Marin Cilic Wins 2014 Delray Beach Open by The Venetian Las Vegas Over Kevin Anderson in ATP 250 Thriller in Delray Beach

Marin Cilic’s tennis play at 2014 The Delray Beach Open by The Venetian Las Vegas® was sizzling hot! Yellow smoke was literally billowing off of each serve, forehand and backhand winner, that Cilic hit on the blue hard Plexipave courts of Delray. Cilic outlasted 2012 Delray Beach International Tennis Championships winner Kevin Anderson, 7-6 (8-6), 6-7 (7-9) and a deciding 6-4, in a thrilling three-plus hour match to win the 2014 Delray Beach Open and according to the ATP Tour, $81,500 in prize money. Cilic also improved to no. 25 in the Emirates ATP Rankings. Cilic was the seventh-seed in the tournament that featured 32 ATP players including John Isner, Tommy Haas, and Kei Nishikori, among other top-pro tennis players. To get to the finals, Cilic, of Croatia, bounced Germany’s Benjamin Becker in the first round, wild card Ryan Harrison 6-3, 6-4 in the second round, T. Gabashvilli 6-2, 6-3 in the third…and Big John Isner 7-6 (5), and 6-3 in the semi-finals. Fan favorite Isner, reached the semi-finals for the third consecutive year at the tourney. He was coming off of an ankle injury he suffered in Australia, and seemed to move very well on the Plexiplave once again in Delray. Throughout the tournament, Isner’s issue was his composure. The big guy, Isner is 6’9’’ often played far down in size compared to his competition, smacked tennis ball’s completely out of the stadium on Tuesday and Friday resulting in astonishingly, only warnings from the chair umpire. But, that’s understandable, because Big John Isner is fun to watch and likeable, and most likely if one of us had the chance to be the chair umpire, would have been awe of his athletic ability and probably not even issued the warnings. Isner though, struggled in the first set of each of his four matches played at the 2014 Delray Open. Isner came storming back in his first three matches at the tourney, often relying on a serve that pushed 138 M.P.H. but could only muster winning three games against Cilic in the semi’s. Eventual Champion Cilic built momentum over five straight days of play to take the Delray Beach crown, and is 18-4 in matches this year with two titles won. Bob and Mike Bryan won their third doubles title in the last six-years playing in the Delray tourney. The Bryan’s defeated F. Cermak and M. Elgin 6-2 and 6-3. Andy Roddick made his ATP Champions Tour debut for the American team and won three straight matches over Sweden’s Mats Wilander 6-3 and 6-3, Mikael Pernfors 6-3 and 6-2, and Croatia’s Goran Ivanisevic 6-4 and 6-3. Prize money totaled $474,005 at The Delray Beach Open, a men’s pro-tennis ATP 250 tourney held yearly each February at the Delray Beach Tennis Center in beautiful Delray Beach, FL.

I Sleep Well Here at Lance Road

The house was the color of Southeastern Florida beach sand. That shade of sand was darker than oatmeal and lighter than pine tree bark. Leading up to the front door was a four-car wide driveway, and a path through the bright green grass was made by the clicking of flip flops on the way to the simple, yet lightly faded brown, front door. The house was strong, and nicknamed “Lance Road” because of it’s likeness to the seven-time winner of the Tour De France, U.S.A. cyclist Lance Armstrong. I slept well there at Lance Road.
About once a month I heard the late night dull pitch of a siren and the Florida East Coast Railroad train passing through on it’s way from Jacksonville to Miami, or vice versa. I never really knew what the siren was for, maybe the night black railroad bridge with lined with wooden railroad ties and steel track. Or maybe that siren was for a neighborhood water pump out station filled to capacity because of the drenching rains that blanketed the area during the start of this year’s rainy season. I hadn’t had a chance to discover what that siren really was. The sound came late… Sometime like after two or three a.m. 99 percent of the time, after 4 a.m. was when I slept well there at Lance Road.

Short story I'm working on called: 72 degrees and Sunny

I used to walk the green chain-link fences separating the International Tennis Center from the courts where only elite and professional players participated. I was seven, and already had what felt like arthritis in my fingers. Sharp pains, unexpected bends.. They always seemed to stretch out one-second or so after I made an effort to extend them. I could usually feel the muscle against the bone. Anyways, I walked the fence for one reason, I wanted a ball stamped with the ATP, that’s Associated of Tennis Professionals for those that aren’t so luckily sports inclined as I am. On this day there were no balls. The landscaping crew must have eaten them up with their Dixie Chopper ride-on-lawnmowers. It was hot… I ventured across the busy avenue, named after the ocean to the east, and into the Taj Mahal, Cathedral if you will… The 72-degree air conditioned downtown library, filled with homeless avoiding the heat reading comic books, about Dale Earnhardt and to my amusement the Financial Times.
In the library you could hear a pin drop. Some patrons slept, others worked on betterment of education and in the back west corner a newpaper writer typed about a bank robber, a criminal that used the disguise of a William H. Jefferson mask. “Fucking Bill Clinton!” He wanted to type as the headline. The library gala was last night and to the reporter’s amazement, Bill had fucking entered the downstairs of the library with a 30.06 rifle, and a need for the thousands of dollars of uncounted gala donations. To be continued…

Yardwork

The yard-work was left to him, he didn’t have enough money or the “know how” to go hog hunting with his roommate out west of Lake O. so he would be conducting this weeks tasks of mowing, weed-whacking, chopping, and hauling the debris of his destruction. His canvas was a quarter-acre piece of property.

It was the time of the year just after the autumn time change. The air was cold, crisp, and it felt like change was in the light winds, pockets of cold air filled the yard. Just two months ago those breezes were in the 90-degree realm

He was dressed in camouflage shorts with many pockets, black tube socks, black clog chef rubber chef shoes, a black jacket with the word “Hummer” inscribed over the upper chest, and a signature Dale Earnhardt Jr. Mountain Dew AMP with adjustable Velcro strap black and green, hat.

The man hit the yard at 3 p.m. He thought to himself…

“I’ll definitely have this done by dark.”

Dark was now around 5:30 p.m. His roommate normally cut, and blew off the debris with a blower, while he weeded, and picked up the debris from the many Palm Trees the storm had shredded during the constant windstorms that pestered the coastal town on a regular basis.

But, his roommate was eliminating nuisance black hogs out west of Lake O. in Arcadia. So, he started up the mower, took a quick walk around the premises and removed any mower blade clogging debris and he mowed. He mowed. He mowed. He mowed for an hour and fifteen minutes. Then weed-whacked. After that trimmed the front chaucous hedge, and felt so overzealous that he began to chop down the overgrown jungle of a backyard, Palm Trees, Oaks, Hibiscus Tree’s, more Hedges, and so on. He used machetes, trimmers, eclectic hedge trimmers, gas powered hedge trimmers, and virtually everything crowded garage could offer.
Piles of shrubbery were everywhere. The sun was setting. A coyote howled. And the clean-up had just began…

Single handedly began…

Work in progress... This is from the start of a novel I'm writing titled: "Between Love and Clemons Street"

They danced every Friday night between Love Street and Clemons Street. She would take his hand and lead, he would wait for a comfortable pause and spin her. She kept him in rhythm.
She dumped him the weekend after a long Martin Luther’s King Day the two spent in the city. His love for her was more than any of the ten or so girls he dated in long relationships. He was saving money at the top of his closet to buy her an engagement ring and propose.
He was down in the dumps when she told him to date other people and he’ll get over her. I’m sorry, but that was a total bitch thing to say someone who dedicated two years to making her happy.
As much as his stomach turned to tell her so, he gained enough courage and shared with her that he had been on three dates after she broke it off.
Of course she said that no one else had come into her life. Bullshit! He thought. There had to be something more. Or was this just typical man behavior? Or was it jealousy? He would find out either way, but didn’t wish to know the outcome of this heartbreaking admission.
He stared through his binoculars at the beer girl. She stopped, and carefully brushed her appealing auburn colored hair back. Then, she yelled in a sultry voice: “Get your beer here!”
He didn’t even hear, or comprehend what she said. The moment was completely an auditory deafening experience.
He noticed what she was wearing. But, he felt that this wasn’t stalking.
“My name’s not Peeping Tom,” he thought to himself.
He said something to himself. It was barely audible.
“I admire a good woman like a museum curator views a piece of fine art.”
He noticed her tight yellow shirt. Her young firm boobs, and flat stomach.
Her ass ate her tight white shorts. Although this turned him on for a split second, it was incomparable to the love he felt the past two years, and the love he would yearn for from the girl who dumped him just one month earlier.
“I’ve got a bad habit…” He said aloud.
“I like fucking my life up and putting it back together again.”
He had done this so many times before. There was his 16-year-old sweetheart that he spent all two years of his sophomore and junior high school with. They got along great, learned to drink, yearned to party, and used to make love in the front seat of his 1986 Cutlass Supreme Brougham in her driveway just minutes before she was due to walk through the front door in time for curfew. She would walk in just before 11:30 weeknights and just past midnight on the weekends. She would ride him in her driveway, hard adolescent sex.
What if her father walked out the door to check whose car had pulled in the driveway just a half hour earlier. That was part of the thrill… What if he came out?
“My windows aren’t even tinted,” he thought.
Her father would see his daughter riding her 17-year-old boyfriend right there in the driveway. Again that was the thrill for both of them.
But, things don’t stay great forever and she broke up with him when he self destructed over a six month period.
There was the night he told a fib to her face at the Half Bridge. The time he beat up his friend, up and down the beach road. The friend that had hung out and kept his girlfriend occupied (in a friendly way) waiting for him to patiently to be dismissed from his work as a bus boy. Then, he bloodied his friend’s lip at the first boardwalk they stopped at. Wrestling him into the bushes until his girlfriend somehow pulled him off his friend.
“I like fucking my life up and putting it back together again,” he said to himself on many occasions.
There were women before her and woman after, but none like the one he met his junior year of college.
She was coming down the stairs, a blur of golden brown locks, a smile so big you could probably drive a double wide trailer through, and the body of a Greek Goddess.
He didn’t know where it came from but he had an unlimited amount of courage.
“My name is Dan,” I work at “The Reef,” he said.
“I’m the Sous Chef!”
He told her where “The Reef” was over on Juno Beach and he asked her to please come in and “see me.”
Three nights later on a hot-summer Sunday night she showed up with her girlfriend, an attractive blur of blonde curls, and her boyfriend, a familiar face that fished just north of Shantytown.
“Make a table visit… Make a table visit!” “Red” the Pinot Noir toned friendly female server said.
“Tell me all your thoughts on God because I’d really like to meet her,” I said.
“Dishwalla, Blue Cars,” blared on my back-up kitchen stereo.
So, I made my table visit and we connected. I obtained her digits and two nights later on a late Thursday afternoon I called her.


Car crash ending … leave it open for sequel

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