Ladies and Gentlemen,
So ... it begins. The countdown to the eighth annual Sergio Open battle royale is on.
For those of you who have attended before, you should damn well know the drill by now. We won’t be mixing things up. You can’t improve on perfection (which remains my response to Snarlo whenever he talks about participating in ‘boot camp’).
For those of you who haven’t ... what the hell? What sort of bizarre, deeply-buried rock have you been residing under? And what’s the rent like on that sort of residence?
The vital stats are as follows:
Saturday, 15 January 2011
Forrest Tennis Club
Dominion Circuit, FORREST ACT
http://www.tennisact.com.au/pages/default.aspx?id=2524
10.30am – 3.00pm (with the world-famous after-party, Sergio Closed, to follow in the evening)
$10 registration fee (which covers court-hire, tennis balls and the coveted winners’ trophies)
Registration fee to be paid (in exact change, preferably) on the day
BYO racquet, outrageous (or outrageously serious) tennis wear and non-ripple-soled shoes
The format is mixed doubles, with teams formed by the age-old method of names being drawn from a hat. This has seen some truly great combinations formed over the years. There’s a flip-side to that, but nobody likes negativity at this time of year.
It is extremely important to note that tennis really is just the excuse we exploit for hosting this thing. Previous participants will confirm that the standard is in many cases woefully low. We have significant numbers of people every year who have literally (and I mean that in its ... er ... literal sense) never picked up a tennis racquet before. So don’t even begin to think that lack of tennis experience counts as an excuse for not getting yourself on board.
Of course, some very cruel individuals might say that it’s predictable for the only Director never to take out the Sergio Open to say these sorts of things ... but it really is the truth.
As with previous years, we’ll do our best to ensure that we have even numbers of guys and girls ... without which the whole mixed doubles thing can become a mite difficult. There are ‘work-arounds’ available if we don’t quite get there, but I can assure you that there won’t be a repeat of last year’s farce – which saw eventual lady winner Bel Gorman teamed up with two different fellows in two different Pools ... the predictable result being that she ended up having to play against herself at the semi-finals stage. My fellow directors and I have only just finished rigorous examination by the Royal Commission which was established to look into this travesty, so we’ll be avoiding a repeat performance like the plague (or like the plaque, for those of us concerned with oral hygiene).
I appear to have become a little side-tracked with that previous paragraph, for which I apologise. What I was trying to get at is that juggling numbers will probably be necessary and so we’ll take participants on a ‘first-come, first-served’ basis. Last year we ended up with about 25 blokes and one or two fewer ladies and it was my impression that we were pretty much at capacity. We’ll prolly be looking to cap it at about 25 teams again this year ... so get on board!
Please submit expressions of interest (or better still, rock-solid guarantees of your attendance) to one of your unfriendly Sergio Open Directors at your earliest convenience.
Your move, suckers ...
Dan Crowe
(on behalf of The Sergio Open Directors)
