Me 1: Table Tennis vs Andy Lyle 1998
From one dour Scot called Andy hitting a ball over a net to another. Seamlessly I move.
When I think of moments of pure sporting pleasure in my own life, playing table tennis against a fellow called Andy (no S) Lyle looms surprisingly large.
In my Hall of Residence at St Andrews Uni, John Burnet, appeared, at the start of the second term, a table tennis table. Rare delight! I was a pretty nifty player and generally had the beating of all my friends, and you know what it's like with racquet/bat sports, they're very much most enjoyable for everyone if they're a closely fought contest. There were a few good matches, but generally I'd have to play really poorly to lose. I even beat a few folk with the wrong hand, and the jest for me was seeing if they noticed. Aah, the arrogance of youth!
This guy, Andy Lyle, was no friend of mine, or it seems, of many people. He was an awkward, geeky, sarcastic Scot of the old school (his only friend was called Jamie Scotland, I recall) and I, for once in my life, was a bit more "in" than usual and had no time for him. But he could play the ping pong.
So it transpired that every now and then, usually late in the evening, we'd find ourselves the only two people in the table tennis room and, usually without speaking a word except the occasional "Game?" and a score update, we'd play. Rather than the better quality soft rubber bats, we'd usually both for some reason use the cheap harder ones, perhaps so neither had any kind of advantage.
We didn't always play for points, but when we did, the games were always on a knife edge, never more than a couple of points in it. It emerged, over the games, that he probably had the slightest edge on me. If we played 20 games, he probably won 12 or 13 of them.
But I didn't care. We really played. Spectacularly. Every now and then I remember someone else from Hall stumbling into the room hoping for a late night drunken game, then stopping, mesmerised at the incongruous quality of it all. Long, serious, rallies angles, running, fierce concentration.
The best table tennis I've ever played. I've given one or two people a tiny bit better than me and Andy Lyle, for example my brother, a good game, but for a perfect match and playing for the sake of playing, that tops it all.
And I think there's another reason I look back on it fondly. I was a bit of dick that year. I can think of more instances of my being a dick that year than pretty much any other year. It's excusable, the first drunken flush of freedom, having a group of friends I hadn't really had at school, but I was often snobbish and mean. I looked down on people like Andy Lyle and somehow those games serve to restore my inner sense of fairness, of good will to all men, which was more absent back then than I care to remember.
I think Andy Lyle was at a quiz I was running a few years ago, and I pretended I didn't see him, so perhaps I'm still as capable of being a dick, but to be honest, that was in keeping with the terms of our game. The longest, truest thing either of us ever said to each other, at the end of one epic encounter when he bested me 3 games to 2 was "Well played". That's it.
When I think of moments of pure sporting pleasure in my own life, playing table tennis against a fellow called Andy (no S) Lyle looms surprisingly large.
In my Hall of Residence at St Andrews Uni, John Burnet, appeared, at the start of the second term, a table tennis table. Rare delight! I was a pretty nifty player and generally had the beating of all my friends, and you know what it's like with racquet/bat sports, they're very much most enjoyable for everyone if they're a closely fought contest. There were a few good matches, but generally I'd have to play really poorly to lose. I even beat a few folk with the wrong hand, and the jest for me was seeing if they noticed. Aah, the arrogance of youth!
This guy, Andy Lyle, was no friend of mine, or it seems, of many people. He was an awkward, geeky, sarcastic Scot of the old school (his only friend was called Jamie Scotland, I recall) and I, for once in my life, was a bit more "in" than usual and had no time for him. But he could play the ping pong.
So it transpired that every now and then, usually late in the evening, we'd find ourselves the only two people in the table tennis room and, usually without speaking a word except the occasional "Game?" and a score update, we'd play. Rather than the better quality soft rubber bats, we'd usually both for some reason use the cheap harder ones, perhaps so neither had any kind of advantage.
We didn't always play for points, but when we did, the games were always on a knife edge, never more than a couple of points in it. It emerged, over the games, that he probably had the slightest edge on me. If we played 20 games, he probably won 12 or 13 of them.
But I didn't care. We really played. Spectacularly. Every now and then I remember someone else from Hall stumbling into the room hoping for a late night drunken game, then stopping, mesmerised at the incongruous quality of it all. Long, serious, rallies angles, running, fierce concentration.
The best table tennis I've ever played. I've given one or two people a tiny bit better than me and Andy Lyle, for example my brother, a good game, but for a perfect match and playing for the sake of playing, that tops it all.
And I think there's another reason I look back on it fondly. I was a bit of dick that year. I can think of more instances of my being a dick that year than pretty much any other year. It's excusable, the first drunken flush of freedom, having a group of friends I hadn't really had at school, but I was often snobbish and mean. I looked down on people like Andy Lyle and somehow those games serve to restore my inner sense of fairness, of good will to all men, which was more absent back then than I care to remember.
I think Andy Lyle was at a quiz I was running a few years ago, and I pretended I didn't see him, so perhaps I'm still as capable of being a dick, but to be honest, that was in keeping with the terms of our game. The longest, truest thing either of us ever said to each other, at the end of one epic encounter when he bested me 3 games to 2 was "Well played". That's it.
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