Men's tennis is going dancin'

By Casey Michel     5/16/10 7:00pm

t's not that perfection doesn't exist in sports. Disney feasts on it, and children can't help but imagine it. But when the grind of a season corrodes those attempts at perfection, when faults and walks and bricks remind you of perfection's impossibility, it's easy to think that those childhood thoughts are only meant for disappointment. That perfection is lost with the drop of a point. And then there's the 2010 season of the men's tennis team. Then you have a team swarming center court, a black-and-glass trophy held high, a coach dripping from a Gatorade dousing. You have a reminder that perfection can still peek out from its hiding spot, beneath a crystal blue sky, often when you least expect it.

It's that unexpectedness that makes Rice's 2010 Conference USA Championship all the sweeter. That makes it all the more perfect. Consider:

Rice (14-10) was playing the University of Tulsa, a team that had demolished Rice in four consecutive C-USA Championships, including a 2008 championship taken at the Owls' Jake Hess Tennis Stadium. The Golden Hurricane (16-10) came into the conference tournament not only with a No. 36 ranking and a top seed but with enough of a snobbish reputation that the already ousted C-USA teams, including a very vocal quintet of University of Central Florida, were audibly and obviously rooting for the Owls.

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Yet it wasn't just that Rice was facing its rival - as sophomore Isamu Tachibana said, "I mean, we hate Tulsa. In all sports, we hate them." Rather, it was that Tulsa was out looking for blood. The Owls had already taken down the Golden Hurricane once this year, the first time since 2006, in a heated 4-3 battle two weeks prior. So while Rice knew it was capable of a win in the C-USA final, it also knew that the Golden Hurricane's chip would provide just as much of a boon as its depth - to say nothing of the fact that Tulsa now brought its No. 2 player, 54th-ranked Ashley Watling, who had missed the first match.

Add to this the fact that Rice had just sustained its worst regular season in recent memory - never cracking the top 20, never taking down a top-25 opponent since the end of January - and the April 25 C-USA final loomed with enough history, both recent and far-reaching, that the match could only end in the sweetest victory in a half-decade or with Tulsa's heel planted ever firm on Rice's throat.

The match certainly didn't start out perfectly. The doubles point could have easily gone Rice's way - it had in the Owls' tournament wins against the University of Southern Mississippi and the University of Central Florida in the days preceding - but a series of late breaks allowed Tulsa to take a 1-0 lead heading into singles. The team was visually slumped coming off the court for the break before singles, and the crowd, far and away the largest of the season, sat quietly.

But singles wrought more of the same, and Tulsa's momentum compounded. At one point, sophomore Michael Nuesslein was down a match point, sophomore Christian Saravia was a game away from losing and sophomore Sam Garforth- Bles, who had already lost the first set, stared at a triple-break point that would have put Tulsa's Philip Stephens up 6-1, 5-3.

"If Sam hadn't held there, I think that match would have finished in about four minutes," Assistant Coach Efe Ustundag (Baker '99) said.

But Garforth-Bles did hold, and Stephens, having wasted much of his energy taunting both his opponent and the crowd, began to wilt. Those who were watching senior Bruno Rosa dominate 35th-ranked Marcelo Arevalo at No. 1 moved over to the side courts to turn their sights to Garforth-Bles's match, and were joined by Tachibana taking a quick break from his match at No. 5.

"I saw Sam down the break in the second set, and honestly, I didn't know what was going on," Tachibana said. "But then you could feel it. You could feel that Sam was coming back. The crowd was getting into it and everything, and that's when you kind of knew there was hope, a chance."

Suddenly, there was more than hope - there were results. Garforth- Bles began to figure out Stephens' serve and kept pacing the backline, lengthening points and storming back to take the second set. Nuesslein and Saravia both folded, but junior Oscar Podlewski swept No. 4 to bring the tally to 3-2, still in Tulsa's favor. Tachibana had returned to his court, but was surrounded by four blue-tarped walls such that he couldn't see Garforth-Bles's match.

"I think Bruno's match ending and the crowd coming [over] helped a lot, and [Watling] made a couple questionable calls and that sort of made me mad," Garforth-Bles said. "And then it got personal. . He's notorious. He's known around the college tennis world for being . tricky."

But it didn't matter whether or not the teammates could see one another, or even that Stephens still tried to muster the occasional banter. Because as soon as Garforth-Bles watched Stephens' final error knot the overall score at 3-3, the rest of the Owls had to wait no more than 15 seconds for Tachibana to watch Marko Ballok's easy forehand go wide. Rice had won.

Suddenly, Tachibana was up in the air. Suddenly, Ustundag was leaping at him. Suddenly, within the span of a single point, Rice had gone from the brink to the top of the podium.

"I've never been in a match that finished like that," Rosa said. "Literally one point and then one point, and in the conference tournament. I mean, the whole story, the whole thing, makes it completely different from other [wins]."

Garforth-Bles didn't get a chance to see Tachibana clinch, to get a chance to see his team break what he called a "curse." But he had a chance to help the team douse Ustundag with a Gatorade bath on center court.

"I did not even feel it being cold - that's how numb I was," Ustundag, who had finally won his first conference tournament as player or coach, said. "I actually remember it being wet, but I don't remember it being cold."

The championship meant Rice attained an automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament, and the team entered the field of 64 Saturday against the 25th-ranked University of Washington in the Waco regional. But even if that run ends early, it will be but a footnote to a season that won't readily be forgotten.

Tulsa is done. The season is salvaged. Senior Dennis Polyakov and Rosa, Rice's most decorated talent in many years, sent off their Rice careers just as they wished. Couldn't have scripted it better.

As Ustundag said, "It was a perfect ending.

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