Looking back on his journal, Renard says, “What surprises me is that I did not give more details. Today my eye would have taken in everything. My apparatus is better. But you become aware that you have, after all, lived, and that it is natural for life to pass and, even, for it to end.” It’s hard to imagine what more details he could have given, but what he acknowledges here is how deeply intertwined, inextricable even, are his life and work, like some double helix of his being. “You can recover from the writing malady only by falling mortally ill and dying.” And the sharper his perception, the closer he comes to experiencing his Truth. “The moments during which, like a fish in the water, I move with ease within the infinite.”
Like Renard, I think I continue to keep my journal because I’d like to learn how to be at home in the infinite ocean, to accept the fact that I can be just this one fish, even if it’s not a gigantic whale shark or a manta ray or a humpback anglerfish with its big teeth and bioluminescence. Even if it’s just a plain old tuna. I’d like evidence of a sort that time has gotten into me, proof that experience has made and remade me. Because before my own reckoning, at some point in the hopefully distant future, I’d like to be able to look back on all my anguish and joy and sorrow and pain, everything about my infinitely small tuna existence, and be grateful for it.
Far from Me
Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we die Copies?
—Edward Young
I.
You know us by sight, have seen us out on the courts of your neighborhood park or local high school, and, perhaps, been baffled. You who’ve had to wait on benches or behind windscreens for us to tire and finish, we’ve taxed your patience, I know—I apologize. We are the tennis players who do not properly play, who send the ball back and forth over the net without serving, without keeping score. If asked, we’d say we’re working on our strokes. Just some good old proprioceptive fine-tuning, endless preparation for a match that will never be played. This isn’t to say that competition between us doesn’t exist, though, only that it isn’t measured by something so brutely positivistic as a score. By the subtler metric of body language and mood, then, shifts in the ether. As a result of these shifts, tensions will sometimes rise unaccountably and every now and again we’ll howl out in frustration. We’ll curse our rackets or air our grievances with the wind. Decry a passing siren or bitch about the glare coming off a car’s hood. But for all that, we don’t refer to each other as opponents. Never would. We are “hitting partners,” twinned in an elaborate rumba of angle, pace, and spin. And the point of it all? What can the endgame be when, properly speaking, there is no game? Though we are legion, I speak only for myself when I say that as much as is humanly possible, I want my groundstrokes to resemble those of Roger Federer.
II.
For this ridiculous ambition my hitting partner, Scott, can be held largely responsible. We first met on the courts of Irving Park here in Portland, when he invited me over to be the fourth in an amicable set of doubles, one of the few we’ve ever played. He was part of a crew that regularly gathered there—almost every day of the week they’d turn at least one, though often more, of the four public courts into a private club of sorts. A members-only type deal. And I was excited to get the call, had seen them all before and wanted in. I’d discreetly admired Scott’s strokes, in particular, from the safe distance of a few courts over. Watching his long one-handed backhand could prompt a driblet of envy-drool to trickle down my chin.
And the state of my game? It’d been nearly a decade since I’d played with anything like regularity, but I’d been seized by an urge as mysterious as it was sudden to get back into it. From the neighborhood pro-shop I picked up a racket on the cheap, a seasons-old midplus model from Prince. And a trip to the local Nike outlet yielded a baroque pair of purple sneakers and a matching headband that I thought quite smart—quite smart, that is, until I saw a picture of myself wearing it. I used to cart a grocery bag of balls to the park and serve to ghosts until my shoulder went sore, and then I’d rally with myself against the backboard, trying all the while not to think of myself as kin to that most forlorn of souls, the lone rider of a tandem bicycle. I’d played enough growing up to have a meager aquifer of muscle memory to tap but hadn’t progressed much past the war of attrition stage of youth tennis, when kids can mostly be found hitting great parabolic moonballs and waiting for their opponent to miss. My game, in other words, was mine only according to the laws of grammar. And though I’d continued to watch tennis, I’d never considered modeling my strokes after those of a pro.
Enter Scott, who’s about ten years older than me, though he’d say about eight. He grew up in Northern California, where he surfed and skateboarded, played music and tennis, activities he’s kept up into adulthood. He’s an accomplished photographer and has a master’s degree in English and used to write poetry and, time to time, still does. He’s been collecting midcentury modern furniture since well before it was trendy and will surely continue to after it’s not. He’s one of Those People. You know, annoyingly above average at everything he does. And whatever that happens to be, he always looks good doing it, is always accoutered with the finest gear. His several surfboards are practical works of art. He had Leica custom build him a camera. He commissioned a guitar to be made of wood reclaimed from a New York apartment once inhabited by Jim Jarmusch. And his tennis racket? His tennis shoes? They’re the models used and endorsed by Roger Federer. Even his string job is the same as Roger’s, down to the leather power pads and little plastic string savers, features whose utility is, at best, questionable.
After one of our earliest hitting sessions, Scott took me aside and informed me that I’d accidentally bought shoes endorsed by Rafael Nadal, the southpaw Spaniard whose buggy whip forehand makes him rather resemble a male stripper twirling undies above his head. His voice betrayed embarrassment on my behalf. He didn’t want to have to mention the ankle socks I’d been wearing in the hopes of avoiding weird leg tans—a fashion choice, I was told, espoused only by lesser players like Mardy Fish. And what of the Adidas crew neck I’d got on clearance? It was the get-up of the ATP’s resident Eeyore, Andy Murray. About my poor racket, the less said, the better. Scott likes to refer to this as the time in my life when I was confused.
Now, after a Ship of Theseus–like transformation, I, too, wear only Roger’s shoes, I, too, use his racket. I guess I now have to specify his old racket, the Wilson Pro Staff 90, a version of which he used to win each of his record seventeen major championships. That Roger no longer uses this racket, having lost a step to age and switched to a considerably larger frame, means that Roger isn’t quite Roger anymore. Or so Scott’s argument—and probably mine, too—would follow. And I’ve come to understand the weird tan lines my legs now bear in summer as something like a monk’s tonsure: in striving for tennis purity, one may be called to sacrifice a calf or two.
That I’m so impressionable, so easily influenced, has over the years been the source of much irritation and hand-wringing, and to dwell on it for any length of time is sure to bring on a mean case of the collywobbles.
III.
Outfitting myself like Roger is but a small part of the deeper ongoing project, a project that’s practically metaphysical in its ambition: to get my body to move like his, so much so that an unsuspecting passerby might mistake me for the Maestro. Absurd, I know. But only logically, according to reason. How does this work? you might be wondering. When I’m on the court? It’s not that I imagine I am Roger, as when growing up, playing basketball, I’d imagine I was Michael Jordan. I do not picture myself at Wimbledon, for example, up a break in the fifth and serving, 19–18, for the championship, my player box filled with stalwarts: my wife, my coach (the affable ghost of Arthur Ashe, a fellow Richmonder), and a clutch of my closest friends, Michelle Obama and Randy Newman and Joey from Full House. No—such fancy is rightly left to those with undescended testes. Rather, it’s more like there’s a hologram of Roger projected on the court, superim
posed on my body. While Scott and I are hitting, I am aware of the degree to which my body’s movements conform to those of hologram-Roger. Have I properly timed my split-step? Has my forehand’s backswing described a capital C? Has my head stayed still through contact? Readying for a backhand, did I correctly measure my steps and transfer my weight from right heel to toe? And after releasing the racket for the swing did I keep my left arm down and by my side for balance? A session is good or bad depending on how much in the positive I can answer a whole battery of questions like these.
It was no minor feat, either, acquiring hologram-Roger. To get him into my head, to have a clear enough understanding of what my physical aspirations should be, took hours and hours of observation, study, and practice. Through various European streaming sites, I watched every match of his I could, and not just at the four majors, but at the smaller tournaments, too, including ones played on surfaces like carpet. When there were no matches to be watched, I’d get on YouTube and binge on highlights, supercut after supercut, a practice that’d lull me into dumb wonder. I’d then visit a tennis-teaching website that had videos of Roger warming up on the outer courts at Indian Wells, tuning his serve, his backhand, and his greatest weapon, his forehand, that liquid whip. These videos were in high-def and had sections in ohhh-nooo slo-mo that allowed one to observe and process his body’s every movement. The mechanics of how this happened are unclear to me, but over time I found myself to be in possession of a strange form of bodily knowledge. Almost literally possessed by it, actually. When hitting, I no longer simply knew that I’d made a mistake, but knew its cause, knew precisely how my body had failed to live up to my expectations for it. And with this knowledge in place, I began the long work of refining my movements and shrinking bit by bit the distance that lay between hologram-Roger and me.
IV.
Preposterous as this desire may sound, set down like this, a quick survey of the players at your neighborhood park or local high school or club would show that I’m not alone in it. Not by a long shot. You can’t huck a rock where the sport’s played without dinging a Fedhead. We even have a representative on the pro tour in Grigor Dimitrov, the Bulgarian phenom whose strokes so closely resemble Roger’s that the press often refers to him, sportively, as “Baby Fed.”
So what is it about Roger that casts such a spell? To what can we attribute his tremendous influence?
I don’t think this can be reduced to something as simple as his success, to the fact that he’s won more majors and spent more time at the top of the rankings than any other player in history. Go back a tennis generation and you find folks admiring Sampras for not much other than his domination. Unfair as it may have been, I recall there being quite a bit of fuss and bother then about how boring he was to watch.
Much to-do, on the other hand, has been made about Roger’s game. And maybe more written. Not a season goes by, it seems, without some new appraisal of his greatness, without some writer rehashing what sets him apart from the rest of the field. The dominance, the stats—welcome icing. And while we’re never fully satisfied with the explanations given, while we always find them wanting in some way, tiresome and full of clichés, Scott and I can’t help ourselves. With unspoken relish, a relish that masquerades as disdain, we read them. And of a session we, too, indulge. We moon over his footwork, over the apparent effortlessness of his movement—he so rarely looks rushed or out of place. We go gaga for his forehand, how he manages to create angles with it that one would have thought impossible given his position on the court. We wax dreamily about his serve, about how well he can put it out wide to either court or play it mean and deadly up the T. His feathery slice and occasional tweener thrill us. And his drop shots? His touch around the net? Only a neonate’s tuchus rivals the softness of his hands.
What all this talk amounts to, in the end, is the unshakable belief that Roger plays tennis the way it’s meant to be played. We know it in our bones, such that acknowledging it feels foregone, almost redundant. In this it’s maybe closer to Platonic anamnesis than anything else, a form of deep remembering. A fleet of nerds coxswained by Mark Zuckerberg himself couldn’t program a more complete tennis player. And so it shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a multitude of us out there trying to emulate him. To aspire to play better tennis is, eo ipso, to aspire to play more like Roger. For a handy analog we might look to yoga. Yoga’s promise is that by disciplining one’s body to hold different poses, what amount to bodily archetypes, one may achieve a certain measure of mental quietude or spiritual lightness. Likewise, so long as I’m not playing matches and therefore not afraid to fail, not tempted to resort to a safer and more limited form of the game, I am able to nourish the illusion that progress is being made, that I’m on the road to the sort of total attunement and deep self-forgetting that one used to be able to call, without an ironic sneer, transcendence.
V.
“Liquid whip”—much as I wish it were, the description isn’t mine. It’s Wallace’s, from his now canonical essay “Federer as Religious Experience,” collected posthumously as the more gnomic and koan-like “Federer Both Flesh and Not.” The tween girl inside me has never been able to shake a giddy fascination with the fact that, for half an hour or so in a nondescript ATP office at the All England Club, Roger and Wallace met. I’m not a hundred percent sure what, if anything, it means, but where I naturally and casually call Federer Roger, sometimes even Rodge in fits of pique or passion during a match, I don’t refer to Wallace as anything but Wallace. Not by the publishing world’s freight train, “David Foster Wallace,” and not by the hipster-dipshit acronym “DFW.” And certainly not “David,” or, worse, “Dave”—having known and loved only the work, I cannot bring myself to affect such familiarity with the man. But of course the question’s begged: how did their introduction go? The scene’s been an endless source of homosocial woolgathering for me. Did a tournament official present them to each other with a semiformal exchange of surnames? “Mr. Federer, meet Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace, Mr. Federer.” Or was the vibe more relaxed and chill than that? Was Wallace nervous? Presuming he was nervous, how did those nerves manifest? Did he fidget? Shuffle his notes? Was he literally sweating it? And if so, did Roger do anything special to put him at ease? A joke? A gesture? Maybe a way of crossing his legs or relaxing into his chair? And the questions keep coming: Was Wallace just another journalist to Roger? Or did Roger have a sense of his accomplishments? From the questions Wallace asked, we know he was trying to figure out whether Roger was aware of his own greatness, and, if so, how, but did Roger perceive the possible reflexivity of those questions? Did he know that he was more or less sitting across from the belletristic equivalent of himself? There’s no caboose to this train of questions, it keeps on chugging along.
We do have an inkling of what Roger made of the meeting. When after Wallace’s suicide he was asked about the interview, Roger said, “One of the strangest I’ve ever done. As I was leaving I was still wondering what we had talked about.” And when later prompted by another reporter, he added, “I wasn’t sure what was going to come out of it because I didn’t know exactly what direction he was going to go. The piece was obviously fantastic. You know, yeah, it’s completely different to what I’ve read in the past about me anyway.”
And the piece is fantastic, obviously. If you’re wondering how or why, feel free to hop online and read it. And if you’re still curious after you finish, you can plug any variation of “Wallace Federer” into your search engine of choice and scroll through page after page of appreciations and thoughtful exegeses. Let your tolerance for conspiracy theories and your stomach for mind-boggling insensitivity determine whether you read the articles that aver a correlation between Federer’s “decline” and Wallace’s suicide. There’s all this and more about Wallace out there now, including a movie starring the guy you may remember from such films as The Muppets and Sex Tape. So swiftly plaguelike has writing about him spread in the wake of his death, in fact, that it’s hard not to im
agine it all as an electronic rat king. And as aware as I am of this ever-growing corpus, as hesitant as I am to join my hairless tail to the many hairless tails Twizzlered together in cyberspace, I’m also equally aware that it’s become all but impossible to write anything essayistic or ruminative about Roger without first acknowledging a debt to Wallace. It’s not only his writing about Roger, either, but tennis more generally, too. To write about the sport at all is pretty much to write oneself squarely into the long, dark shadow of his influence and, therefore, to court the easy dismissal that familiarity encourages, almost demands. We seem fixed in our belief that the worst sin an artist can commit is that of being unoriginal and, ergo, inauthentic. How else are we to explain the work of someone like Richard Prince, who’s made a career out of needling this very idea? And yet with that said, every year, come late June, some magazine with a budget sends a writer to London to cover Wimbledon, the fortnight, surely hoping that one of them might return with something like Wallace’s magic. And many of them do. They come back with something like Wallace’s magic. Indeed, there are passable mimics out there, accomplished ventriloquists. (You likely encountered them in the now-defunct “pages” of Grantland, the sports and culture website conspicuously designed to accommodate footnotes, Wallace’s stylistic calling card.) But the spiritual equivalent of reading essays like these is listening to a cover band or someone really fucking nail a song at karaoke. It’s not that they’re not admirable or that writing them doesn’t take a measure of talent and hard work—they are! they do!—only that there’s a ceiling to how much one can appreciate such performances, a ceiling so low you can’t really stand up all the way. The pre-Romantic poet and critic Edward Young, whose work influenced Coleridge, and later Emerson, is great on this. “Suppose an Imitator to be most excellent (and such there are), yet still he but nobly builds on another’s foundation; his debt is, at least, equal to his glory; which therefore, on the balance, cannot be very great.” This is all to say that what interests me here isn’t Wallace’s work, at least not quite, and it’s not his life—with time the considerable allure both once had for me has diminished. Considerably. (“We cloy of the honey of each peculiar greatness,” Emerson wrote. “Every hero becomes a bore at last.”) What interests me, recovering Imitator that I am, is his influence and its residue. And furthermore, that notion’s very pith: that you can, in the career of your life and one way or another, fall under the sway of another person.
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