Andrew Womack is a founding editor of The Morning News.
I grew up in a tennis household, amidst gleaming trophies of miniature champions immortalized in mid-serve. In my house, tennis dominated our television viewing, closets were stuffed with retired racquets, and the hampers always reeked.
To this day, my father is a tremendous player, with a game so solid you can’t pick it apart. Return his serve (good luck), and he’ll reply with dizzying spin. He complains about arthritis in his rotator cuff, then sends a lob to wherever you aren’t.
To be fair, his ability is hardly innate. Long before I was born, he began practicing at least every other night. (Playing actual matches was reserved for the weekends.) He would hone his serve by setting up empty tennis-ball cans in the service courts, knocking them down until he could place the ball with the kind of precision that squeezes a laugh out of a nervous opponent. At 76 years of age, his game is still tight (even if his speed on the court is reduced—osteopath’s orders); though when talking about diehard players, assessing whether 76 is young or old is missing the point: The important fact is he’s now been playing for 57 years. That’s a level of experience few amateur players will ever have time to catch up to.
It’s true that I have not and never will beat my father at tennis. I am probably more OK with this than he is; his coaching over the years has been a constant source of positive reinforcement, but despite his best efforts it has only gone far enough to turn me from a bad sport (it was years before he’d let me swing one of his new racquets again) into a serious appreciator, if not a player, of the game. I’ll give credit to my forehand as pretty devastating, but everything else is succotash.
I first came to Wallace through his David Lynch piece—which hooked me with its descriptions of the director’s constant coffee drinking and resultant urinating behind nearby trees during the filming of Lost Highway—which I read in the collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. But it was the adjacent story in the book, “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness” (published as “The String Theory” in Esquire in 1996), that sealed Wallace’s place in my mind. Because finally, here was someone who could write, really write, about tennis. Someone who finds the joy in the game’s enduring physical and mental struggle, and the humor in realizing there are only a few people in the world who possess the dedication it takes to truly excel at the sport—and that you will never be one of those people. Because it is very funny to come face to face with your limitations. It’s the same kind of funny as when your father, 40 years your senior, places a serve to your backhand and all you can do is laugh it off.
I was taken so much with the article that I Xeroxed and mailed it to my father, who I knew would enjoy it as much as I did, and for much the same reasons. It’s widely lamented that there are no decent tennis movies,44 though there aren’t as many complaints about tennis books—this is both to do with the fact that tennis books center on the psychology of the game (as in, how to freak out other players and how to keep yourself from getting freaked out by other players) and because articles and excerpts fit more neatly into the rare holes that open in a player’s practice schedule.
I phoned a couple of weeks later, and asked how he’d liked it, and he said the footnotes threw him, and that he couldn’t finish it.45
Throughout the piece and in Infinite Jest, Wallace—who, as is widely noted, was a ranked junior player—distinguishes between “serious players” and the rest of us. (I weigh in more at the seriously unserious end of this scale.) In both works, he needs to draw this distinction because, of course, we can all guess that most readers are not tennis appreciators, much less tennis players, much less amateur players, much less professional players, much less the very best of the best, the Top 10, the Grand Slam winners. And while it’s partly out of reverence for the serious players’ ability, it’s also because, concentrically speaking, the vast majority of his audience will not fully get that reverence unless he spells it out. Certainly, Wallace’s style is powerful, muscular—he’s unafraid to force a point home.46
Which is why Wallace’s tennis writing is so dead-on, why it has always struck me so specially. Because I too love the game, and love knowing I will never be much of a tennis player (much less a serious player)—because I would rather watch and marvel at the ability of others. That is what I love. And I suppose Wallace has a character in Infinite Jest who does just that, too.
Comments
22 responses to “Andrew Womack: Love”
As I was reading this, Andrew, perhaps only because such a thing is actually sort of quantifiable if not discoverable, I was wondering this: Who is the best tennis player who has actually read Infinite Jest?
Also, in the absence of other contenders, I would nominate Strangers on a Train as a great tennis movie.
we might never know the answer to that, but we do know that Roger Federer has read DFW’s article on him (he was asked about it at Wimbledon this year), so at least we do know who the best tennis player is who has actually read DFW. 🙂
Great piece, Andrew. It’s fun to fill the gaps in you TMN guys’ backgrounds and interests.
I came to Wallace by way of a TMN link to the Kenyon Commencement address back in, I think, January 2006. I’ve since read everything the guy published in book form, and even some of the uncollected stuff (on Howling Fantods and elsewhere). Simply put, Wallace has changed (read: expanded) certain parts of my mind and life for the better. One example: the Lynch piece in /SFTINDA/ that introduced you to Wallace is the same piece that introduced me to Lynch. (Actually, that made me a fan of Lynch.) My life would certainly be the poorer if I hadn’t seen and subsequently grown obsessed with Blue Velvet. So, thank you to whomever posted that TMN link back in 2006!
I’ve always been more of an admirer of tennis than a ‘fan’. My grandfather religiously watched the majors, and so the U.S. Open was always showing during our vacations at the Jersey Shore. I guess you could probably describe my enjoyment of tennis as more of a connection to my grandfather’s memory than anything else.
Kevin: I doubt any “Show” level tennis players have anything close to the time required to read IJ
I, too, grew up playing tennis and have a 77-year-old father whom I’ve never managed to beat.
Having read more than one third of IJ, I want to weigh in with a few thoughts, if only to leave a public record that at this point in IS, I am still in the game.
I was taking a smug pleasure in fairly easily keeping up with the reading schedule until I hit gargantuan footnote #110 and had an intellectual temper tantrum. I remember DFW commenting that a reviewer seemed mad that he had to read the book, and for a moment, I identified with said reviewer. But then the footnote ended up to be fairly easy going and anyway, there is almost always a payoff with the difficult sections of IJ, even and especially as regards the description of a game of Eschaton. Too much there to unpack in a comment.
I agree with past contributors: IJ is a book to be read clear-headed and don’t skim. Otherwise, you might miss lines like: The Toothless Predator: Breast-Feeding as Sexual Assault.
Did DFW have unfulfilled dreams, like George Costanza, of being an architect, so detailed are his descriptions of buildings?
This probably means nothing, but my uncle, a farmer who lives 10 miles from Bloomington-Normal and Illinois State University, past employer of DFW, also answers the phone with “Mmyellow.” Is it a regional thing?
Despite my background with tennis, I like the sections set in rehab the best. Reading wisdom has never been, among other things, so much fun.
Yup, I laughed out loud at The Toothless Predator line. So damn funny.
And yes! A regional thing. Alls I know is (from my native Midwestern pov) that IJ abounds in Midwesternisms: Mmyellow, pop, supper, etc.
Your dad sounds like my great uncle who just died last year. Up til the very en (his early 90’s) he could still beat me. I am an unserious player, and though he was never a pro, he spent 80 years playing tennis at least weekly.
Wallace’s descriptions of the repetitive nature of training reminds me of Malcom Gladwell’s thesis in “Outliers”. Basically the best of the best are those with the opportunity to spend at least 10,000 hours honing their skills, (and who have a certain amount of innate talent and luck). The tennis academy parts of IJ are a great illustration of that principle in action. Most sports writing misses the critical need for many hours of repetitive grinding drills and practice.
The 10,000-hour point is a good one but should be refined a bit to show something that DFW explained in a non-fiction piece and to some degree later in IJ. The difference between the best and the best-of-the-best isn’t whether they can put in the 10,000 hours. All or most of the kids at ETA will have put 10,000 hours or so into tennis by the time they graduate; assuming they put it 25 hours a week 50 weeks a year, it would take only about 8 years to get to 10,000. The difference between exceptional tennis players and the Andre Agassis and Roger Federers of the world is some combination of genetics, luck and other stuff. All of the great players worked very hard on their games, but even the very good players probably worked just about as hard.
I don’t play tennis but the ideas of being obsessive about something, winning, getting famous, being consumed with how far you can go with it, not knowing how far, etc. really clicked.
The very best player is not the most interesting person. John Wayne is supposed to be the super duper tennis player. (I think. I think he is the best player in Enfield and destined for ‘the show.’) But you don’t really sense that there’s that much interest in the story in the naturally talented who just rise up to the top and are obviously the top. The strivers and the obsessers are more the focal point.
I definitely saw a lot of parallels with graduate school in Enfield Academy. There’s also the writing world. I think any place focussed on achievement and failure.
I play tennis. P L A Y. It is a sport for me, a way to spend 2 hours with friends/husband away from children. But I love the tennis world DFW creates, and I do so wish I could have been in that world as a child. Despite his own connections to tennis, I think it is the only sport that would have worked for the novel, in the role it plays. No other individual sport requires a system of ranking and 1:1 competition and psychological training and completely obsessive learning. Swimming, you race against a clock. Tennis, YOU have to figure out how to beat HIM. And HE changes every time you walk on the court. That’s why the kids are so full-on with the eschaton, and why it is so perfect a game for them, because basically a world-scale war is going on on the tennis court, with all the tactics and details and nuance. Tennis is a perfect game. Eschaton is the tennis-players perfect not-thinking-about-tennis but still using all the same skills game. To be great you have to squeeze that ball all day long, and even on your one free day create a game to play that still lets you practice those needle-in-a-haystack lobs.
I find that DFWs Times article about Federer is a great supplement to tennis appreciation prep we are getting in IJ so far. Highly recommend: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all
I had a different take on Tennis’s place in the novel, although I guess it relates to the idea of getting obsessed with something and taking it as far it can be taken: Tennis illustrates that we do insane things to entertain ourselves. Tennis requires boring, repetitive practice, and you have to wonder why these kids are so obsessed with it because it doesn’t even seem like fun for them anymore.
Thanks for the writeup Andrew. The tennis part of the book is, for me, a very accurate analysis of what goes on in competitive sport. It helps to be a tennis person, but much of it would apply to other sports, easily.
I was a ranked junior tennis player, like DFW, though never destined for any kind of show. This, up to when I was 18 or so, then tennis was on the backburner for a few years. Now I’m playing semi-regularly again, but the emotion and mental state is not the same as way back when it was competitive. DFW has helped me remember that part of my life and helped describe it better than I am capable of.
Penar’s got it. It’s about the fellowship of these boys that is captured. I was a competetive swimmer–not ranked–and he nailed my training world through middle and high school. Court or pool, doesn’t matter. The hours of training, making up complex games after practice instead of going home after 3 hours of pool time, drugs and alcohol, and of course deeper friendships than any of my others. That’s why we did it for hours every day.
The comments about tennis being mundane are interesting. I believe (please correct me if I’m wrong) DFW was the son of an actuary (officially the most mundane field in existance . . . trust me, I almost went there) and his philosophy thesis was based heavily in mathematics. DFW was both raised by the mundane and drawn to it.
well if you’ve read anything on the pale king it sheds some light on the obsession with the mundane. he was starting to explore boredom as the anti-entertainment, and maybe doing boring things sometimes was the way to stay sane in an otherwise insane world. the whole idea of exploring the concept of entertainment is really fascinating to me and is probably the #1 thing I am taking away from IJ.
For what it’s worth, Wallace’s father was (is?) a professor–of philosophy, I believe–at the University of Illinois. His mother was (is?) a professor of English at a community college.
Love your story, thanks! I can’t resist the opportunity to share a joke that I think applies well to Orin’s preference for the “womblike” roar of football as opposed to the sophistication (for lack of a better word) of tennis:
“What’s the difference between a bass player in a rock band and a bass player in a jazz combo? — The rock bassist plays three notes for an audience of a hundred people, and the jazz bassist plays one hundred notes for an audience of three.”
Reading the tennis passages in IJ, I’m constantly reminded of one of my favorite sports books, “The Inner Game of Tennis” by T.Galwey. Like Schitt, the eccentric tennis guru at Enfield Academy, Galwey argues that the chief opponent in any tennis match is oneself. Galwey says there’s always an inner struggle between “Self One,” i.e. the inner voice that tells us to do this or that, and “Self Two,” the ‘person’ within us who merely takes action without self-talk or self-criticism. The key to tennis success is quieting/ignoring Self One and just being Self Two. At its extreme, being wholly Self Two is being in “The Zone.”
I wonder if there’s also a parallel philosophy along the lines of Galwey’s in the literature about addiction.
In response to the best tennis players to have read IJ query I’d say your best bet is to check the varsity squads of top universities. Wallace himself played for Amherst, I believe. I’m a former junior player (top 10 regionally but only in the 2-300s nationally)and current JV (junior varsity) college player and IJ is my favorite book. College kids seem to make up a good chunk of IJ’s readership and, much to my delight, I’ve personally seen it being toted around campus on more than one occasion. Also varsity players are about as close to Show caliber as you’re going to get with quite a few having actually made it there with varying degrees of success.
My kid is new to tennis, so I really enjoy learning the finer details of playing such as using Lemon Pledge as a sunblock. I will put the used husks in her scrapbook.
Consider John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game” a 200+ page exposition of a single championship tennis match between Clark Grabner and Arthur Ashe — superb in its close focus on the physical game and in its depth of context.
Dave did.
Semper fi
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