On Tennis

by David Foster Wallace

  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 technē, 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 tournament:

  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 technē. 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.

  All right, so the obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination. For me, though, the important question is why this is always so bitterly disappointing. And why I keep buying these sports memoirs with expectations that my own experience with the genre should long ago have modified… and why I nearly always feel thwarted and pissed when I finish them. One sort of answer, of course, is that commercial autobiographies like these promise something they cannot deliver: personal and verbal access to an intrinsically public and performative kind of genius. The problem with this answer is that I and the rest of the US book market aren’t that stupid—if impossible promises were all there was to it, we’d catch on after a while, and it would stop being so profitable for publishers to churn these memoirs out.

  Maybe what keeps us buying in the face of constant disappointment is some deep compulsion both to experience genius in the concrete and to universalize genius in the abstract. Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true technē so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it’s just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn’t really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant’s glass jaw or Eliot’s inability to hit the curve.

  For my part, though, I think there’s something deeper, and scarier, that keeps my hope one step ahead of past experience as I make my way to the bookstore’s register. It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of Austin’s narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis, on the other. Anyone who buys the idea that great athletes are dim should have a close look at an NFL playbook, or at a basketball coach’s diagram of a 3-2 zone trap… or at an archival film of Ms. Tracy Austin repeatedly putting a ball in a c
ourt’s corner at high speed from seventy-eight feet away, with huge sums of money at stake and enormous crowds of people watching her do it. Ever try to concentrate on doing something difficult with a crowd of people watching?… worse, with a crowd of spectators maybe all vocally hoping you fail so that their favorite will beat you? In my own comparatively low-level junior matches, before audiences that rarely hit three digits, it used to be all I could do to manage my sphincter. I would drive myself crazy: “… but what if I double-fault here and go down a break with all these folks watching?… don’t think about it… yeah but except if I’m consciously not thinking about it then doesn’t part of me have to think about it in order for me to remember what I’m not supposed to think about?… shut up, quit thinking about it and serve the goddamn ball… except how can I even be talking to myself about not thinking about it unless I’m still aware of what it is I’m talking about not thinking about?” and so on. I’d get divided, paralyzed. As most ungreat athletes do. Freeze up, choke. Lose our focus. Become self-conscious. Cease to be wholly present in our wills and choices and movements.

  It is not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals,” because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even—and, for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and Austin, especially—under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two.

  The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

  How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as “One ball at a time” or “Gotta concentrate here,” and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it.

  What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, “I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,” the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there’s nothing she can do about something bad and so she’d better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

  This is, for me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir. That plain empirical fact may be the best way to explain how Tracy Austin’s actual history can be so compelling and important and her verbal account of that history not even alive. It may also, in starting to address the differences in communicability between thinking and doing and between doing and being, yield the key to why top athletes’ autobiographies are at once so seductive and so disappointing for us readers. As is so often SOP with the truth, there’s a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

  —1992

  TENNIS PLAYER MICHAEL JOYCE’S PROFESSIONAL ARTISTRY AS A PARADIGM OF CERTAIN STUFF ABOUT CHOICE, FREEDOM, LIMITATION, JOY, GROTESQUERIE, AND HUMAN COMPLETENESS

  When Michael Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling, but he’s not really smiling—his face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss’s rise. He wants to hit it fully extended and slightly out in front of him; he wants to be able to hit emphatically down on the ball, to generate enough pace to avoid an ambitious return from his opponent. Right now it’s 1:00 Saturday, 22 July 1995, on the Stadium Court of the Stade Jarry tennis complex in Montreal. It’s the first of the qualifying rounds for the Canadian Open, one of the major stops on the ATP’s “hard-court circuit,”1 which starts right after Wimbledon and climaxes at NYC’s U.S. Open. The tossed ball rises and seems for a second to hang, waiting, cooperating, as balls always seem to do for great players. The opponent, a Canadian college star named Dan Brakus, is a very good tennis player. Michael Joyce, on the other hand, is a world-class tennis player. In 1991 he was the top-ranked junior in the United States and a finalist at Junior Wimbledon,2 is now in his fourth year on the ATP tour, and is as of this day the 79th best tennis player on planet earth.

  A tacit rhetorical assumption here is that you have very probably never heard of Michael Joyce of Brentwood/LA. Nor of Florida’s Tommy Ho. Nor of Vince Spadea, nor of Jonathan Stark or Robbie Weiss or Steve Bryan—all American men in their twenties, all ranked in the world’s top 100 at one point in 1995. Nor of Jeff Tarango, 68th in the world, unless you remember his unfortunate psychotic break in full public view during last year’s Wimbledon.3

  You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.

  Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court facility can hold slightly over 10,000 souls. Right now, for Michael Joyce’s qualifying match, there are 93 people in the crowd, 91 of whom appear to be friends and relatives of Dan Brakus. Michael Joyce doesn’t seem to notice whether there’s a crowd or not. He has a way of staring intently at the air in front of his face between points. During points he looks only at the ball.

  The acoustics in the near-empty Stadium are amazing—you can hear every breath, every sneaker’s squeak, the authoritative pang of the ball against very tight strings.

  Professional tennis tournaments, like professional sports teams, have distinctive traditional colors. Wimbledon’s is green; the Volvo International’s is light blue. The Canadian Open’s is—emphatically—red. The tournament’s “title sponsor,” du Maurier cigarettes,4 has ads and logos all over the place in red and black. The Stadium Court is surrounded by a red tarp festooned with corporate names in black capitals, and the tarp composes the base of a grandstand that is itself decked out in red-and-black bunting, so that from any kind of distance the place looks like either a Kremlin funeral or a really elaborate brothel. The match’s umpire and linesmen and ballboys all wear black shorts and red shirts emblazoned with the name of a Quebec clothing company.5 The big beach umbrella that’s spread and held over each seated player at end-change breaks has a lush red head and a black stem that looks hot to hold.

  Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court is adjoined on the north by the Grandstand Court, a slightly smaller venue with seats on only one side and a capacity of 4800. A five-story scoreboard lies just west of the Grandstand, and by late afternoon both courts are rectangularly shadowed. There are also eight nonstadium courts in canvas-fenced enclosures scattered across the grounds. Professional matches are under way on all ten Stade Jarry courts today, but they are not exactly Canadian Open matches, and for the most part they are unwatched.

  The Stade Jarry grounds are all spruced up, and vendors’ tents are up, and Security is in place at all designated points. Big TV trailers line the walkway outside the stadium, and burly men keep pulling compl
icated nests of cable out of ports in the trailers’ sides.

  There are very few paying customers on the grounds on Saturday, but there are close to a hundred world-class players: big spidery French guys with gelled hair, American kids with peeling noses and Pac-10 sweats, lugubrious Germans, bored-looking Italians. There are blank-eyed Swedes and pockmarked Colombians and cyberpunkish Brits. There are malevolent Slavs with scary haircuts. There are Mexican players who spend their spare time playing two-on-two soccer in the gravel outside the Players’ Tent. With few exceptions, all the players have similar builds: big muscular legs, shallow chests, skinny necks, and one normal-sized arm and one monstrously huge and hypertrophic arm. They tend to congregate in the Players’ Tent or outside the Transportation Trailer awaiting rides in promotional BMWs back to the Radisson des Gouverneurs, the tournament’s designated hotel. Many of these players in the “Qualies,” or qualifying rounds, have girlfriends in tow, sloppily beautiful European girls with sandals and patched jeans and leather backpacks, girlfriends who set up cloth lawnchairs and sun themselves next to their players’ practice courts.6 At the Radisson des Gouverneurs the players tend to congregate in the lobby, where there’s a drawsheet for the Qualies up on a cork bulletin board and a multilingual tournament official behind a long desk, and the players stand around in the air-conditioning in wet hair and sandals and employ about 40 languages and wait for results of matches to go up on the board and for their own next matches’ schedules to get posted. Some of the players listen to personal stereos; none seem to read. They all have the unhappy self-enclosed look of people who spend huge amounts of time on planes and waiting around in hotel lobbies, the look of people who have to create an envelope of privacy around them with just their expressions. Most of these players seem either extremely young—new guys trying to break onto the Tour—or conspicuously older, like over 30, with tans that look permanent and faces lined from years in the trenches of tennis’s minor leagues.