Writing demands a form of controlled daydreaming, an act based in losses of self that alternate with conscious assertions of self—the edit, the second draft, the rewrite, an act opposed to the nature of all games and sports.
Wallace, though, the book works. We get memoir, philosophy, reporting, and a good dose of Wallace’s writerly risks in the course of 138 pages. Tennis is an organic, not stupid principle for framing Wallace. He played the game from childhood on, thought about it obsessively, and returned to it often as both subject and practice. We don’t need to buy the “greatest tennis writer ever” line to appreciate how good Wallace is on tennis (and how, maybe surprisingly, it triggered some of his most controlled writing). The book opens with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan that addresses the origin of the word “tennis.” Most sports do not need this kind of explanation—you do not wonder where someone got the name “basketball.” But a casual fan, like me, did not know that “tennis” began as a French word—“Tenez,” or “Take it”—shouted before each serve. As Sullivan describes it, the “Neapolitan ear” took up this term and by the time it drifted from Italy into England, and Shakespeare, the word had become “tennise,” or simply “tennis.” The introduction eventually flirts with a distortion of category. Sullivan isn’t a real opponent here, or even a straw man, as he’s too careful to call tennis “the literary sport.” He writes, instead: It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too. The perfect game for Wallace. Sullivan seems to know the dangers at hand. “Physical chess” acknowledges that we can’t call chess a sport, though it is a game.
The end of this paragraph, though, goes ahead and re-shelves tennis anyway, moving it from “sport” to “game.” This threatens to remove the athlete from the act, which segues right into denying athleticism its own logic and its own poetics. Backing up for a moment, though. Tennis is “the most isolating of games”? In my ten or twelve attempts to get through a game of tennis—or a set—I have felt not isolated, but very easily seen. Given the chance to score one ferocious and elegant point if I also agreed to a swift, equally elegant death, I would have taken it. The most isolating experience I’ve ever had in sport is playing left field in a baseball game that involves no strong hitters. You can think about eternity, perhaps even design the upper- left corner of a crossword puzzle. Even if you drift off, the crack of a well-hit ball and a few shouts are usually enough to prompt you back into position. But the larger problem, one that can dog any subject, tennis or otherwise, is the “x is
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