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.
