Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

by David Foster Wallace

  So we want to know them, these gifted, driven physical achievers. We too, as audience, are driven: watching the performance is not enough. We want to get intimate with all that profundity. We want inside them; we want the Story. We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain. We want to know how they did it. How many hours a night did the child Bird spend in his driveway hitting jumpers under home-strung floodlights? What ungodly time did Bjorn get up for practice every morning? What exact makes of cars did the Butkus boys work out by pushing up and down Chicago streets? What did Palmer and Brett and Payton and Evert have to give up? And of course, too, we want to know how it feels, inside, to be both beautiful and best (“How did it feel to win the big one?”). What combination of blankness and concentration is required to sink a putt or a free-throw for thousands of dollars in front of millions of unblinking eyes? What goes through their minds? Are these athletes real people? Are they even remotely like us? Is their Agony of Defeat anything like our little agonies of daily frustration? And of course what about the Thrill of Victory—what might it feel like to hold up that #1 finger and be able to actually mean it?

  I am about the same age and played competitive tennis in the same junior ranks as Tracy Austin, half a country away and several plateaus below her. When we all heard, in 1977, that a California girl who’d just turned fourteen had won a professional tournament in Portland, we weren’t so much jealous as agog. None of us could come close to testing even a top eighteen-year-old, much less pro-caliber adults. We started to hunt her up in tennis magazines, search out her matches on obscure cable channels. She was about four foot six and eighty-five pounds. She hit the hell out of the ball and never missed and never choked and had braces and pigtails that swung wildly around as she handed pros their asses. She was the first real child star in women’s tennis, and in the late Seventies she was prodigious, beautiful, and inspiring. There was an incongruously adult genius about her game, all the more radiant for her little-girl giggle and silly hair. I remember meditating, with all the intensity a fifteen-year-old can summon, on the differences that kept this girl and me on our respective sides of the TV screen. She was a genius and I was not. How must it have felt? I had some serious questions to ask her. I wanted, very much, her side of it.

  So the point, then, about these sports memoirs’ market appeal: Because top athletes are profound, because they make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it ever can get, these ghostwritten invitations inside their lives and their skulls are terribly seductive for book buyers. Explicitly or not, the memoirs make a promise—to let us penetrate the indefinable mystery of what makes some persons geniuses, semidivine, to share with us the secret and so both to reveal the difference between us and them and to erase it, a little, that difference … to give us the (we want, expect, only one, the master narrative, the key) Story.

  However seductively they promise, though, these autobiographies rarely deliver. And Beyond Center Court: My Story is especially bad. The book fails not so much because it’s poorly written (which it is—I don’t know what ghostwriter Brennan’s enhancing function was supposed to be here, but it’s hard to see how Austin herself could have done any worse than two hundred dead pages of “Tennis took me like a magic carpet to all kinds of places and all kinds of people” enlivened only by wincers like “Injuries—the signature of the rest of my career—were about to take hold of me”), but because it commits what any college sophomore knows is the capital crime of expository prose: it forgets who it’s supposed to be for.

  Obviously, a good commercial memoir’s first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who’s spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet. But none of Beyond Center Court’s loyalties are to the reader. The author’s primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends. Whole pages are given over to numbing Academy Award-style tributes to parents, siblings, coaches, trainers, and agents, plus little burbles of praise for pretty much every athlete and celebrity she’s ever met. In particular, Austin’s account of her own (extremely, transcendently interesting) competitive career keeps digressing into warm fuzzies on each opponent she faces. Typical example: Her third round at 1980’s Wimbledon was against American Barbara Potter, who, we learn,

  is a really good person. Barbara was very nice to me through my injuries, sending me books, keeping in touch, and checking to see how I was doing. Barbara definitely was one of the smartest people on the tour; I’ve heard she’s going to college now, which takes a lot of initiative for a woman our age. Knowing Barbara, I’m sure she’s working harder than all her fellow students.

  But there is also here an odd loyalty to and penchant for the very clichés with which we sports fans weave the veil of myth and mystery that these sports memoirs promise to part for us. It’s almost as if Tracy Austin has structured her own sense of her life and career to accord with the formulas of the generic sports bio. We’ve got the sensitive and doting mother, the kindly dad, the mischievous siblings who treat famous Tracy like just another kid. We’ve got the ingenue heroine whose innocence is eroded by experience and transcended through sheer grit; we’ve got the gruff but tenderhearted coach and the coolly skeptical veterans who finally accept the heroine. We’ve got the wicked, backstabbing rival (in Pam Shriver, who receives the book’s only unfulsome mention). We even get the myth-requisite humble roots. Austin, whose father is a corporate scientist and whose mother is one of those lean tan ladies who seem to spend all day every day at the country club tennis courts, tries to portray her childhood in posh Rolling Hills Estates CA as impoverished: “We had to be frugal in all kinds of ways … we cut expenses by drinking powdered milk … we didn’t have bacon except on Christmas.” Stuff like this seems way out of touch with reality until we realize that the kind of reality the author’s chosen to be in touch with here is not just un- but anti-real.

  In fact, as unrevealing of character as its press-release tone and generic-myth structure make this memoir, it’s the narrator’s cluelessness that permits us our only glimpses of anything like a real and faceted life. That is, relief from the book’s skewed loyalties can be found only in those places where the author seems unwittingly to betray them. She protests, for instance, repeatedly and with an almost Gertrudian fervor, that her mother “did not force” her into tennis at age three, it apparently never occurring to Tracy Austin that a three-year-old hasn’t got enough awareness of choices to require any forcing. This was the child of a mom who’d spent the evening before Tracy’s birth hitting tennis balls to the family’s other four children, three of whom also ended up playing pro tennis. Many of the memoir’s recollections of Mrs. Austin seem almost Viennese in their repression—“My mother always made sure I behaved on court, but I never even considered acting up”—and downright creepy are some of the details Austin chooses in order to evince “how nonintense my tennis background really was”:

  Everyone thinks every young tennis player is very one-dimensional, which just wasn’t true in my case. Until I was fourteen, I never played tennis on Monday… . My mother made sure I never put in seven straight days on the court. She didn’t go to the club on Mondays, so we never went there.

  It gets weirder. Later in the book’s childhood section, Austin discusses her “wonderful friendship” with a man from their country club who “set up … matches for me against unsuspecting foes in later years and … won a lot of money from his friends” and, as a token of friendship, “bought me a necklace with a T hanging on it. The T had fourteen diamonds on it.” She was apparently ten at this point. As the book’s now fully adult Austin analyzes the relationship, “He was a very wealthy criminal lawyer, and I didn’t have very much money. With all his gifts for me, he made me feel special.” What a guy. Regarding her de facto employment in what is technically known as sports hustling: “It was all in good fun.”

  In t
he subsequent section, Austin recalls a 1978 pro tournament in Japan that she hadn’t much wanted to enter:

  It was just too far from home and I was tired from the travel grind. They kept offering me more and more money for an appearance fee—well over a hundred thousand dollars—but I said no. Finally, they offered to fly my whole family over. That did it. We went, and I won easily.

  Besides displaying an odd financial sense (she won’t come for $100,000+, but will come if they add a couple thousand in airfare?), Tracy Austin seems here unaware of the fact that, in the late Seventies, any player who accepted a guaranteed payment just for entering a tournament was in violation of a serious tour rule. The backstory here is that both genders’ player associations had outlawed these payments because they threatened both the real and the perceived integrity of pro tennis. A tournament that has paid some star player a hefty guarantee—wanting her in the draw because her celebrity will help increase ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, TV revenues, etc.—thereafter has an obvious stake in that player’s survival in the tournament, and so has an equally obvious interest in keeping her from getting upset by some lesser-known player in the early rounds, which, since matches’ linesmen and umpires are employed by the tournament, can lead to shady officiating. And has so led. Far stranger things than a marquee player’s receiving a suspicious number of favorable line calls have happened … though apparently somehow not in Tracy Austin’s experience.

  The naïveté on display throughout this memoir is doubly confusing. On the one hand, there’s little sign in this narrator of anything like the frontal-lobe activity required for outright deception. On the other, Austin’s ignorance of her sport’s grittier realities seems literally incredible. Random examples. When she sees a player “tank” a 1988 tournament match to make time for a lucrative appearance in a TV ad, Tracy “couldn’t believe it… . I had never played with anyone who threw a match before, so it took me a set and a half to realize what was happening.” This even though match-tanking had been widely and publicly reported as a dark consequence of skyrocketing exhibition and endorsement fees for at least the eleven years Austin had been in pro tennis. Or, drugswise, although problems with everything up to cocaine and heroin in pro tennis had been not only acknowledged but written about in the 1980s, * Austin manages to move the reader to both scorn and pity with pronouncements like “I assume players were experimenting with marijuana and certainly were drinking alcohol, but I don’t know who or when or where. I wasn’t invited to those parties, if they were happening at all. And I’m very glad I wasn’t.” And so on and so on.

  Ultimately, though, what makes Beyond Center Court so especially disappointing is that it could have been much more than just another I-was-born-to-play sports memoir. The facts of Tracy Austin’s life and its trajectory are almost classically tragic. She was the first of tennis’s now-ubiquitous nymphet prodigies, and her rise was meteoric. Picked out of the crowd as a toddler by coaching guru Vic Braden, Austin was on the cover of World Tennis magazine at age four. She played her first junior tournament at seven, and by ten she had won the national girls’ twelve-and-under championship both indoors and out- and was being invited to play public exhibitions. At thirteen she had won national titles in most junior age-groups, been drafted as a professional by World Team Tennis, and appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the teaser “A Star Is Born.” At fourteen, having chewed up every female in US juniors, she entered the preliminary qualifiers for her first professional tournament and proceeded to win not just the qualifying event but the whole tourney—a feat roughly equivalent to someone who was ineligible for a DMV learner’s permit winning the Indianapolis 500. She played Wimbledon at fourteen, turned pro as a ninth-grader, won the US Open at sixteen, and was ranked number one in the world at just seventeen, in 1980. This was the same year her body started to fall apart. She spent the next four years effectively crippled by injuries and bizarre accidents, playing sporadically and watching her ranking plummet, and was for all practical purposes retired from tennis at age twenty-one. In 1989, her one serious attempt at a comeback ended on the way to the US Open, when a speeder ran a red light and nearly killed her. She is now, as of this writing, a professional former sports star, running celebrity clinics for corporate sponsors and doing sad little bits of color commentary on some of the same cable channels I’d first seen her play on.

  What’s nearly Greek about her career’s arc is that Tracy Austin’s most conspicuous virtue, a relentless workaholic perfectionism that combined with raw talent to make her such a prodigious success, turned out to be also her flaw and bane. She was, even after puberty, a tiny person, and her obsessive practice regimen and uncompromising effort in every last match began to afflict her with what sports MDs now know to be simple consequences of hypertrophy and chronic wear: hamstring and hip flexor pulls, sciatica, scoliosis, tendinitis, stress fractures, plantar fasciitis. Then too, since woe classically breeds more woe, she was freak-accident-prone: coaches who fall on her while ice-skating and break her ankle, psychotic chiropractors who pull her spine out of alignment, waiters who splash her with scalding water, color-blind speeders on the JFK Parkway.

  A successful Tracy Austin autobiography, then, could have afforded us plain old plumbers and accountants more than just access to the unquestioned genius of an athletic savant or her high-speed ascent to the top of a univocal, mathematically computed hierarchy. This book could actually have helped us to countenance the sports myth’s dark side. The only thing Tracy Austin had ever known how to do, her art—what the tragic-savvy Greeks would have called her techne?248-175?, that state in which Austin’s mastery of craft facilitated a communion with the gods themselves—was removed from her at an age when most of us are just starting to think seriously about committing ourselves to some pursuit. This memoir could have been about both the seductive immortality of competitive success and the less seductive but way more significant fragility and impermanence of all the competitive venues in which mortal humans chase immortality. Austin’s story could, since the predicament of a dedicated athletic prodigy washed up at twenty-one differs in nothing more than degree from that of a dedicated CPA and family man dying at sixty-two, have been profound. The book could, since having it all at seventeen and then losing it all by twenty-one because of stuff outside your control is just like death except you have to go on living afterward, have been truly inspirational. And the publisher’s flap copy promises just this: “The inspirational story of Tracy Austin’s long struggle to find a life beyond championship tennis.”

  But the publisher’s flap copy lies, because it turns out that inspirational is being used on the book jacket only in its ad-cliché sense, one basically equivalent to heartwarming or feel-good or even (God forbid) triumphant. Like all good ad clichés, it manages to suggest everything and mean nothing. Honorably used, to inspire means, according to Mr. American Heritage, “to animate the mind or emotions of; to communicate by divine influence.” Which is to say that inspirational, honorably used, describes precisely what a great athlete becomes when she’s in the arena performing, sharing the particular divinity she’s given her life for, letting people witness concrete, transient instantiations of a grace that for most of us remains abstract and immanent.

  Transcendent as were Tracy Austin’s achievements on a public court, her autobiography does not come anywhere close to honoring the promise of its flap copy’s “inspirational.” Because forget divine—there’s not even a recognizable human being in here. And this isn’t just because of clunky prose or luxated structure. The book is inanimate because it communicates no real feeling and so gives us no sense of a conscious person. There’s nobody at the other end of the line. Every emotionally significant moment or event or development gets conveyed in either computeresque staccato or else a prepackaged PR-speak whose whole function is (think about it) to deaden feeling. See, for instance, Austin’s account of the moment when she has just beaten a world-class adult to win her first professional tourname
nt:

  It was a tough match and I simply outlasted her. I was beginning to get a reputation for doing that. When you play from the baseline, perseverance is everything. The prize money for first place was twenty-eight thousand dollars. *

  Or check out the book’s description of her career’s tragic climax. After working for five years to make a comeback and then, literally on the way to Flushing Meadow’s National Tennis Center, getting sideswiped by a van and having her leg shattered through sheer bad luck, Tracy Austin was now permanently finished as a world-class athlete, and had then to lie for weeks in traction and think about the end of the only life she’d ever known. In Beyond Center Court, Austin’s inspirational prose-response to this consists of quoting Leo Buscaglia, reporting on her newfound enthusiasm for shopping, and then giving us an excruciating chapter-long list of every celebrity she’s ever met.

  Of course, neither Austin nor her book is unique. It’s hard not to notice the way this same air of robotic banality suffuses not only the sports-memoir genre but also the media rituals in which a top athlete is asked to describe the content or meaning of his techne?248-175?. Turn on any post-contest TV interview: “Kenny, how did it feel to make that sensational game-winning shoestring catch in the end zone with absolutely no I mean zero time remaining on the clock?” “Well, Frank, I was just real pleased. I was real happy and also pleased. We’ve all worked hard and come a long way as a team, and it’s always a good feeling to be able to contribute.” “Mark, you’ve now homered in your last eight straight at-bats and lead both leagues in RBIs—any comment?” “Well, Bob, I’m just trying to take it one pitch at a time. I’ve been focusing on the fundamentals, you know, and trying to make a contribution, and all of us know we’ve got to take it one game at a time and hang in there and not look ahead and just basically do the best we can at all times.” This stuff is stupefying, and yet it also seems to be inevitable, maybe even necessary. The baritones in network blazers keep coming up after games, demanding of physical geniuses these recombinant strings of dead clichés, strings that after a while start to sound like a strange kind of lullaby, and which of course no network would solicit and broadcast again and again if there weren’t a large and serious audience out here who find the banalities right and good. As if the emptiness in these athletes’ descriptions of their feelings confirmed something we need to believe.