While playing an especially intense game of tennis with his father, a man strategizes how best to maximize error to prevent his father from winning or himself from losing. In the first serve, the man faults and loses his second serve and, by default, the point, returning the ball to his father. His father serves and he returns the ball in a backhand transfer move that his father gracefully lobs back. The man strikes the ball in a powerful overhead strike, sending it hurtling towards the back of the his father’s box, “leaving no possibility of accidental return.” Noting that the sun was setting and that the game would likely be called after the next exchange, the man assures himself that should his strategy of not losing and his disinterest in winning prevail, he would at least conclude the game with a draw. They resume the game; the man powerfully delivers the ball down court at his fathers heart, a serve his father returns with a “forceful and deep” strike sending the man across the court. The man, with the objective of maximizing even unintentional error in his father’s game, returns the strike with a “scooplike shot”, a shot his father easily taps into the court left open leaving the man with oppurtunity for a deuce. The two exchange words, the man infuriated by his opponent’s and the umpire’s collusion. He prepares for his strike, and in the form of his first point strike, launches the ball past his father, but his next shot fails to clear the net, resulting in yet another deuce. The man, annoyed by how long the game has run, attempts a truce, but his father brusquely declines, remarking, “Don’t look to me for concessions.” The umpire then intervenes, clarifying that the mach would continue until one player demonstrated superiority over the other. The game continues with several point deuces until, in an accidental shot and already defeated, the man just barely clears the net into the shallow edge of his father’s box, denying his father the chance to return. The man wins the game, noting that the “serve had no business going where it did.” His father is rather icy towards him after the game. After he stops to talk to an observer who too notes that the shot wasn’t “fair play,” the man goes in search of his father who is “as always, deceptively difficult to find.” He is stopped by a person who says he saw an older man pass by with “tears running down his ancient face." The person refuses to tell where the father went, until after they play a match together.

The match starts and already, before the ball reaches him, just by the power and coordination with which his opponent serves the first strike, the man is sure he lost, but he concedes nothing.