Short Story #9: Dead Even

I was watching the tennis match between the champion Nadal and the never-heard-of Petzschner. When I had switched on TV, the score had read one set all and two games apiece. Miraculously, Petzschner played well enough to snatch that third set from Nadal. Soon, the match went into the fourth set, which Nadal won. Next hour, even as the weather became dank, my eyes fell upon the giant scoreboard that read two sets all and three games apiece. “What a fascinating dead even”, I had conjectured.

It reminded me of the Olympics gymnastics event of year 2008. The degree of crossing and then uncrossing the bar by the champion Romanian team had created an effect of a dead even angle. It also reminded me of the philosophy of negative and positive lags used by their captain.

When I had switched on TV, USA was leading the pack in the Gymnastics event by overhauling the 9.7 score of Chinese by a mere 0.05. The blunt and sharp scissors of the scorers was in full action, as they were literally shearing the fate of the teams by a margin as little as 0.05 points. The combat between the bluntness and sharpness of their scissor-like action resembled was dead even. Tension was spilling everywhere as USA hoped no other team would better their score. However, they were skeptic of Romania, who was the last team to participate. USA was aware of the stunning performance produced by Romania in the previous Olympics. Before the entire nation of USA could complete praying to the God for the Romanians to default, the Romanian captain’s legs crossed and then uncrossed the bar with amazing symmetry to hand his team a score of 9.85 and with that the Gold medal. The position of both his legs while crossing and then uncrossing was dead even.

“What is the reason of your continued success at the Olympics?” he was asked after the felicitation. “I try to arrive at a dead even between positive and negative lags.” he said. Amused by this response, the reporter requested the captain to elaborate. “I use positive lag to delay the start of our practice sessions until my team composition is final. After that, however, we get a surprise in the form of negative lag. Even before our practice sessions are over, generally the news breaks out that there is a fair chance that USA will qualify. Recent history suggests that when they qualify, they pose the stiffest challenge to our medal aspirations. So, once our practice is over, this negative lag helps me in predicting at what stage we would need to face them in the main event. With this knowledge, I ask my team to focus on tackling USA six months in advance. So, we try to first scale up our own preparation, and then focus on winning over USA. When the contribution of positive lag matches that of negative lag, we arrive at a dead even scenario, which helps us in winning Gold!” he concluded.

Never in my wildest of thoughts had I fathomed the lively importance of such a term that contained the word ‘dead’!