One Point at a Time

Update on James Stout:

 

Jamie won the second leg of the racquets world championship at Queen’s Club in London later in November. All he had to do was win one game. The match is based on whoever wins five games and Stout won all four of the games played in the first leg in New York.

In the first game at Queen’s, he blew a world championship point when he was up 14-7. He went on to lose the game in a tiebreaker, 17-14.

Instead of panicking, Stout regrouped by rethinking his position. Rather than worrying about winning that suddenly elusive final game, he focused on winning points. He calculated that he didn’t have to win any of the four games to be played at Queen’s. As long as he won more points in London than his opponent, Alex Titchener-Barrett, had won when losing all four games in New York, he’d win the title. It was a clever piece of positive thinking—a way to avoid obsessing about the big picture (“I just blew a match point that would let me be a world champion”) and rather concentrating on the age-old mantra: one point at a time.

This came in handy when Titchener-Barrett followed up on his first-game escape by surging to a 5-1 and 8-3 lead in the second game. Stout remained stout and climbed back to 8-all. From there, Titchener-Barrett held the serve four more times but was unable to clinch a single point as Stout rolled out the game 15-8 and retained the title of racquets world champion until at least 2012. 

So this means he can work on his court tennis game. A fortnight after his match at Queen’s, Stout reached the finals of the National Open at Tuxedo. There he played wonderfully and pushed the world #2 player, Steve Virgona, to five sets after getting crushed in the first two: 6-0, 6-2, 2-6, 3-6, 6-3. 

One thought on “One Point at a Time”

  1. James Stout is absolutely the greatest multi-sport racquets athlete of our generation , and it’s not close. World Champion racquets playerTop 5 court tennis playerOne of the top ISDA hardball squash doubles prosFormer top 130 squash singles playerIf he can win the court tennis he’ll be the first man since Peter Latham to hold both titles at once. Don’t bet against him. Fahey can’t last forever, and his powers of concentration , speed and athletic ability will carry him to improve even further at tennis. It’s do-able. Further, his working at the NY R+T is a huge advantage since he has access to top competition and a very supportive environment.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *