The location was just outside the 5th ring road in the suburbs of Beijing which seems like a long ways away until you actually take a cab and go. Then you know it is a long ways away. The Beijing International Family Tennis tournament is sponsored by one of my wife's closet friends. I hadn't played tennis in months due to the way the game tortures both my ego and my back. But they needed someone to be the international and I was it. We arrived at 8:30am, plenty of time to loosen up for our 9:30am match. I warmed up a bit, played with our kids, and in general felt relaxed. There was a pretty young woman (a girl really but my conscience insists on calling her a woman) walking around in a tennis outfit practicing reading lines from a piece of paper. My guess was she didn't really play tennis. Maybe it was the high heals that gave her away. At 9:30, I'm ready to play. But it seems there will be a little ceremony first. Four older men, well old men, make their way from a waiting room to one of the tennis courts. It's maybe a 40 yard walk and they seem pretty relived to have found seats on the court. It's the pretty young woman's turn to talk and she reads from the text and smiles. I'm later told she flubbed many of the lines. I guess she isn't going to make it as a spokesperson either. At least she looked good holding the mic. The crowd surrounds the court she speaks and there is occasional applause which to me seems random, and my son is flirting on a woman support staff holding a balloon. He's successful and he has a shit eating grin on his face when he returns to me. As much as a three year old can have a shit eating grin. The speaking stops and two of the old men pair up with little girls for a game of doubles. The old men can somehow hit and return the ball. In fact they ain't bad. Their lateral movement a bit slow. Maybe a walker would help. I get a little bored with the play, maybe I could go watch their dentures in water to liven things up. I see my wife has already left the court with our daughter, so I follow with our son. By 11:30am I'm pretty loosened up. This is when our 9:30am match starts. This is somewhat expected, the mistake would be to expect it to start on time. Having no expectations is a good way to get by in Beijing. Our opponent is a couple about our age, I want to say older, because they look older, but that's simply because I haven't yet adjusted to being the age that I am. They look pretty serious and focused. I feel not so serious and not so focused. I know my wife expects us to lose because she does not expect much of me. But that's the funny thing about having no expectations, it makes it easy to exceed them, and I think I do. We start well and have the match in hand. It's now after 12pm and our children have not ate or taken their nap yet. Our son decides to give us a hint that he's tired and hungry. His hint consisted of screaming, pulling away from the Ayi, and running onto the court. My wife holds him, he then has to be physically separated from her so we can continue the match. Our daughter chimes in for a harmony of screaming and fussing. Rinse, repeat. We lose focus, we lose some games, and it seems we will lose the match. We ask the Ayi to take our son far away from the courts, at least far enough away so we can't hear him screaming. Once quiet we regain our game. Like reaching the top of the hill on a bike. We win! That's the good news, the bad news is we have to keep playing. We tell tournament organizer we are going for lunch, she says take your time. 30 minutes later she calls asking if we can play right away. Such is the level of organization. We finish our lunch and send the babies and Ayi to my father in law's home for the rest of the afternoon. We go back to the courts and try to relax under a small canopy. For me I alternated between a Jonathan Kellerman novel (please, I never said I was "all that") and my mp3 player. My wife talked and slept, mostly separately. Eventually it was out time to play. Our opponent: A middle age man and his 11 year old daughter. After we won the first game easily, my wife told me in all seriousness that we should hit for power for after all she is just a little girl and won't be able to handle it. Ok, fine, I say. We play and we win the match easily. I figure we are done for the day and have to come back tomorrow, but no, the wonderful organizing committee (and it must be a committee at this point for no one person could create such a mess) decides we have an immediately following match. Ok, we say, why not, after two wins today we are feeling pretty good. My wife even giving me a sincere compliment or two. This third match starts out well and we win the first three games easily. The referee would later say he thought the other side would simply conceded, it was that easy. By some fluke we lost the fourth game. Weird. And then the next. And the next. And the next. Suddenly facing elimination we rose up and won two more games and then¡lost. Did I say our opponents were in their early 60s? And I'm not talking about those 60ish wonders with rock solid abs and a great shape. These two looked their age. And it was their 4th match of the day. No more compliments from the wife now. We took the bus back to town. I have my first ever pedicure.