“Irritable! Irritable!” shouted Deiton Baughman during his match Wednesday against Prajnesh Gunneswaran at the ATP Challenger Tiburon. After a forehand error to lose his serve at 7-6, 4-3, Baughman thumped a ball clean out of the court, earning a code violation. But that wasn’t his most inventive exclamation of the match.
At 15-0 in the next game, Baughman hit a forehand long. “I feel like a nymphomaniac is also a nun,” he observed. “It’s kind of like, the bizarre world I’m living in right now.”
Unfamiliar with this idiom, but struck by its vividness, I messaged Baughman to ask where he got it from. He said it was totally his own, made fresh on the spot. “Things just pop into my head and in the heat of competition I just say it without thinking about how it’ll sound or what it even means half the time haha,” Baughman wrote.
When asked if he remembered any other quips, Baughman said most of his phrases escape him after the fact, given their stream-of-consciousness nature, but he did recall two:
I once asked a chair umpire during one of my matches why we had “living fossils” making line calls haha. The linesman was a bit advanced in age.
I remember saying one thing during my matches recently like “I have less clarity out here than Trump does on twitter” haha
“I’m a pretty creative guy even when I’m not thinking about it lol,” Baughman said of his on-court poetry.
H/t Robby