Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, November 30, 2022
This could be a repost, but I love this story of Andre Agassi detecting a tell (an inadvertent behavior or mannerism that betrays a player’s true intention) Boris Becker had when they played each other. After losing to Becker in their first three matches, Agassi then won eight straight over Becker. Agassi revealed this to Becker in retirement over a beer.
“If he’s serving in the deuce court and he put his tongue in the middle of his lip, he was either serving up the middle or to the body. But if he put it to the side, he was going to serve out wide.”
“The hardest part wasn’t returning his serve — it was not letting him know that I knew this,” Agassi said. “I had to resist the temptation of reading his serve for the majority of the match and choose the moment when I was gonna use that information on a given point to execute a shot that would allow me to break the match open.”
I suppose hanging on to regret suggest we haven’t learned anything from it.
Something I miss about being a married parent is discussing what we were going to buy the kids for Christmas. The banter was fun. Some divorced couples have a relationship in which that can happen, but the boundaries set up in my situation prevents that joy. For the most part, I have to hope what I buy isn’t already bought by their mother or someone in her large family. Oddly, I try not to buy anything on their Christmas list thinking a former in-law will use it as a guide. It’s hard trying to make Christmas warm and rememberable when you dread the whole experience and doing what you can to merely survive the experience. Sheesh, it ain’t even December yet, lol.
