visionaries who finger time and space (Serena, LeBron, Steph). So why even get close to the trap of the “literary sport”? This is a challenge for writers, not athletes. We want to characterize something for those who don’t know the thing, and similes using two known quantities are quickly and easily seen. (The optic yellow of rhetoric.) In 1984, if you had written that a shell-toe Adidas three-stripe was “the rap sneaker,” you wouldn’t have been far from the truth. Run-DMC made the shoe part of their uniform and cut a deal with Adidas after cutting a song about the shoe. By the ’90s, though, the sneaker was no longer seen, and the Timberland boot had begun to signify allegiance to the sister nations of hip-hop and R&B. Decades later, the shell-toe Adidas says “retro hip-hop,” but Timberland boots are probably just boots. Even when they work, broad-stroke similes often have a short shelf life. “Tennis as literary sport” isn’t entirely flawed, conceptually, since it hints at its own roots in the royal court: the ultimate patrician lineage. But that was then, to put it mildly. Of late, tennis has been dominated by two sisters, one of them possibly the most dominant player of all time. This would be problematic for royal ghosts, though Wallace would likely have taken on the political implications of the Williams sisters’ reign. In 1995 he wrote “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open,” which dealt largely with corporate ad placement (a thing that could still surprise and offend). In 2016, given the same title, how could he not take on the spectacle of an athlete of Serena Williams’ caliber being compared to a horse by a major newspaper? 1 As much as I’d like to read him on Serena’s run and a world in which she has to reassert her dominance as often as people grant it, I am more excited to read the next great tennis writer. That writer, like Wallace, only needs the sport to be itself, and will see lines that were obscured, subtle arcs, and the minor, unexpected adjustments that create major results.
the literary y” problem. Chess recalls some aspects of writing, but Sullivan had to put spin on “chess” with the word “physical” to bring it back closer to sports, a move that suggests the dangers of attempting the comparison at all. Chess involves thinking, guessing, and lots of invisible effort, bringing it close to writing but not close enough. Chess has one desired end; writing does not. 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. (The video review is the closest sports get to a rewrite, but often supports already arbitrary decisions by referees who aren’t writing the sport to begin with. No really good editor would want to be compared to a video review.) The athletic act brings an advance, a retreat, or a void, and then leads to the next act. If sport is writing, it is improvised, within rough guidelines that bend in the face of your opponent and her guidelines. You don’t have to bat away someone else’s hands when you type; not very sporting, writing. Literary, though. If we focus on the process, the hollowness of a “literary sport” as a trope is clear. Athletes, even bad ones, arrange their minds to help their bodies track an element: the ball, for example. Though the muscles and synapses are doing subtle trade, the bits of the brain dedicated to written and spoken language go largely quiet. This necessary bit of rerouting is what makes playing sports both thrilling and relaxing. As the internet says, you have one job. Where is the ball? As a teenage first baseman, I was likely to be fielding slow grounders in every single inning, unlike our theoretical outfielder. I was going to be as busy as baseball gets, after the pitcher and catcher. My available powers had no job beyond tracking the position of the ball and where my body was in relationship to it. This is the core act of any sport, whether you’re a passable athlete thinking in horizontal planes (young me) or one of those three-dimensional
1 After Sports Illustrated honored Williams with its once- prestigious award, the Los Angeles Times , in a tweet, asked, “Serena Williams or Who’s the real sportsperson of 2015?” The response to the comparison American Pharoah:
was near- universal outrage.
Sasha Frere- Jones is a musician and writer from Brooklyn. He lives in Los Angeles.
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