"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

[fiefoe]

"Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness"
This is another highlight in this collection. One wonders how DFW can sustain one's interest in tennis in a drastically longer form.

• (The players) 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.
• The realities of the men's professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin.
  
• ... the distorted idea that most pro players are oversensitive brats - is on a qualifier's view easily explainable: top players are temperamental because they can afford to be.
• I truly understand why Charlton Heston looks gray and ravaged on his descent from Sinai: past a certain point, impressiveness is corrosive to the psyche.
  
• Sampras is surprisingly childlike and cute on the court, in person, in contrast to Agassi, who's about as cute as a Port Authority whore.
• It's the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one's given up for it. Whether there's "choice" involved is, at a certain point, of no interest... since it's the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.
  
• An almost ascetic focus. A subsumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very serious and very small.
  
• Michael Chang.. an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I've ever seen outside a Graduate Writing Program.
• Chang's mother is here - one of the most infamous of the dreaded Tennis Parents..., a woman who's reliably rumored to have done things like reach down her child's tennis shorts in public to check his underwear.
• 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.
  
• 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.
  

They didn't teach us this in Tennis 101:
'Serious tennis is full of these multisemiotic terms - "love," "hold" and "break," "fault," "let" as a noun, "heat," "moon," "spank," "coming in," "playing unconscious," and so on.'

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