fwriction

Because I am fully entrenched in Wimbledon right now—between Federer and Rafa nearly being upset early, and John Isner’s historical eleven hour win, I have been utterly gripped (unfortunately, an exhausted Isner just lost his second round match)—I wanted to post something for the weekend that would bring my love of tennis to fwriction. This memoir from DFW was the first thing that came to mind. In addition, DFW’s “Federer as Religious Experience” holds its own as one of the best pieces of writing on tennis I’ve ever read.

This essay, which appeared in Harper’s, was published later in DFW’s collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again, under the title “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” I hope you enjoy it, and some Wimbledon time this weekend:

“Unless you’re just a mutant, a virtuoso of raw force, you’ll find that competitive tennis, like money-pool, requires geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles. Tennis is to artillery and air strikes what football is to infantry and attrition. Because the expansion of response possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think n shots ahead, where n is a hyperbolic function limited by (roughly) your opponent’s talent and the number of shots in the rally so far. I was good at this.”