Hoffman’s Heroics Can’t Lift Dukes to Victory : TeamTennis: Former UC Irvine player called out of stands as replacement, but Wichita proves too tough.

Hey, Carsten Hoffman, isn’t TeamTennis a nutty game? One minute you’re sitting in the stands minding your own business, and the next you’re running for the locker room at the John Wayne Tennis Club.

“Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.” Well, sort of.

When Jorge Lozano’s back went out midway through the men’s doubles set, the call went out for Hoffman, a former No. 1 doubles player at UC Irvine who became a Duke for a day Sunday.

It would have made a better story if Hoffman had helped Tim Pawsat defeat Buff Farrow and Craig Johnson of the Wichita Advantage. It would have been a great story if Hoffman had helped the Dukes beat the Advantage.

But the results were disappointing on both counts as Farrow and Johnson defeated Hoffman and Pawsat, 6-4, and Wichita beat the Dukes, 23-21, in overtime.

“It was like when you hear the rumbling,” said Greg Patton, Dukes’ coach. “And you start looking for a sturdy table to jump under before the earthquake starts.”

That’s how Patton felt when he saw Lozano come up lame after hitting a return with Lozano and Pawsat ahead, 3-2, and the Dukes up, 12-9.

TeamTennis rules say you can make one substitution per gender, per match, but they don’t spell out where you get that substitute. Before the match, Patton, who coached Hoffman at UCI, put the former Anteater on a list of possible alternates.

“I came here with my aunt and uncle from Germany to show them some tennis,” Hoffman said later. “What are the odds?”

So long that he didn’t know Patton penciled him in as an alternate beforehand; so long that he had neither shoes, nor racquet, nor shorts, nor T-shirt.

“I ran into the pro shop and I started grabbing stuff off the wall,” Patton said. “It was like a supermarket derby.”

Hoffman’s racquet was “purple,” the shoes were straight out of the box, the shorts “two sizes too big” and the T-shirt read, “John Wayne Tennis Club.”

Mind you that while this was going on backstage, Lozano, a Davis Cup player for Mexico since 1981, gamely played on.

After about five minutes, Hoffman and Patton returned to the cheers of the crowd of about 1,000. Then things got tougher.

“Of course I have to serve first, of all things,” said Hoffman, who in accordance with the rules was given no time to get loose. “It wasn’t exactly a perfect warm-up.”

Hoffman’s only hurrah was an overhead winner, and it wasn’t enough to alter the course of the set.

In other action: The Dukes’ Manon Bollegraf and Elise Burgin remained unbeaten in women’s doubles this season, defeating Cammy MacGregor and Catherine Suire, 6-1. MacGregor defeated Bollegraf, 6-3, in women’s singles, and Farrow beat Pawsat, 6-2, in men’s singles.

Pawsat and Burgin forced overtime by defeating Johnson, who was later replaced by Farrow, and Suire, 6-3, in mixed doubles.

In TeamTennis you can’t win the match if you lose the final set, so the teams played until Farrow and Suire won the first overtime game.

The Dukes (1-2) play at San Antonio Tuesday and at Wichita (2-1) Thursday before returning to the John Wayne Tennis Club to play host to Sacramento Saturday.

Meanwhile, the search is on for a replacement for Lozano, whose back injury was described by Patton as “pretty serious.”

Mark Kaplan, another former Anteater, was mentioned as a replacement. So was Hoffman. At this point, the Dukes will take anyone they can get, even if they happen to be sitting in the stands.