An Ungrateful Game

This Means War

2012-07-16T13:29:00.001-04:00

There was a time, not long ago, when in most of my tennis matches I was the big banger. Win or lose, I usually hit faster and heavier balls than my opponent. But with age, that’s changing.

Yesterday I played with a friend whom I’ll call Art. He’s got a big game himself along with something I rarely possess: stamina. He loves nothing better than to run side to side on the baseline, retrieving balls and wearing down his opponent with big topspin.

When I get into a contest with Art on his terms, I usually lose. He makes me hit that extra shot and I too often miss it in an attempt to overcome his “leg” advantage. But when I play thoughtfully, I win.

Yesterday it was hot and humid. We were playing near mid-day and I hadn’t set foot on a tennis court — or done any substantial cardio — for nearly a week. So when we started playing a set, I knew I didn’t want to get into a banging contest with Art, exchanging cross-court rally balls until I could no longer breathe.

My strategy was to mix up the pace and to play him in and out rather than side to side. He’s not real comfortable at the net, and if you get him into a deep corner at the baseline, his instinct (like most players) is to race back along the baseline. A short ball takes him out of his comfort zone, and if he does get to that ball he's likely to play a weaker shot, setting up a potential passing shot.

Yesterday, we had some long points, but we had a lot of short ones because I refused to play to his strength. At one point, he even complained that he’d have to hit the treadmill later, because he wasn’t getting enough cardio.

At the end of all this, he walked off the court and said, “You wouldn’t let me get into a rhythm.” Exactly.

A tennis match is like a war. You don’t attack your “enemy” at his point of greatest strength. You find his weakness and force him out of his comfort zone.

It’s taken me years to realize this precisely because I’ve usually been the banger. If you’re playing a lesser player, it can be a great strategy to say, with your racket, “For every cross-court forehand you hit in a rally, I’ll hit one more. And harder.” Then you just watch the other guy melt down in the face of relentless consistency.

But when your opponent has a higher-quality game, the key is to take that rhythm away, not to feed into it.

Playing Small

2012-02-29T13:02:00.000-05:00

One interesting and under-appreciated aspect of sports is the degree to which — all things being equal — success flows from the strategic occupancy of space. Think about the over-rotation of a baseball defense to an extreme pull hitter. Think about what goes on in a football game: linemen and linebackers (in addition to all their other tasks) creating or filling passing lanes. Think about a good singles tennis player recovering to the area where his opponent is most likely to hit the next ball.

So why do many otherwise competent club doubles players begin so many points out of position?

Before I knock vibration dampers out of joint, let me make a few pre-emptive clarifications. First, I’m not talking right now about people who get worked out of position during a point, but rather about those who begin the point in a location that puts the team at a disadvantage. Second, I don’t claim to be flawless in this regard myself, but at least give me credit for thinking about it. Third, this tendency can manifest itself in people who know many other aspects of the game quite well, but that doesn’t mean they’re not hurting their chances of winning.

This situation came to mind recently when I was partnered with B.P., a better player than I, against a teaching pro (T.P.) and a regular Joe like myself (R.J.). The teaching pro was the best player on the court but is not completely dominant. R.J. is someone a bit older than I whom I beat easily in singles but who’s much more competitive with me in doubles, partly because his court position is generally excellent. B.P. has great skills and is a strong singles player. In fact, I’ve never beaten him on the singles court, and at times I've fallen to him quite badly indeed.

B.P. rarely plays in this game, and I don’t think I’ve ever played dubs with him in any other venue, but after we got drubbed fairly handily in two sets (3 and 3), it occurred to me that I’ve only seen him win one set in doubles (with me or against me) out of eight or nine played in total. On the singles court he plays big (you look up and he seems to be everywhere), but on the doubles court he was playing small (completely out of too many points). How can that be when — with the exception of this day, which featured T.P. — on paper he’s always been the best player in the game? Well, as Brad Gilbert famously said, tennis is not played on paper. It’s played on a tennis court.

When I went to serve, I noticed that my partner, B.P., was guarding the alley. This startled me a little because (1) one shouldn’t expect many return attempts down the alley unless it’s being blatantly vacated by the net player (say on a planned poach); and (2) I expected my partner, who has better skills than I, to be an active participant in defense of my service games.

During the first service game, sure enough, our opponent on the deuce court lobbed most every return over my partner’s head as I was charging the net. My partner, rather than adjust his position one iota, blamed me for not serving hard enough. On the ad court, our opponent easily returned cross-court to me — not winners but balls that my partner, stuck guarding the alley, had no chance to lay a racket upon.

In my opinion, my partner, B.P., should have been standing a giant step (two or three feet) into the service box rather than a foot from the singles line, where he’d planted himself. I tried waving him over once and he threw me a dirty look and took a reluctant half step toward the center, immediately retreating to his original position on the next point. Needless to say, we lost that game.

We lost my next service game, too, I think.

In fact, we lost all but one of my service games, if I recall correctly. By the end, I was double faulting like mad, trying to overcompensate for the fact that I was playing two-on-one during my service games, my net man barely moving toward any of our opponents’ returns up the middle — and how could he? He was too far away from the trajectory!

Now, let me point out that I don’t claim to have a dominating serve. A dominating serve by definition would have negated any issues with regard to my partner’s court position. If you have a dominating serve, your partner can just take a seat on the bench for all anyone cares. That's not the case for me. I need my partner on the court.

And let me quickly add that I missed my share of shots during the match (everyone on court, including T.P., missed his share) and I probably even missed some shots as a result of getting myself out of position. Furthermore, there’s really no excuse for all the double faults I poured in at the end. I wish I had half the head for competition that B.P. has.

And yet, I often do hold my serve. Nobody was ripping winners off of it during that match. It was simply the case that I could not single-handedly overcome my partner’s net position against challenging opponents.

In doubles I serve by the book, which is to say eighty percent of the time up the tee in order to limit sharp angle shots coming back. Since we were playing without poach signals, my net man should be cheating more toward the center line and only sliding to the alley when my serve goes out wide. It’s not that he didn’t move once the point started, but when the toss went up he wasn't in a position to influence our opponents’ returns. Not ever.

The net man, properly positioned, should be putting pressure on the returner by narrowing the space into which the returner hopes to hit, thus taking away the returner’s margin for error on high-percentage targets and enabling his own partner more easily to cover the remaining court. If there is no threat of a poach, the pressure on the returner diminishes greatly. The way we were playing this match, I felt that our opponents had a gap the size of the New Jersey Turnpike in which to return my serves. And guess who had to cover all four lanes of that turnpike!

When we got to the third set (which we didn’t complete), I asked my partner (who was razzing me for all of my double faults — fair enough) if he wouldn’t mind trying it my way and taking “a more aggressive position” at the net. He responded not by moving toward the middle of the court where most returns go but by taking a step forward, thus exposing even more of the court! Needless to say, this undermined me so much that losing the game at love practically became a foregone conclusion. There would be no pressure on my opponents unless I started ripping service winners, and, like I kind of said already, Roger Federer I ain’t.

So let me boil this down to a simple point. If you’re the net man and you set up in such a way that the returner only expects you to lay a racket on his mis-hits, then you’re leaving open too much court. You’re not helping your partner and, ultimately, you’re not helping yourself. You may have a big game in other respects, but as far as occupying space on the court is concerned, you're playing too small.

Pain and Possibility

2011-06-14T16:53:00.000-04:00

I had hoped, when I began this blog, among other things to report on my progress through the USTA season. This plan has gone down in a sea of distractions...my upcoming novel (Primacy) and the weekly column about it for The Nervous Breakdown, among them. But mostly the problem is that my season never got off the ground.

A few faint elbow issues had been haunting me for some time, nothing that a good warm-up couldn’t overcome, I thought. When I changed rackets it got a little worse, but still after fifteen minutes of hitting I'd feel fine. That was then.

My first USTA match was 4.0 First Doubles with John J. back in April. The weather was cold and raw. Though the captain moved our match indoors, my elbow never warmed up. Every shot hurt.

The captain could see it on my face. He volunteered to sub for me before we spun rackets, but he was fresh off a serious (non-sports-related) surgical procedure, and I couldn’t allow him to do it. Besides, I’d never walked off a court in my sporting life due to injury — not that I could remember. I figured it would just take me a little longer to warm up today. I figured wrong.

Every shot sent a jarring pain through my arm, but by now the match had started. I tried borrowing John J.’s elbow brace, but that didn’t help and I shed it after awhile. I had to dial back my serve, using only my shoulder for impulsion, and at times I had to let some balls through at net because I couldn’t get my racket up in time.

It never got any better, but we managed to win. I iced the elbow and the shoulder, but the next day, driving to New York, I couldn’t lift my hand to my head. For a week I couldn’t turn a doorknob without wincing pain.

After treatment and rest, I’ve tried twice more to get out there, but to no avail. I’m on the DL at least through the end of June, then we’ll see again.

Most depressing of all, there’s nothing interesting to say, nothing interesting to write about any of this. It’s boring and frustrating at the same time. It’s that terrible place where possibility meets pain.

Forced Errors

2011-01-12T16:26:00.000-05:00

I’ve been thinking that professional tennis commentators talk all day about unforced errors and winners, but the majority of points are forced errors, especially at the amateur level.

We hackers know. We know how hard it can be to hit the open court, for example, against a jackrabbit opponent who fetches every ball, even when you get him on a string. Maybe you don’t miss your shot because you suck — even though that’s what you probably tell yourself — but because your opponent forced you to attempt a too-difficult (or perfect) shot in overcompensation for his speed.

I thought of this kind of thing recently after a conversation with one of my hitting partners, George W., a retired teaching and hitting pro, who also coaches high school tennis. I’ve only been knocking it around with George for a couple of months, but doing so has already helped me find some aspects of my old game and start playing more competitively after a long period of mediocre singles performance.

A few weeks ago, after my best outing ever against George, we got into a conversation about approach shots. He observed that players often try to get too cute with their approach shots, hitting angles that open up the court for an opponent’s subsequent attempt at a passing shot. George says the best approach shot is often one up the middle, because it takes angles away from the opponent.

On its face, one can’t argue with this logic. But George reacts to the ball — any ball — better than most people I play against. It occurred to me that I’ve approached him up the middle many times only to be easily passed — not exactly a winning strategy. The problem is that when I hit a medium-paced approach up the middle, his balance and reflexes and racket control are too good for my ball to impose significant pressure on him. He practically has time to file his nails before easily passing me.

The reason George has improved my game has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with shot execution. That approach shot up the middle, which may be effective simply because of its placement against a lesser opponent, must arrive deep in the court with pace and spin to pressure George. If any one of these factors is missing, my chance of winning the point has diminished.

This relatively straightforward insight has helped my game lately.

One of my frequent opponents, Eric H., had been beating me all indoor season this year. To his credit, he’s elevated his game to the point where he’s playing both consistently and well, not easily intimidated by difficult gets and even more rarely worn down by hard-fought points.

Setting aside some inconsistency issues on my part, what’s been driving me crazy about my games with Eric is how often I’ve put balls in the right place on the court but lost the point anyway. My approach shots in particular have often been futile, just set-ups for his passes — and it didn’t used to be that way.

Placement is meaningless unless married to pace and spin. I played Eric after that lightbulb went off and brought with me the determination to step up these qualities in my shots. Voila! All of a sudden, his passing shots were landing six inches out because he had less time to set up and my ball’s heaviness robbed his racket of some precision.

So to my New Year’s resolution: be the error en-forcer!

Chunking It

2010-11-22T14:29:00.007-05:00

Well, o.k., my commitment to shot commitment hasn’t worked out so well yet.

In the parking lot after another drubbing from George W., he said, not unkindly, “You overanalyze too much.”

At first I presumed the redundancy was unintentional (overanalyze, too much?), but on reflection…

Oh, hell. The guy is right, but why does it matter? Why can’t I brood about why I hit that last shot too short while I’m waiting for the next serve? Or tell myself how badly I suck after missing that easy volley?

Here’s why: chunking. Or, more to the point: unchunking.

In his brilliant book, Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham and the Science of Success, Matthew Syed discusses the relative importance of practice versus talent in human endeavors and concludes that success relies heavily — and, to some extent, deceptively — on piling up hours of quality practice. The reason is that we can only execute complex tasks by grouping the required information into patterns, a strategy that psychologists call “chunking.”

Syed illustrates chunking by noting how hard it is to recall a series of random letters but how easy it is to recall the same number of letters when arranged into words. The same skills apply when we hit a forehand or anticipate where our opponent will direct the next ball.

(By the way, in The Inner Game of Tennis, W. Timothy Gallwey reminds readers that hitting a tennis ball is so complicated that we should congratulate ourselves on being able to do it at all rather than beating ourselves up when we fail. Certainly you can’t run and hit a ball without some degree of “muscle memory” — another term for chunking -- but I can't remember the last time I congratulated myself for merely hitting a ball over the net.)

Unfortunately, we can be chunking along and suddenly our head asserts itself and everything breaks down. When this happens under psychological pressure, we call it “choking.” But in all cases it’s “unchunking” — breaking a situation (or a stroke) down into its component parts by bringing it from the unconscious mind to the conscious. When this happens, the mind can’t process the details quickly enough. Result: we hit a bad shot.

I hit a lot of bad shots because I’m thinking too much. I know that because many of these bad shots result from indecisiveness. On a tennis court one can only fall prey to indecision two ways: by not thinking at all (which isn’t usually my problem) or by overanalyzing in the midst of a point: I’ll hit it cross-court but I did that a bunch and he got them so I’ll go down the line but it looks like he’s leaning that way therefore how about a drop shot but that’s so low percentage and I’m out of position and now the ball is behind me and it’s so much harder but I have to act now now now just swing dammit. OUT!

All this I know, but to know it, for me, is to think about it, which creates a vicious circle of unchunking.

The tendency to do this becomes worse because I took up the game seriously only as an adult. As a consequence, I don’t slip as easily into "automatic" as people who began the game as juniors hitting countless drills.

So, somehow, I have to figure out how to chunk more (or unchunk less) without thinking about it, but figuring out requires thinking, which, of course, would unchunk everything.

Do I overanalyze?

Tennis Vows

2010-10-29T11:55:00.004-04:00

How is a tennis match like a marriage?

No, this isn’t the entry point to an off-color riddle. It’s an attempt on my part to understand why, lately, I’ve forgotten how to win.

For the past two months, I’ve been losing a lot of tennis matches. More than a lot, in fact. Most.

Partly I can attribute this drought to the fact that I’m hitting against the same three guys, and all of them are tough competition for me. One (Eric H.) is a solid 4.0 player who could compete at 4.5 and has competed a great deal at 4.0 singles, winning most of his matches last season. Another (George W.) is a former teaching and hitting pro who in his salad days occasionally hit drills with Ivan Lendl. The third (Joe D.) is a young teaching pro with a fairly big game.

All of these guys are winners, and I’m the big loser. I give them a run on any given point and in any given game, but I’m having a great deal of trouble taking sets off of them. Sometimes I lose very badly, and the occasional set that I do win is almost never lopsided in my favor.

This week it was Joe D.’s turn to take me to the cleaners. He opened with a big serve against which I hit a good deep return. On his next shot I created a good angle, which took him beyond the doubles alley. He covered it but could only generate a short ball in the middle of the court. I sidled up to that ball near the T and — with the court open — clipped the net and watched the ball fall onto my side.

Thus, on the first point, I established the tone for the whole set: hit good offensive shots and take the weak reply and either make an unforced error or neutralize my own advantage by hitting a shot that allows Joe back into the point. Ugh! Another 6-1 shellacking!

Now, here’s the thing. I think Joe would tell you, if you asked, that I gave him a workout. He had to fight to hold his serve and he had to fight to break mine. Most games were close, and I put enough pressure on him to force quality play. So why couldn’t I break through?

One word: commitment. It’s not that I don’t want to win, but what hit me when I walked off the court is that I am not fully committed to winning every point.

I am committed to my marriage — and so is my wife. That’s one reason it has lasted 21 years. Do we fight sometimes? Sure. Can we make each other miserable? Absolutely — and only as two people who love one another can. But when either of us ventures too close to the abyss, we step back. We may be miserable at that moment, but we don’t want to be miserable forever. We just won’t go to that dark place where losing marriages reside.

Because of our commitment to making the marriage work, we don’t let the occasional disruption lead to a general state of unhappiness or frustration. In the context of things, we view any argument as a speed bump on a road that we’ve committed to travel together.

This firm commitment is what makes our marriage work.

There are other points of commitment in a life — points with regard to work, family and important relationships. One can view the tennis court as a place to find relief from the tensions these commitments sometimes bring, but if that’s the only way I look at tennis I’m not going to win much against hungrier opponents.

Wanting a good marriage means nothing without committing to put the effort in almost every day. Wanting to win a tennis match means nothing without committing to put the effort into almost every ball. There’s no shortcut to beating a quality player.

So I’m going to try, for the rest of this year, to commit myself to every shot in every point in every game in every set in every match.

We’ll see what that does for my winning percentage. Fortunately, my marriage doesn’t depend on my forehand.

The Pickle-Ball Pickle

2010-10-18T12:43:00.008-04:00

Paddleball. Paddle tennis. Racquetball. Squash. Table tennis. Tennis. Pickle-ball?

Just when I thought I’d at least tried every sport involving hand-eye coordination, a ball and a plate-like object (i.e. a paddle or a racquet), along comes pickle-ball. This strange new permutation of tennis resembles paddle tennis but without the platform or the tightly fenced enclosure. And here’s another distinction: it involves a perforated plastic sphere more like a whiffle ball than a tennis ball.

Maybe I’m late to the pickle party, but I only found out about this game last week via a short video on the front page of my iPad Wall Street Journal subscription. The title of that piece was “Move Over, Tennis, Pickleball Is Here!”

The challenge to my favorite participatory sport having been laid down, I executed a web search that landed me on the pickle-ball homepage (the compound word pickle-ball adorned with a gaudy registered trademark symbol, which should tell you something not good), where I learned:

That pickle-ball was invented on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle.

That it began in the summer of 1965, the same year Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed.

That one of its co-inventors was U.S. Congressman Joel Pritchard.

That it’s played on a surface with the dimensions of a badminton doubles court (less than a third the size of a doubles tennis court) and a net 34-36 inches high.

That the game takes its name not from the strange ball or the condition of its players but from Pritchard’s family dog, Pickles, who used to fetch errant balls from the bushes.

According to the Journal, this 35-year-old game has recently captured the imagination of retirement community residents looking for a sport with less impact on the body than tennis. In other words, they get to exercise their reflexes a lot and their feet a little, with most of the activity coming from exchanges at the net using wooden paddles.

Well, of course, if your choice is between sitting in a chair and playing pickle-ball, this is a step in the right direction. But am I the only one who finds all of this a little suspect?

A sport involves the combination of skill and physical exertion. No doubt the definition of “physical exertion” lends itself to a wide range of interpretations and nearly any activity requiring repeated use of hand-eye coordination offers the opportunity to bring skill to bear. But is there not something inelegant going on here — at least a dumbing down of our notion of racquet sports and more so an exploitation of one of our worst instincts: our desire to play with minimal exertion?

That registered trademark speaks loudly. You trademark Kadima, not paddleball. You trademark particular games, not entire sports.

Yes, I know, there’s a long history of commercially exploiting the great sports, but James Naismith didn’t stick a trademark on basketball. Walter camp didn’t stick a trademark on football.

More than that, this disquisition has me wondering what makes some sports resonate more than others. Why is racquetball — which certainly provides a great deal of exercise and does require some skill — persistently considered a low-rent cousin to squash? Why can’t paddle tennis shake an element of ridiculousness — despite its country club popularity?

The greatest sports, I think, are those that tax the best athletes to their very limits, yet remain accessible to mere mortals. They offer competitors the opportunity to express both power and finesse, speed and control. And in these sports while — like any human endeavor — the occasional point may be subject to the whims of chance, the outcomes of entire games and sets rarely are.

By these standards, it's hard to imagine that the great sport of tennis will be cast aside for a game that involves hitting a whiffle ball over a net with a wooden paddle on a rump court. Doing so may prove to be fun for some, but don't count on it ever rising to greatness. And, notwithstanding the nice plug for this game from the Journal, therein lies the pickle for whomever holds the trademark to pickle-ball.

On Gratefulness

2010-10-11T08:00:00.006-04:00

I‘ve had a racquet of one sort or another in my hand for most of my life. Growing up, my friends and I would knock the tennis ball around from time to time at local parks or at camp — not tennis camp, just camp. There was also the very occasional tennis lesson at the country club or on vacation. For a time in my teens we got into paddleball, now a lost art, it seems, in which one smacks a lively little ball against a concrete wall. In college I hit the tennis court and the squash court once in a while, but only just enough to convince myself I hadn’t grown bookish. And when I lived full-time in Manhattan, I went through a period where I regularly played racquetball at a downtown health club called The Printing House.

Through all these permutations I usually had enough talent and eye-hand experience to hold my own among equally unskilled decent athlete, but I never stood a chance against a serious tennis player. Then, in my late twenties, we moved to Bedford Hills in northern Westchester County and joined a facility in Mt. Kisco called the Saw Mill Club.

I hacked it around there for a few years at the sub-3.5 NTRP level, playing my usual uneven game of one impressive shot spaced between half a dozen mediocre ones and a dozen flat-out lousy ones. Yet my opponents had similar games, and you could dine out on the one great shot of the set and have a good time so long as you didn’t take winning too seriously.

Problem was: I’m not the kind of guy who can live with not taking winning seriously. After getting beat by enough guys with games even uglier than mine, I began to feel that I had to get better or find another sport. Thus began my experience with a long list of pros. In the twenty years I’ve been working to improve my tennis game, I estimate that I’ve hit with a couple dozen professionals, one of whom floated to mind specifically when I decided to launch this blog.

Richard Stephenson came to work at Saw Mill not long after I’d picked up my game with intensive training from a local pro who’d just left the tour. To my delight, that pro had me hitting both consistently and big. I’d always had the occasional fast-moving flat drive, but my new strokes resulted in a heavier ball, and I began feeling pretty good about myself.

Along comes Richard, new to the club at that time (he’s since left), but with four decades of tennis under his sweatband. As I recall, he hailed from Jamaica, where he’d once ranked very high in all of the Caribbean. He had something of an old-fashioned game: a forehand that he seemed to caress rather than whip, a one-handed backhand, looping groundstrokes, a serve that penetrated the box with relatively little velocity (by pro standards, anyway). We hit regularly for the better part of a year, I think, and I believed at first that I could give him game — which is to say, play him relatively even, maybe win the majority of sets on a given day.

Wrong I was.

Richard was freckled and lanky. He moved like Federer (though no one had yet heard of Federer back then), like a gazelle with padded hooves. You’d think you had hit the ball into an open court or at an impossible angle, and he’d just appear, unhurried, lay his racket on the yellow sphere, and reset the rally. You’d work the next point, sure you had the advantage this time, and there he was again, presto, reversing your momentum.

Sure, I won some games, maybe even a set or two off the guy. But on the whole he mastered me, and he didn’t even seem to be trying.

To make matters worse, for several years prior to meeting Richard I had expended a great deal of time (and not a little money) modernizing my game, learning to hit the big topspin ball, to bring pressure, to brush angle shots from mid-court. And Richard’s game wasn’t only better than mine; it was a refutation of half of what I’d learned. You hit Richard a loopy shot and you got a loopy shot back, six inches inside the baseline. Okay, most good players do that. Then, on the rare occasion you were lucky enough to get a short ball, you stepped in and drove it, but a split second later, when you looked up, there was Richard’s ball, looping back into the space you’d vacated on the baseline or in the corner or, maybe, six inches from the sideline.

Looping, looping. Argh!

I emphasize: it didn’t matter how hard or soft you hit the ball to Richard. It always came back at a measured pace and it almost always landed in the court. He was human alkaline. The great neutralizer.

Richard matched this game with his demeanor: even-tempered, an easy smile, showing you the big space between his front teeth as if to demonstrate how much room you had to beat him.

After my worst outings against Richard, before I’d fully resigned myself, perhaps, to the knowledge that I’d never hit many balls past him, I must have shown that look of frustration that all those who play this game of racket and ball and net see from time to time — or feel forming on their own faces. I must have shown that look because Richard would tilt his racket and shake his head and say, “It’s an ungrateful game, mon.”

We give tennis all this love, work so hard to earn the right to win…and the game doesn’t care. It requires us to prove ourselves every time we step out onto the court, every time we turn our shoulder for a backhand, every time we send a service toss into the wind, every time we approach the net, every time we hit a great shot and watch it looping, looping back to us and stand there wishing it out, this once, this one damned point.

And of course that ball drops in, and unless we give chase with every muscle in our legs, tennis won't return the love just then. It cares only about how we execute now, in this moment, and not a whit for what we’ve given it in the past.

Point taken, Richard. Point taken. And in defiance of the game, I am grateful.