supper at the best table: the match Hal should have lost, choked away by belief
He should by all rights have lost to Stice today, and he knows it. Stice was in physical control of the third set. Stice choked it away only because he didn’t believe he could beat Hal yet, deep down, since Hal’s competitive explosion.
Context
The afternoon's near-upset gets its post-mortem, and the verdict is that the body wasn't the problem. Stice "was in physical control of the third set" — the strokes, the fitness, the game were all there to win it. What lost it was belief: he "choked it away only because he didn't believe he could beat Hal yet." It's the form-vs-inspiration question 130 will press, previewed as a diagnosis — a fully-capable athletic body undone by the one thing conditioning can't install, the conviction that it's allowed to win.