JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

in memory of David Foster Wallace.

This is going to be a tennis year. Good. If the world is going kaput in under 12 months we still have time to attend the major tournaments and behold Roger Federer with our own eyes. End it all with the sport you loved first and most.

Of the many things DFW wrote we like his tennis pieces the most: his 1997 essay on the journeyman Michael Joyce (Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness) in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again showed us the endless possibilities of tennis writing. The fusion of nerdiness and passion, the hilariously accurate portraits built through the accretion of minutiae, the footnotes that went on like jazz riffs—there is no one like DFW. (When we read his Roger Federer essay ten years later our seatmates could hear our neural circuits crackling with joy.)

To prepare for the Infinite Jest tennis tour of the end of the world we got a copy of Consider The Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace. It is ten times more portable than Infinite Jest (which we plan to dip into when we are at home and stationary) and it contains an essay about tennis.

In How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (1994) DFW asks two questions that boggle sports fans. One, Why are sports autobiographies so robotically banal? (Notable recent exception: Open by Andre Agassi.) Two, Why are great athletes so robotically banal in their post-game interviews? (Notable exceptions: Goran Ivanisevic and Marat Safin)

“The real secret behind top athletes’ genius…may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

(It’s just occurred to us that DFW is Seymour Glass.)

“How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliche as trite as “One ball at a time” or “Gotta concentrate here,” and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, cliches present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative fu with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it…

“This is, for me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither.”

* * * * *

We were talking to Straight Tennis Mike (to distinguish him from Gay Tennis Mike) and we agreed that this year The Fed should be good for one or two slams. As last year limped to a close his advantages over his younger competitors became apparent. The Fed’s “economical, no sweat” (in quotation marks because you need to be a genius in order to look like you’re not doing very much) style allowed him to keep playing at full capacity while the others had succumbed to exhaustion and injury. His timing was off in 2011—you’re supposed to play your best tennis AT the majors, not After—but 2012 will be better.

We don’t know how we know, we just know.