Counting down the "top" five racquet smashes of 2020 ends up being an abbreviated research project, in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. Even so, whether angrily bashing their battle ax ahead of gathering emotions for the win or ahead of dropping a match, players had their reasons for acting out a bit.

The No. 5 entry doesn't involve destruction so much as handcraft. In a gravity-meets–motor skills display, Benoit Paire bounced his racquet once, twice ... four times ... in angry-but-dainty fashion, as if his tennis stick were a rider-less pogo stick.

The incident came on February 25 in the Dubai Tennis Championships, as shown by this lukewarm-, low-, and highlight reel:

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It was but another of the artful French shotmaker's tennis-as-theater showings. And it was a delicious, topsy-turvy match overall, with Paire bounding back from a 6-2, 5-3 deficit to beat former US Open champion Marin Cilic in a final-set tiebreak.

Life's not Paire—but it should be.