Sublime

stand lead-footed, watching the ball skid low, graze the inside of the line on its way to set the chain-link fence into song.

So before I played Petrosian again, less than a year after the defeats described above, I spoke with Spassky, who was playing in the same tournament in Yugoslavia. He counseled me that the key was to apply pressure, but just a little, steadily. “Squeeze his balls,” he told me in an unforgettable turn of phrase. “But just squeeze one, not both!”

The two contestants tossed a newly minted Jefferson nickel to decide the order of speaking. Florentyna won and chose to speak first, a mistake she never made again in her life.

I’ve heard old-timers say that the fifth set has nothing to do with tennis. It’s true. The fifth set is about emotion and conditioning.