On Tennis

by David Foster Wallace

  49 An important variable I’m skipping is that children are (not surprisingly) immature and tend to get angry with themselves when they screw up, and so a key part of my strategy involved putting the opponent in a position where he made a lot of unforced errors and got madder and madder at himself, which would ruin his game. Feelings of self-disgust at his errors, or (even better for me) bitter grievance at the universe for making him have “bad luck” or an “off day” would mount until usually by sometime in the second set he’d sink into a kind of enraged torpor and expect to miss, or occasionally he’d even have a kind of grand Learesque tantrum, complete with racquet-hurling and screamed obscenities and sometimes tears. This happened less and less as I got older and opponents got more mature, and by the time I was in college only genuine head-cases could be counted on to get so mad that they’d basically make themselves lose to an inferior player (viz. me). It’s something of a shock, then, to watch Joyce do to his third-round Qualies opponent what I used to do to twelve-year-old rich kids, which is essentially to retrieve and avoid errors and wait for this opponent to have a temper tantrum. Because Sunday was a rainout, Joyce’s third round is played Monday at 10:00 A.M., at the same time that some of the main draw’s first rounds are beginning. Joyce’s opponent is a guy named Mark Knowles, 25, the 1986 U.S. Junior Indoor Champion, a native of the Bahamas, now known primarily as a doubles player but still a serious opponent, ranked in the world’s top 200, somebody on Joyce’s plateau.

  Knowles is tall and thin, muscular in the corded way tall thin people are muscular, and has an amazing tan and tight blond curls and from a distance is an impressive-looking guy, though up close he has a kind of squished, buggy face and the slightly bulging eyes of a player who, I can tell, is spring-loaded on a tantrum. There’s a chance to see Knowles up close because he and Joyce play their match on one of the minor courts, where spectators stand and lean over a low fence only a few yards from the court. I and Joyce’s coach and Knowles’s coach and beautiful girlfriend are the only people really seriously standing and watching, though a lot of spectators on their way to more high-profile matches pass by and stop and watch a few points before moving on. The constant movement of civilians past the court aggrieves Knowles no end, and sometimes he shouts caustic things to people who’ve started walking away while a point is still in progress.

  “Don’t worry about it!” is one thing Knowles shouted at someone who moved. “We’re only playing for money! We’re only professionals! Don’t give it a second thought!” Joyce, preparing to serve, will stare affectlessly straight ahead while he waits for Knowles to finish yelling, his expression sort of like the one Vegas dealers have when a gambler they’re cleaning out is rude or abusive, a patient and unjudging look whose expression is informed by the fact that they’re extremely well compensated for being patient and unjudging.

  Sam Aparicio describes Knowles as “brilliant but kind of erratic,” and I think the coach is being kind, because Knowles seems to me to belong on a Locked Ward for people with serious emotional and personality disorders. He rants and throws racquets and screams scatological curses I haven’t heard since junior high. If one of his shots hits the top of the net-cord and bounces back, Knowles will scream “I must be the luckiest guy in the world!” his eyes protruding and mouth twisted. For me he’s an eerie echo of all the rich and well-instructed Midwest kids I used to play and beat because they’d be unable to eat the frustration when things didn’t go their way. He seems not to notice that Joyce gets as many bad breaks and weird bounces as he, or that passing spectators are equally distracting to both players. Knowles seems to be one of these people who view the world’s inconveniences as specific and personal, and it makes my stomach hurt to watch him. When he hits a ball against the fence so hard it seems to damage the ball, the umpire gives him a warning, but in the sort of gentle compassionate voice of a kindergarten teacher to a kid who’s known to have A.D.D. I have a hard time believing that someone this off-the-wall could rise to a serious pro plateau, though it’s true that when Knowles isn’t letting his attention get scattered he’s a gorgeous player, with fluid strokes and marvelous control over spin and pace. His read on Joyce is that Joyce is a slugger (which is true), and his tactic is to try to junk him up—change pace, vary spins, hit drop shots to draw Joyce in, deny Joyce pace or rhythm—and because he’s Joyce’s equal in firepower the tactic is sound. Joyce wins the first set in a tiebreaker. But three times in the tiebreaker Knowles yells at migratory spectators “Don’t worry! It’s only a tiebreaker in a professional match!” and is basically a wreck by the time the first set is over, and the second set is perfunctory, a formality that Joyce concludes as fast as possible and hurries back to the Players’ Tent to pack carbohydrates and find out whether he has to play his first round in the main draw later this same day.

  50 Hlasek lost in the first round of the main draw Tuesday morning to obscure American Jonathan Stark, who then lost to Sampras in the second round on Wednesday in front of a capacity Stadium crowd.

  51 This is in the Stadium and Grandstand, where the big names play, this ceremonial hush. Lesser players on the outlying courts have to live with spectators talking during points, people moving around so that whole rickety sets of bleachers rumble and clank, food service attendants crashing carts around on the paths just outside the windscreen or giggling and flirting in the food-prep tents just on the other side of several minor courts’ fences.

  52 This is Canada’s version of the U.S.T.A., and its logo—which obtrudes into your visual field as often as is possible here at the du Maurier Omnium—consists of the good old Canadian maple leaf with a tennis racquet for a stem. It’s stuff like Tennis Canada’s logo you want to point to when Canadians protest that they don’t understand why Americans make fun of them.

  53 (though best of luck getting fudge home in this heat…)

  54 “Le Média” has its own facilities, though they’re up in the Press Box, about five flights of rickety and crowded stairs up through the Stadium’s interior and then exterior and then interior, with the last flight being that dense striated iron of like a fire escape and very steep and frankly dangerous, so that when one has to “aller au pissoir” it’s always a hard decision between the massed horror of the public rest rooms and the Sisyphean horror of the Press bathroom, and I learn by the second day to go very easy on the Evian water and coffee as I’m wandering around.

  55 (a recent and rather ingenious marketing move by the ATP—I buy several just for the names)

  56 It’s not at all clear what N.V.G.B.’s have to do with the Omnium, and no free samples are available.

  57 Du Maurier cigarettes are like Australian Sterlings or French Gauloise—full-bodied, pungent, crackly when inhaled, sweet and yeasty when exhaled, and so strong that you can feel your scalp seem to leave your skull for a moment and ride the cloud of smoke. Du Maurier-intoxication may be one reason why the Canadian Open crowds seem so generally cheery and expansive and well-behaved.

  58 (=“Give me your mouth”—not subtle at all)

  59 These are usually luxury cars provided by some local distributorship in return for promotional consideration. The Canadian Open’s courtesy cars are BMWs, all so new they smell like glove compartments and so expensive and high-tech that their dashboards look like the control panels of nuclear reactors. The people driving the courtesy cars are usually local civilians who take a week off from work and drive a numbingly dull route back and forth between hotel and courts—their compensation consists of free tickets to certain Stadium matches and a chance to rub elbows with professional tennis players, or at least with their luggage.

  60 He will lose badly to Michael Stich in the round of 16, the same Stich whom Michael Joyce beat at the Lipton Championships in Key Biscayne four months before; and in fact Joyce will himself beat Courier in straight sets next week at the Infiniti Open in Los Angeles, in front of Joyce’s family and friends, for one of the biggest wins of his career so far.

  61 Chang�
�s mother is here—one of the most infamous of the dreaded Tennis Parents of the men’s and women’s Tours, a woman who’s reliably rumored to have done things like reach down her child’s tennis shorts in public to check his underwear—and her attendance (she’s seated hierophantically in the player-guest boxes courtside) may have something to do with the staggering woe of Chang’s mien and play. Thomas Enqvist ends up beating him soundly in the quarterfinals on Wednesday night. (Enqvist, by the way, looks eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain, the Richard Chamberlain of The Towering Inferno, say, with this narrow, sort of rodentially patrician quality. The best thing about Enqvist is his girlfriend, who wears glasses and when she applauds a good point sort of hops up and down in her seat with refreshing uncoolness.)

  62 Who himself has the blond bland good looks of a professional golfer, and is reputed to be the single dullest man on the ATP Tour and possibly in the whole world, a man whose hobby is purported to be “staring at walls” and whose quietness is not the quietness of restraint but of blankness, the verbal equivalent of a dead channel.

  63 (Just as Enqvist now appears to be Edberg’s heir… Swedish tennis tends to be like monarchic succession: they tend to have only one really great player at a time, and this player is always male, and he almost always ends up #1 in the world for a while. This is one reason marketers and endorsement-consultants are circling Enqvist like makos all through the summer.)

  64 Nerves and choking are a huge issue in a precision-and-timing sport like tennis, and a “bad head” washes more juniors out of the competitive life than any sort of deficit in talent or drive.

  1 “A U.S.T.A. Event.”

  2 Actually, if you count the Grandstand Court’s annex, the whole thing looks more like an ablated head w/ neck-stump.

  3 There’s always something extremely delicate and precarious and vulnerable-looking about the umpire’s shoes projecting out over the court from a height in little metal stirrups—the blend of authority and precarious vulnerability is just one of the things that makes a tennis umpire such a compelling part of the whole show.

  4 The tentish tops and near-Bermuda-length shorts of M. Jordan and the NBA have clearly infiltrated tennis. Nearly half the men in the 128 draw are wearing clothes that seem several sizes too big, and on players as fundamentally skinny and woebegone-looking as Sampras the effect is more waifish than stylish—though I have to say that weirdly oversized clothes aren’t near the visual disaster that Agassi’s new clunky black sneakers (also imported from basketball fashion) are.

  5 (looking more like ball-grad-students, here, actually—several have earrings and leg hair, and one on the south side’s got a big ginger beard)

  6 The Open’s crowds, I know, are legendary for being loud and vulgar and generally psycho, but I’ve got to say that most of the audiences for most of L.D.W.’s matches seem like people you’d be proud to take home and introduce to the folks. The odd bit of audible nastiness does sometimes issue from way up top in the Stadium’s bleachers, but then usually only when there’s been some missed call or flagrant injustice.

  7 Females in the crowds of this year’s Australian Open apparently screamed and fainted and made with Beatlemania-like histrionics whenever Rafter or Philippoussis appeared, and it’s true that on the court they are both extremely handsome guys; but it’s also true that Mark Philippoussis, close up, looks amazingly like Gaby Sabatini—I mean amazingly, right down to the walk and the jaw line and the existentially affronted facial expression.

  8 The Open’s slow DecoTurf, which various rumors allege has had some kind of extra abrasive mixed in to make it even slower for the Open, favors the power-baseline game of Agassi, Courier, et al.—even netophiles like Edberg and Krajicek have been staying back and whaling through the first two rounds.

  9 The Open’s administration is smart about providing the right visual backdrop for world-class play. The Stadium Court at the du Maurier Ltd. in Montreal this July had yellow bleachers at the north end that, according to players, made it tough to track balls coming from that end, whereas the N.T.C.’s Stadium’s got blue tarps and white chairs and gray chairs, and even the bleachers are high-contrast red—there’s nothing even close to the YG part of the spectrum unless you count the pale-yellow shirts of the Security guys who stand court-side with the crossed arms and beady eyes of Secret Servicemen. (I’ve got to think the whole Seles thing is behind the high-profile Security here.)

  10 The tarp ads around pro tennis courts function like ads on subways, I think. Ads on subways exploit the fact that subway rides present both a lot of mental downtime and a problem with what to look at—the windows are mostly dark, and looking directly at other people on the subway is an action that the lookee can interpret in a number of ways, some of which are uncomfortable or even hazardous—and the ads up over the windows are someplace neutral and adverting to rest the eye, and so they usually get a lot of attention. And tennis is also full of downtime—periods between points, changeovers between odd games—where the eye needs diverting. Plus, during play, the tarp acts as the immediate visual background to the players, and the eyes and cameras always follow the players—including TV—so that having your company’s name hovering behind Sampras as the camera tracks him is a way both to get serious visual exposure for your company and to have that name associated, even on a subliminal level, with Sampras and tennis and excellence in general, etc. It all seems tremendously sophisticated and shrewd, psychologically speaking.

  11 See FN#1 again—the strong sense I got was that you are never to say “The U.S. Open” in any kind of public way without also saying “A U.S.T.A. Event.” Let’s let the U.S.T.A.’s promotional appendix be implicit from now on; I don’t feel like saying it over and over. The United States Tennis Association gets something like 75 percent of its yearly operating revenues from the U.S. Open, and it’s probably understandable that it would want to attach its name like a remora to the tournament’s flank, but the constant imposition of “A U.S.T.A. Event” all over the place got a little tiresome, I found, overtaxing the way relentless self-promotion is overtaxing, and I have to say I got a kind of unkind thrill out by the Main Gate’s turnstiles when so many people coming in for the evening session of matches pointed up at the big sign over the Main Gate and asked each other what the hell “USTA” was, making it rhyme with a Boston pronunciation of “buster” or “Custer.”

  12 The names of all the various sponsors are on a big (very big) blue board just inside the National Tennis Center’s Main Gate, with the bigger events’ “presenting sponsors” on the left in huge caps, and in smaller caps on the right the names of pres. spons. of smaller events—Men’s 35s Doubles, Mixed Doubles Masters—as well as other sponsors whose role is unclear beyond having paid a fee to sell concessions where appropriate and/or to have a PR booth on the grounds and a venue to call their own inside the Corporate Hospitality Areas (plus of course having their name on the v.b. blue board). Here’s the whole sign’s program, much reduced in scale: in the middle (natch), “1995 U.S. OPEN—A U.S.T.A. EVENT”; on the left: Infiniti, Redbook, Prudential Securities, Chase Manhattan, FujiFilm, MassMutual; on the right: American Express, AT&T, Ben Franklin Crafts, Café de Colombia, Canon, Citizen Watch Company (Citizen also has its name on all the big real-time and match-duration clocks on the Show Courts), Evian Natural Spring Water, Fila U.S.A., The Haägen-Dazs Co. Inc., Heineken, IBM, K-Swiss, The New York Times (which one kind of wonders, then, how objectively or aggressively the paper could report the facts if like the tournament this year were really boring or poorly managed or crooked somehow, etc.), NYNEX, Pepsi-Cola, Sony, Tampax (which, now that Virginia Slims finally got PC’d out of sponsoring the WTA, put in a bid to be the tour’s new sponsor but was turned down, for reasons that haven’t been made publicly explicit but are probably amusing), Tiffany and Co., Wilson Sporting Goods, good old Tennis magazine (which is itself owned by The New York Times Co., so that the Times sneakily gets on the Board twice), and something called the VF Corporation. />
  13 Another sort of endearing thing about Sampras is the way he always sweats through his baby-blue shorts in an embarrassing way that suggests incontinence and lets the world see just where his athletic supporter’s straps are (i.e., after a while the whole upper part of the shorts is sweated through except for a drier area that’s the exact shape and size of a jock). This even TV’s crude pictures can capture, and I think I like it so much because it humanizes Sampras and lets me identify with him in a way that the sheer preternatural beauty of his game does not. For me, similar humanizing foibles in transcendent players included McEnroe’s irrational fits of pique, Lendl’s and Navratilova’s habit of every once in a while getting so nervous and choking so badly on a point that they looked almost spastic and the ball would actually hit the ground before it reached the net, and Connors’s compulsive on-court touching and adjustment of his testes within his jock, as if he needed to know just where they were at all times.

  14 According to M. Chang’s limo driver, it’s been, like, the longest rainless interval of the century for NYC. I don’t know whether that’s true or whether New Yorkers are being enjoined from watering the mums in their window boxes or whatever, but I do know that there hasn’t been one rain-delay in the whole tournament so far, and the upper-management guys from both CBS and the U.S.T.A. are going around looking pleased in a way that’s just short of gloating.