Well, ok, not my whole life, but the last month and a half at least. You may have noticed my burgeoning affection for David Foster Wallace, and his wonderous writing, since I discovered him at the end of last year. Now there is MOOOOORE.
Acutually there probably is more, lots more, since there are probably humungeous numbers of his essays and short stories out there uncollected, not to mention whatever else he was working on. But this isn’t about that. This is about Tennis. Or DFW and Tennis.
David Foster Wallace having been a junior tennis player, properly (as opposed to those of us who just played junior tennis for shits’n'giggles), gets tennis and is pretty much one of the best writers about the game I have ever read. His essay ‘How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart’ started my affection – because it is just so true. Really great sports people can’t explain it. It’s why the best sporting autobiographies are by the slightly less brilliantly talented. Why Will Greenwood’s autobiography is better than Jason Robinson’s, and so on. And then I came across his essay ‘Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness’ (which was originally an Esquire article called ‘The String Theory’), which became the best essay on tennis I’d ever read, despite his lack of affection for Andre Agassi.(1) I read Infinite Jest, which gave me a whole new appreciation for junior tennis, and made me wonder, whilst watching Wimbledon whether the likes of Murray, Monfils, Federer and those other former junior stars were ever as loopy as Hal, Pemulis, John-no-relation-Wayne, et al.
Which note brings us to Federer. There was something odd about reading Infinite Jest, which is that it’s dated. It was written in the mid-90s, and set in the future. In fact, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment may actually be this year. But of course, the world has changed rather dramatically since the mid-90s, w/r/t the international situation in particular, and so at times the Infinite Jest version of the future strikes you as a bit odd. Not false odd, or anything like that, it’s just that you know we didn’t end up where IJ posited we would, and there’s no way DFW could have known that, and it’s a bit bizarre, like looking at an alternate reality. One of the other things that dates it is the tennis references made in the scenes at the ETA. And when talking about tennis and its purveyors and examples of greatness, there is no Roger Federer. And this, after seven years of wonderous Federer domination, periodically makes the tennis-aware reader blink. Clearly in 1994-95 ish, when DFW was writing (the book was published in 1996) Federer wasn’t a blip on the radar spotting potential genius, at least, not in the US. It’s not really suprising, since Federer, who is three month younger than me, would have 13 or 14, and barely getting going on the junior tour (the boys tour being different to the girls). But it is another oddity; another alternate reality. Tennis World without Roger Federer (not nice). And since then, I’ve been wondering, what did DFW think of Roger Federer?
Yesterday, I was absolutely over the moon to discover (thank you Andrew Womack over at Infinite Summer) that not only did DFW think about Roger Federer, he wrote about him, for the New York Times back in 2006, the year Federer destroyed all comers at Wimbledon – even Nadal (who lost the first set of the final 6-0). And now I think that this may be the best essay on tennis ever written (I haven’t read DFW’s essay about the 1996 US Open though, yet, I’m getting to it). It really really gets why Federer is so special. The bit in the middle where he gets all metaphysical is it; the bit that really explains the Federer magic, the idea that, when I try to express it just emerges as, “It’s ROGER FEDERER,” with lots of arm waving. (2) The essay is made more special, to me, because I was at that Wimbledon, and I saw Roger Federer demolish Tim Henman, and my thoughts were (apparently, since I recorded them) “(a) back from Wimbledon, (b)in awe of Roger Federer, (c) feeling slightly bad for Tim, because he played so much better than the scorecard suggests.(3) I over, identify, slightly, with the writer of this essay, because I, too, have sat with my jaw pretty much on the floor, watching Federer break the laws of physics. And David Foster Wallace is the only writer I’ve come across who has expressed what it feels like.
Which, this is about DFW, so clearly there should be footnotes.
(1) Which is a bit odd itself now, the dislike of Agassi, since he has become the Great Legend. I had to think myself back to the mid-90s whilst reading it and try and remember what I thought of Agassi then. And a bit of me would probably have agreed with DFW – I didn’t much care for him in the mid-90s, between his first Wimbledon title, which I really enjoyed, and his re-emergence at the end of the decade. It wasn’t for the same reasons; I never had a problem with Agassi’s game (though I’d prefer not to watch him play Lleyton Hewitt – too much of the same thing, he needs a contrasting player), but I severely disliked watching him waste it for those years there, and I severely disliked everyone who said that he was better than Sampras, when Sampras was practically camped out on Wimbledon’s centre court, and Agassi was wasting his talent. I’d be interested to know what DFW thought of Agassi by the time he retired, actually.
(2) It’s magic itself, and actually explains why DFW is the Roger Federer of writing. He has the special kinesthetic sense of writing, and is exempt from certain rules.
(3) This further illustrates f/n (2).
