The day I lost to Julien Prosser
By Chris Burns

Let’s set the scene. It was February this year and I was playing in my second Australian Tour event for the season after assuming I wasn’t going to play at all in 2006. I hadn’t really put in the preparation required for the Australian circuit but did believe I was good enough to jump on board and cause some damage. I was teamed up with Peter “Chico” Jones and we’d been playing together for about a month so we were still fairly raw with our teamwork. Adelaide, a month earlier, was a bit of a shit fight and we scrambled our way to a 9th place through just about all three set matches including our two losses. We wanted something more at St Kilda, had prepared hard for a month this time and we were ready to go. Our first match was hopeless; we just scraped through against the bottom seeds in straight sets (we were seeded 9th). I was feeling emotionally flat throughout the game and feeling as though I was going through the process rather than playing in the moment. I didn’t really go into that one with any goals or plans and it was really only the belief that we’d win that carried us over the line. I wasn’t going to let this happen again. It was four hours until our next match against the 8th seeds who knocked us out of the Adelaide event so I went away to a secluded area and set out a plan for the next match. I then meditated over it and came back to the tournament fully charged. What’s more, when we were warming up for the match almost the entire crowd put on white headbands to show their support (don’t ask why). Anyway, the positive energy was really there and we went out and thrashed our opponents, taking us through to the next day and an encounter with the number one seed, Julien Prosser and his partner. (Prosser lost the bronze medal playoff in the Athens Olympics and is a three time Olympian). He had been the player I’d always wanted to play so this was a dream come true and I wasn’t planning on wasting it.

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