Status Updates From On Tennis: Five Essays

first dfw!

Oversweating seems an ambivalent blessing, and it didn’t exactly do wonders for my social life in high school, but it meant I could play for hours on a Turkish-bath July day and not flag a bit so long as I drank water and ate salty stuff between matches. I always looked like a drowned man by about game four, but I didn’t cramp, vomit, or pass out.

The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with the fact that—wind and your more exotic-type spins aside—balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won’t hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition.

It had taken genius to break through the brutal dictates of the power game and bring back an all-court style, to bring back art. And Federer, as Wallace emphasizes, did this from “within” the power game; he did it while handling shots that were moving at hurricane force. Inside the wind tunnel of modern tennis, he crafted a style that seemed made for a butterfly, yet was crushingly effective.

In Federer, though, he had a player who offered him a different subject: transcendence. What it actually looked like. An athlete who appeared “to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.”

The greatest tennis writer of his generation was writing about the greatest player of his generation. “Federer had spent only “20 min with him in the ATP office.” But I doubt Wallace wanted more face time than that. He had come to Wimbledon in search of not the man Roger Federer but rather the being Federer seemed to become when he competed. What Wallace wanted to see occurred only as spectacle

about athletic greatness and mediocrity, and what truly differentiates them, as a player he would often get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Lose our focus. Become selfconscious. Cease to be wholly present in movements. Unlike the great, who become so in part because they would never not to be totally present. Their blindness is not the price of the gift but its essence, and even the gift itself.

The game he writes about is one that, like language, emphasizes the closed system, makes a fetish of it. He seems both to exult and to be trapped in its rules, its cruelties. He loves the game but yearns to transcend it

(…)

reality is inseparable from language, the limits of my language mean the limits of my world

It can be amazing how early in life some writers figure out what they are and start to see their lives as stories that can be controlled