. By a lot. We finished the first round undefeated, then we won in the quarterfinals, too. When Lugui saw me in the halls, she'd yell, "Hey Djokovic !" When she saw other tennis players pass by in the school, she'd tell them, "He's my partner, and I'm never trading him !"She even christened herself Lugui Williams: Venus and Serena's younger sister. Lugui's very Caucasian.
But not even Djokovic can win them all. In the semis, we finally met a team that wasn't a overweight husband / desperate housewife combination. Both players were young, athletic, and had trained every day. We were the old goats now. They had me running this way and that in the burning heat of Northern Colombia. By the end of the game, I was bleeding out my arm in three places from diving for balls. And we had lost. But only in a tie-break.
Overall, we were pretty pleased with our performance. This summer, I'll be buying a tennis racquet (I had borrowed one for the tournament) so that when then next tournament starts, the duo of Loogie and Djokovic will bring home the coveted cup of coal.
