2A/3A Arizona Doll Championships

There is a little thing like high school and ordinary life for doll seen here with h. s. coach for three weekends of 2A/3A high school tennis championships, AP exams, term assignments, honor society requirements, last band concerts performed, prom, cutting CD's, parties, final exams next Friday before leaving for the El Paso Open the same day, just back in time for graduation before leaving for the Quiksilver [now canceled]. That is the schedule in which some change might have to occur. Sandwiched between everything else are the 2A/3A AZ State High School Championships, three weekends in a row, barely sandwiched. First Regionals, 4/24-25, just after return from the Muterspaw and turn in the hundred page Lit paper defining 100 terms. Second, Individual championships, 5/2-3, this past weekend, two matches each day, Friday, Saturday. Sat began at 7 AM, then 9:30, then off to two last minute four hour qualifying public service requirements for Honor Society, heavy lifting moving jobs, that is after a muscle strain and he has got a cold, but none of it prevents performing a dozen tunes with the next day's, Sunday, last City Jazz Concert at Symphony Hall, till 3, then reunion with old classmates, home to translate the Spanish assignment because the next day, Monday, is the AP government exam and there turn in 300 defined terms with at least ten essays (he has 16 because he worked in Vegas off court) before leaving by bus to the third state, qualifying team event near Yuma (Antelope), except he wakes Monday with a 103 degree fever, proving bronchitis, which a doll maker knows before x-rays. He takes the AP exam anyway, as a concession resolves to take a jug of cold water and a blanket even if he is unconsciousness on the drive to Yuma for the state team event where he will play twice in the 100 degree sun. As the reporter of the 2A/3A finals said,

him "playing on the 2A/3A level is like taking a howitzer to a pistol shoot."

"It is not something to be taken lightly, going pro," he said,"it's really more work than I can imagine. I've been 10 years in this game and maybe I'm getting close now." But as the trainer of Eight Belles must have thought, who broke her ankles finishing second in the 2008 Derby this weekend, thoroughbreds are fragile and need all the care anybody can invent and even then Big Brown didn't finish the race, but that's why they have doll makers, to advertise the meaning.

College coaches, pastors and parties unite in one thing: do not not go to college. Do not try to go pro. With this kind of scheduling a pro would get some rest. The recruiter was 0-0 in a futures event. Will he survive Yuma? Will doctor and coach let him go? Yes. He promises not to go to school the next day! would anyway still be in hospital. Will he go? Lasty brings up the question completely understood in its day, "did you ever look into an 0?"

The Last City Jazz Concert

Team Doll

Team Doll has an ongoing philosophy. In the midst we don't argue only about tennis. As here, Andrew's coach, a new grad himself of May 2, it's hard to know what to call him, whether guitar soloist, film maker, one who brings together opposites, so busy at the graduation he organized you'd think he was a whole committee, its stage hand, and entertainer, who gave a brief statement tongue in cheek. Maybe he will be a politician, but it is hard to find time off from schedules as tennis practitioner, computer repairman and builder, manipulator of sound and video, bending the light recovered from 12 hour shifts he works which have not yet entered into the designs of which he has so many clips to edit.Now he is an RN he would be happy to drive places he hasn't seen, a still camera in a rappin' truck. They used to say to Lasty, when they left their little blocks of incense, "keep on truckin." There are no pictures of the truck. You cannot see from the picture either the Team colors, the unshaven or the very best companionable traveller.

Catch the Sun: Muterspaw Championships, Las Vegas, 2008

To play Sat 8 AM we left at 1 AM, drove all night, crossed the space city of Hoover Dam before light, cooked at a park, warmed up at Darling and so it went. Everything about the patterns of learning that occured is written in code at the best, not even hinted at the least. We saw the best and worst, Charley's Decatur amid the smoke and digital handle pullers 7 AM Sunday, Mt. Charleston Monday, snow on the ground and the high sun. In between in the matches everything best left unsaid is unsaid. Tennis is a simple game that leaves little to say except,

Catch

the sun

between

fingers.

The sun

doesn't mind

Joy Catchers.

Las Vegas. The Eighth Muterspaw

Try to catch the sun between your fingers.

It might seem impossible.

There are all kinds of objections.

You're not allowed to do it.
Why do you have to control it?
The faint hearted cry, that's an ultimatum!
But the sun doesn't mind.
No screeches from the light. The sun shines for the bold.
This whole tournament coaches and parents raved, dolls taunted
with insults. Some used four syllable words to denigrate. How will they fit with "international studs," those thinking beings?
After you pay in advance for the clinics, they tell you all your doll life that 1) if you're good you get a full ride, which means half or none. 6 or 7 out of 10 rides go international. You want to play 4, 5 or 6 on a half ride they will let you hit with bigs.

That evasion is followed with the further counterfeit that if you play in doll college you can go pro. And we will help you go pro. We will prepare you. So of the 1000s of dolls how many go pro? 100? Not even, since it takes years to doll up, very hard work, expenses not included, and there's such a desperate need for mortgage brokers and lawyers. Doll recruiters enlist players much as the army does, with the promise of a signing bonus, something you think for nothing, but then you find they own you for four years and you owe them 20 plus hours a week, plus every weekend, travel time in season, it keeps your expenses to a minimun.

We play for its own sake, none other and enjoy catching the sun in its transit between our fingers in the mountains.It looks like the Doll Shop nobody knows. So putting aside what things are supposed to be. Down on the desert floor the action is hot, up in the mountains, Mt. Charleston, it is not. Snow was on the ground. The dolls played, filmed, cooked and cooled out.
Got it.