On Tennis

by David Foster Wallace

  Michael Joyce in close-up person, like eating supper or riding in a courtesy car, looks slighter and younger than he does on-court. From close up he looks his age, which to me is basically a fetus. He’s about 5′9″ and 160; he’s muscular but quietly so, without much definition. He likes to wear old T-shirts and a backwards cap. His hairline is receding in a subtle young-man way that makes his forehead look a little high. I forget whether he wore an earring. Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial paperback sort that one reads on planes. In other words, he really has no interests outside tennis. He has a tight and long-standing group of friends back home in LA, but one senses that most of his personal connections have been made via tennis. He’s dated some. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s a virgin. It seems staggering and impossible, but my sense is he might be. Then again, I tended to idealize and distort him, I know, because of how I felt about what he could do on the court. His most revealing sexual comment is made in the context of explaining the odd type of confidence that keeps him from freezing up in a match in front of large crowds or choking on a point when there’s lots of money at stake.64 Joyce, who usually needs to pause about five beats to think before he answers a question, thinks the confidence is partly a matter of temperament and partly a function of hard work:

  “If I’m in like a bar, and there’s a really good-looking girl, I might be kind of nervous. But if there’s like a thousand gorgeous girls in the stands when I’m playing, it’s a different story. I’m not nervous then, when I play, because I know what I’m doing. I know what to do out there.” Maybe it’s good to let these be his last quoted words.

  Whether or not he ends up in the top ten and a name anybody will know, Michael Joyce will remain a figure of enduring and paradoxical fascination for me. The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque. But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be. It’s allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under wilting scrutiny and pressure.

  Michael Joyce is, in other words, a complete man (though in a grotesquely limited way). But he wants more. Not more completeness; he doesn’t think in terms of virtues or transcendence. He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media. He is an American and he wants to win. He wants this, and he will pay to have it—will pay just to pursue it, let it define him—and will pay with the regretless cheer of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant long ago. Already, for Joyce, at 22, it’s too late for anything else: he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and un-. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

  —1995

  DEMOCRACY AND COMMERCE AT THE U.S. OPEN

  RIGHT NOW IT’S 1530H. on 3 September, the Sunday of Labor Day Weekend, the holiday that’s come to represent the American summer’s right bracket. But L.D.W. always falls in the middle of the U.S. Open1; it’s the time of the third and fourth rounds, the tournament’s meat, the time of trench warfare and polysyllabic names. Right now, in the National Tennis Center’s special Stadium—a towering hexagon2 whose N, S, E, and W sides have exterior banners saying “WELCOME TO THE 1995 U.S. OPEN—A U.S.T.A. EVENT”—right now a whole inland sea of sunglasses and hats in the Stadium is rising to applaud as Pete Sampras and the Australian Mark Philippoussis are coming out on court, as scheduled, to labor. The two come out with their big bright athletic bags and their grim-looking Security escorts. The applause-acoustics are deafening. From down here near the court, looking up, the Stadium looks to be shaped like a huge wedding cake, and once past the gentler foothills of the box seats the aluminum stands seem to rise away on all sides almost vertically, so vertiginously steep that a misstep on any of the upper stairs looks like it would be certain and hideous death. The umpire sits in what looks like a lifeguard chair with little metal stirrups out front for his shoes,3 wearing a headset-mike and Ray-Bans and holding what’s either a clipboard or a laptop. The DecoTurf court is a rectangle of off-green marked out by the well-known configuration of very white lines inside a bigger rectangle of off-green; and as the players cross the whole thing E-W to their canvas chairs, photographers and cameramen converge and cluster on them like flies clustering on what flies like—the players ignore them in the way that only people who are very used to cameras can ignore cameras. The crowd is still up and applauding, a pastel mass of 20,000+. A woman in a floppy straw hat three seats over from me is talking on a cellular phone; the man next to her is trying to applaud while holding a box of popcorn and is losing a lot of popcorn over the box’s starboard side. The scoreboards up over the Stadium’s N and S rims are flashing pointillist-neon ads for EVIAN. Sampras, poor-postured and chestless, smiling shyly at the ground, his powder-blue shorts swimming down around his knees, looks a little like a kid wearing his father’s clothes.4 Philippoussis, who chronologically really is a kid, looks hulking and steroidic walking next to Sampras. Philippoussis is 6'4" and 200+ and is crossing the court with the pigeon-toed gait of a large man who’s trying not to lumber, wearing the red-and-white candy-stripe Fila shirt so many of the younger Australians favor. The PM sun is overhead to the W-SW in a sky with air so clear you can almost hear the sun combusting, and the tiny heads of the spectators way up at the top of the W bleachers are close enough to the sun’s round bottom to look to be just about on fire. The players dump their long bags and begin to root through them. Their rackets are in plastic they have to unwrap. They sit in their little chairs hitting racket-faces together and cocking their heads to listen for pitch. The cameramen around them disperse at the umpire’s command, some trailing snakes of cord. Ballboys take crumpled bits of racket plastic from under the players’ chairs.

  A lady making her way in that sideways-processional way past seats in the row right beneath me wears a shirt advising all onlookers that they ought to Play Hard because Life Is Short. The man on her arm wears a (too-large) designer T-shirt decorated with images of U.S. currency. A firm/pleasant usher stops them halfway across the row to check their tickets. Fifteen hundred citizens of the borough of Queens are employed at the Open today. Weekend labor. The ushers are at their fat chains stretched across the Stadium tunnels, all wearing chinos and button-down shirts. The Security guys (all large and male, not a neck or a smile in sight) wear lemon-yellow knit shirts that do not flatter their guts. Chewing-gum seems to be part of Security’s issued equipment. The ballboys5 are in blue-and-white Fila, while the line judges and umpires are in (Fila) shirts of vertical red-black stripes that make them look like very hip major-sport refs. The Stadium’s capacity is supposedly 20,000 and there are at least 23,000 people here, mostly to see Pete. If there were rafters people would be hanging from them, and I will be shocked if there isn’t some major screaming fall-down-the-steps- or topple-backward-over-the-rim-of-the-wall-type disaster before the match is done. The crowd down here near the court is for the most part adult-looking, businessish—in the Box Seats and pricey lower stands are neckties, sockless loafers, natty slacks, sweaters w/ arms tied across chests, straw boaters, L.L. Bean fishing hats, white caps with corporate names, jeweled bandeaux, high heels, and resplendent feminine sunhats—with a certain very gradual casualizing as the fashion-eye travels up (and up) past the progressively cheaper seats, until the vertiginous top sections of the bleachers feature an NYC sporting event’s more typical fishnet shirts and beer hats and coolers and makeshift spittoons, halter tops and fluorescent nail polish and rubber thongs, w/ attendant coarse NYC-crowd noises sometimes drifting down from way up high overhead.6 But apparently over 50 percent of tickets for this year’s Open were pre-sold to corporations, who lik
e to use them for the cultivation of clients and the entertainment of their own executives, and there is indeed about the Stadium crowd down here something indefinable that strongly suggests Connecticut license plates and very green lawns. In sum, the socioeconomic aura here for the day’s headline match is one of management rather than labor.

  The players’ umbrellas and chairs and big EVIAN-labeled barrels of drinks are on either side of the umpire’s chair at the base of the Stadium’s western cliff face, in a long thin patch of shade that ripples when the heads of the people way overhead move, and it’s cool in that shade—it’s cool for me, as well, in the shade of the very large man next to me, who’s wearing a gorgeous blue cord three-piecer and what seems to be a kind of huge sombrero—but the sunlight is summery, the sun (as mentioned) explosive, seeming to swell as it lowers, at 1535h. positioned about 40° above the Stadium’s W battlements; and the Grandstand Court, attached to the Stadium’s E flank, is knife-sliced by the well-known PM Grandstand shadow that Jim Courier is even now using to vivisect Kenneth Carlsen in full view of diners at Racquets (the impossible-to-get-into glass restaurant built into the wall that separates the Grandstand’s W flank from the Stadium’s E) and the 6,000+ crowd in there, a lot of whose nationalistic whistles and applause intrude into the Stadium’s sonic fold and lend a kind of surreally incongruous soundtrack to Sampras and Philippoussis’s exchanges as they warm up. Sampras is hitting with the casual economy that all the really top pros seem to warm up with, the serene nonchalance of a creature at the very top of the food chain. The Wimbledon champion’s presence aside, this third-rounder has particular romance about it because it features two Greeks neither of whom are in fact from Greece, a kind of postmodern Peloponnesian War. Philippoussis, just eighteen, Patrick Rafter’s doubles partner, ranked in the top 100 in this his first year on tour, potential superstar and actual heartthrob,7 resembles Sampras, somewhat—same one-handed backhand and slight loop on the forehand’s backswing, same café-au-lait coloring and Groucho eyebrows and very black hair that get glossy with sweat—but the Australian is slower afoot, and in contrast to Sampras’s weird boneless grace he looks almost awkward, perilously large, his shoulders square the way heavy guys with bad backs’ shoulders are square. Plus he seems to have aggression-issues that need resolving: he’s hitting the ball as hard as he can even in warm-up. He seems brutish, Philippoussis does, Spartan, a big slow mechanical power-baseliner8 with chilly malice in his eyes; and against him, Sampras, who is not exactly a moonballer, seems almost frail, cerebral, a poet, both wise and sad, tired the way only democracies get tired, his expression freighted with the same odd post-Wimbledon melancholy that’s dogged him all summer through Montreal, Cincinnati, etc. Thomas Enqvist’s epic 2-6 6-2 4-6 6-3 7-6 (7-5) first-rounder against Marcelo Rios and Agassi’s second-round squeaker against Corretja notwithstanding, it’s tempting to see this upcoming match as the climax of the Open so far: two ethnically agnate and archetypally distinct foes, an opposition not just of styles of play but of fundamental orientations toward life, imagination, the uses of power… plus of course economic interests.

  Covering the four walls down around the Stadium Court is a kind of tarp, chlorine-blue,9 and on it, surrounding the court, are the white proper nouns FUJIFILM, REDBOOK MAGAZINE, MASSMUTUAL, U.S. OPEN ’95—A U.S.T.A. EVENT, CAFÉ de COLOMBIA (complete w/ a dotted white outline of Juan Valdez and devoted burro), INFINITI, TAMPAX, and so on.10 Professional tennis always gets called an international sport, but it would be more accurate to call it a multinational sport: fiscally speaking, it exists largely as a marketing subdivision of very large corporations, and not merely of the huge Tour-underwriting conglomerates like IBM and Virginia Slims. The hard core of most professional players’ earnings comes from product endorsement. Absolutely every venue and piece of equipment associated with pro events has some kind of ad on it. Even the official names of most pro tournaments are those of companies that have bid to be a “title sponsor”: the Canadian Open this year was the “du Maurier Ltd. Open” (for a Canadian cigarette company), Munich was the “BMW Open,” New Haven was the “Volvo International” (next year it’s to be the “Pilot Pen International”), Cincinnati the “Thriftway ATP Championship,” and so on. The U.S. Open,11 being a Slam and a national championship, doesn’t have a title sponsor like Munich or Montreal; but instead of decommercializing the event, the tournament’s Slam-status just makes the number of different commercial subsidizations more dizzying. The Open has an official sponsor not just for the tournament but for each of the tournament’s various individual events: Infiniti sponsors the Men’s Singles, Redbook the Women’s Singles, MassMutual the Junior Boys, and so on.12

  Now the umpire has ordered Play and Sampras is getting ready to serve, lifting the toe of his front foot on the toss’s upswing in that distinctive way he has. I’ve never gotten to see Sampras play live before, and he’s far more beautiful an athlete than he appears to be on TV. He’s not particularly tall or muscley, but his serve is near-Wagnerian in its effect, and from this close up you can see that it’s because Sampras has got some magic blend of flexibility and timing that lets him release his whole back and trunk into the serve—his whole body can snap the way normally just a wrist can snap—and that this has something to do with the hunched, coiled way he starts his service motion, lifting just the toe of his front foot and sighting over the racket like a man with a crossbow, a set of motions that looks ticcy and eccentric on TV but in person makes his whole body look like one big length of muscle, a kind of angry eel getting ready to writhe. Philippoussis, who likes between points to dance a little in place—perhaps to remind himself that he can indeed move if he needs to—awaits service without facial affect. His headband matches his candy-stripe shirt. The scoreboards’ displays are now set for keeping score instead of flashing ads. Philippoussis’s name eats up a large horizontal section of each board. The wall between Stadium and Grandstand (so on our E side) is topped by the press box, which runs along the wall’s whole length and basically looks like the world’s largest mobile home, all its windows’ tinted shades now pulled against the PM sun. Three points have now yielded an ace, a service-return winner, and a long rally that ends when Philippoussis comes in on an approach that’s not quite in the exact backhand corner and Sampras hits an incredibly top-heavy short angle past him into the ad service court. The fierceness of Sampras’s backhand is something else that TV doesn’t communicate well, his racket-head control more like that of one of those stocky clay-courters with forearms like joints of mutton, the topspin so heavy it distorts the ball’s shape as the pass dips like a dropped thing. The malevolent but cyborgian Philippoussis hasn’t betrayed anything like an actual facial expression yet. He also doesn’t seem to perspire.13 Two older guys in the row right behind me are exhorting Sampras in low tones, addressing him as “Petey,” and I can’t help thinking they’re friends of the family or something. And propped up over the press box—so at about the height of a radio station’s aerial—is the 1995 U.S. Open’s own ad for itself. It’s an enormous pointillist pastel print of an N.T.C. Stadium’s crowd around an outsized court, the perspective weirdly foreshortened, and then with the well-known Manhattan skyline ballooning in the immediate background in a way it decidedly does not in the real Flushing, Queens; and then above and beyond the billboard is the big zucchini of the Fuji Inc. blimp floating slowly against the cerulean of far and away the best summer sky I have ever seen around New York City. Not only is the ’95 Open’s L.D.W. air unhumid and in the eighties, the sunshine astringent and the breeze feathery and the sky the overvivid blue of a colorized film, but the sky’s air is clean, the air smells fine and keen and sweet the way line-dried laundry smells, the result not only of a month without rain14 but also this weekend of a freak high-pressure front that’s spiraled southwest out of Nova Scotia’s upper air and is blowing the oxides and odors that are NYC’s deserved own out over New Jersey. The Stadium’s bowl of air gets finer and keener the higher up in the stands y
ou go, until, standing on top of somebody’s smuggled Michelob cooler in the top row of bleachers15 and peering over the wall due east past the edge of the press box, looking down over the big sign that says

  you can see them, Them, coming, an enormous serpentine mass, the crowd, still at 1615h. coming, what looks from this distance like everybody in New York City who hasn’t retreated to the Hamptons for the long summer weekend. The U.S. Open is a big deal for NYC. Mayor Dinkins is gone—the Dinkins who used to reroute landing patterns at LaGuardia just for the Open—but even under Rudy Giuliani, for a fortnight a city that ordinarily couldn’t give two chomps of its gum for a sport as patricianly non-contact as tennis is into the game in a very big way. Thirty-year-old arbitrageurs in non-rented tuxes at the Bowery Bar dissect various men’s matches and speculate on how Seles’s hiatus from the game will affect her endorsement contracts now that she’s back. Croatian doormen bemoan Ivanisevic’s early departure. On the subway, a set of tough chicks in leather and fluorescent hair concur that even though Graf and Seles and that Spanish what’s-her-face with the hymen16 in her name might rule, let’s don’t for a m.-fucking second count out the U.S.’s Zina G. ’cause this is her swan-song before the like bow-out. Or e.g. Friday, 1 September, the day after Agassi’s five-set comeback against Corretja, a Lebanese driver on the Grey Line bus in from LaGuardia and a cigar-chewing old passenger he doesn’t know from Adam bond over their shared assessments of Agassi’s rehabilitation as a man: