MANY OF YOU, I know, are sitting on the edges of your seats waiting with bated breath to hear how I did at USTA North Carolina Senior Men's 3.5 Doubles Tennis Championships. You can slide back now; I will get to that indirectly. Asheville is nice. It's kinda like Carrboro on steroids. For example, one of our waitresses at Tupelo Honey Cafe (which I would highly recommend), was pleasant, efficient and educational — appearing to have the collected works of Hieronymus Bosch tattooed on her body.

We didn't really see a lot of the town, though we did go to the Chamber of Commerce — twice in one day. (They had computers for checking email that we used to email to see how we could get email at the place we were staying. So much for "getting away to the mountains.") While there I bought a t-shirt for my lovely wife at the whitewater rafting booth. It says: "Paddle faster! I hear banjo music." She thinks it means head toward the music.

The Senior State Championships in a nutshell: lots of old guys, as well as some well- preserved gals, hitting balls back and forth. That's pretty much it.

Our team, which represented the aging yet middling tennis players of the greater Durham/Orange/Northern Chatham County area, did not fare so well — if winning and losing are any standard. In the thin mountain air, our balls tended to go long, while our opponents' managed to just dribble over the net onto our court.

I know that many of you would like to know how I did in the championships, wondering what happens when mediocrity meets excellence. Briefly, it's not pretty.

But this is not just about me. As many of our coaches over the years have repeatedly pointed out to us, there is no "I" in team. (Experience, unfortunately has shown me that it usually does include both an "M" and an "E".) How did our team do? We exceeded all expectations — of which there were none. Just as I had so presciently predicted: first-round elimination! We finished second in the four-team Group III — just behind three teams tied for first, including the team from the mountains where there is barely enough level ground to build a tennis court, and the team from Wilmington where bikini-clad women are a constant distraction. Finishing behind Greensboro we expected. (Civic motto: America's Most Boringest City).

We did not embarrass ourselves – mostly because we are not easily embarrassed. During three team matches, each with three "individual" doubles matches with two sets each (for a total of 18 sets), we won one. (Thanks, Doug and Dave – for making the rest of the team look bad.) But, hey, but nobody bagelled any of us! For those not versed in the technical language of competitive tennis, "to be bagelled" means to lose a set at zero games, derived from the similarity in the torus shape of the bagel and the number zero. (Speaking of zeroes, know how to tell winners from the losers at the tournament post-first-round party? The losers are drunk; winners are sober, still having matches to play.) In a completely unexpected turn of events, my regular partner, Terry O'Culligan, the esteemed manager of the Hollow Rock Racquet and Swim Club, despite being saddled with several disabilities (including me as his partner) ended up with the best results for our team, winning an average of seven games per match.

Still, my readers ask: how did you do? OK, I'll say. To help you visualize my matches, for those of you who don't know me by sight, I have a body a lot like that of Rafael Nadal — just distributed a little differently. Our opponents didn't look much better — until they hit the ball. Many of them appeared to have played this game before.

My results? Losers just lose. So I didn't do that. Winners just win. So I didn't do that either. Mediocre players? They get leads and blow them. That characterized the whole weekend for me and whichever poor sucker was paired with me. (For example, ahead in games 4-1 then 5-2 in the first set of our first match, we lost 7-5.) However, I really had only one personal goal going into the tournament — for my partner and me to win the Misses Congeniality Award — and although there was no official vote, the consensus was that we walked away with it. We are sure, given our conduct on the court, all of our opponents would have been glad to play us again — and again and again and again.

Gary D. Gaddy grew up with public tennis courts practically in his backyard in Danville, Virginia — for what little that turned out to be worth. A verion of this column was published in the Chapel Hill Herald June 14, 2007.

Copyright 2007 Gary D. Gaddy