Mini Serena by Christina

Pueblo is the most desolate town I've been to in the seven years I've lived in Colorado. I was driving with my dad and brother to a tennis tournament I was playing in. The three of us were singing along with Snoop Dogg and Pharrell and laughing at the bugs that splattered against the window. I had no apprehension about the upcoming matches, absolutely no worries.
We finally arrived in Pueblo, and my happy go lucky mood dropped to a simmer. I tried to imagine what my four year old brother was seeing. In the mind of an innocent boy this town resembled the farm books he had on the Pottery Barn shelves back home. I was envisioning, however, a fat man with oil stained hands, a tractor, and a six pack. I didn't even have to imagine what my dad was thinking, I knew right away when we stopped at a Loaf n' Jug and he told me to lock the doors while he went in to pay the gas bill.
We drove onward and of course ended up getting lost for 20 min. I had to beg him to stop to ask for directions. Women say that men hate to stop for directions. I haven't met every man in the world, but the ones I have met hate asking for directions. I finally convinced him to give up the manly front and get some help. The address Google provided and the Yahoo directions I had looked up the night before ended up driving us straight into the city's events center. My dad was furious, and quickly blamed me for the mishap. I looked sideways at my dad as we drove through the events center and past seven or eight men in orange prison suits lifting concrete slabs. My brother mimicked my dad and said "Chrissy, you've really gotten us lost this time." I told him to shut it. My dad stopped a guy driving around in a golf cart who told us the tournament was in the city park. We drove on.
I walked to the front desk, accepted the can of balls and shook my opponents hand. She was tiny. So frail that I almost laughed at the image everyone around us must see. Invescoe field compared to my backyard. We started warming up on the court and I performed the various tests to identify my opponents weaknesses. We started play, and I was on a roll. I slammed balls to her backhand which she could rarely get back. When she did manage to get her racquet on the ball, she would then lob it back, and I would slam one of my untouchable overheads. I felt great.
I ended up creaming frail-girl and moved on to my next opponent. This girl was pretty cocky. In the warmups I saw that she got frustrated really quickly, so when we started playing I started out strong knowing that she would probably give up. I was right and quickly got ahead. Towards the end of the game my opponent started crying. Typical. Suddenly I heard a grunt that would give Serena Williams a run for her money. I looked to my right two courts down and saw a girl who was maybe four feet tall and wearing a pink visor with matching shorts ripping balls at her opponent. I looked at the girl I was playing, who had stopped crying and was also staring dumbfounded at the mini Serena. My opponent and I laughed, I won the game and we walked off the court.
I had quite some time before my next match against my next opponent, Anastasia Kondrasov. So my dad, brother, and I drove to the nearest Loaf n' Jug to pick up some energizing goodies to go along with the lunch we packed. After lunch I walked back to the tennis courts and did some stretches. I felt pretty good about the tournament as I walked to the front desk. I watched the matches that were going on as I waited for Kondrasov to show up. I heard the tournament director announce that Kondrasov was there, and I tore myself away from the match between two very buff and quite attractive teenage boys. I looked around for Kondrasov and I didn't understand. I watched the balls in the director's hand descend a foot or two to a blonde-haired girl with a pink visor and matching pink shorts. I couldn't believe it, the Russian girl I was playing was actually the mini Serena I heard two courts away.
Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my Goddy God God. Crap. Okay Christina, breathe, breathe. I tried to pull myself together. Her dad, little sister, and older brother were there, all equipped in tennis gear. I was surrounded by a family of Russian speaking tennis prodigies. We started the warmup and I was so nervous, that I all I could think about was the grunt. That damned grunt. She grunted for everything. I wanted to jump across the net and rip out her that precious blonde hair of hers. Then I realized that she probably exaggerated her grunt with the intent of psyching out her opponent, and it was working. More importantly, I was thinking about harming a girl who couldn't have been older than eleven. I tried to pull myself together. It didn't work too well. I ended up losing the match.
The tennis director and at least fifteen people had come from all over the club to watch our match. When we walked off, people shook my hand, told me I had played a great match, and asked me questions about how long I'd been playing. I was so upset, but I held myself together for my last twenty minutes in Pueblo. I looked over at Kondrasov and saw people trying to talk to her. She gave them a smile which quickly faded as her dad grabbed her hand to pull her away, all the while speaking to her in Russian. Now I don't speak Russian, but you can always hear emotion in someone's voice, no matter what language they speak. I could hear the anger in his voice. This was something I couldn't quite understand. She had managed to beat a girl that weighed a buck sixty, when she couldn't have been over one hundred and five pounds. I had lost the match and my dad might have been disappointed in me, but he certainly wasn't angry. Kondrasov might have walked off the court a winner, but I could see that she had learned to win to please her father, not to please herself. It doesn't surprise me that I've never forgotten her name or that match. On the drive back home, I didn't laugh at the dead bugs on the window. I was too busy thinking about the lesson I had learned from that match. Kondrasov taught me that a win is only a win when you do it for yourself and nobody else.