In this week's Book Club, I took stock of the collected tennis works of author and essayist David Foster Wallace, who died last September. I conclude here with his final major word on the subject. Fittingly, it was about Roger Federer.
Ten years after publishing celebrated articles on Michael Joyce and the U.S. Open, David Foster Wallace brought his hyperactive eye and pen back to pro tennis in 2006. He immediately produced an even more celebrated piece, “Federer as Religious Experience,” for the New York Times. In those earlier stories, Wallace had given us the final word on the journeyman player and the Grand Slam experience. Now he set out to give us the definitive look at an all-time champion.
In most ways, he succeeded. The timing was a right for a serious piece of Federer appreciation—Wallace would watch from the Centre Court press seats as the Swiss won the eighth of his 15 majors, at Wimbledon in 2006—and he provided an exhaustive account of what made him such a special tennis player and and person. The idea of Federer as genius took on a wider currency once it appeared in the pages of the Times. In fact, Wallace was such a relentless and at times condescending advocate for him that by the time you’d finished reading, you could have been forgiven for hating Roger Federer just a little bit.
That’s not because what Wallace claims for him isn’t true, or well put. He tells us that Federer has brought beauty to the power-baseline game, fusing “Mozart and Metallica” on court (did he know that, in the pre-Anna Wintour phase of his life, Federer was a huge Metallica and pro wrestling fan?), and in the process “transfigured"—note the lofty term—the sport. Wallace is very good with the technical and historical aspects of tennis, especially when he describes how wider racquet faces changed the angle and trajectory that could be created from the baseline, making it less necessary to come to the net in order to open up a point. He’s equally good at making Federer’s unique tactics, footwork, and strokes come to life on the page. And he gets Federer the person down as well:
He’s next to a table that’s covered with visors and headbands, which he’s been autographing with a Sharpie. He sits with his legs crossed and smiles pleasantly and seems very relaxed; he never fidgets with the Sharpie. One’s overall impression is that Federer is either a very nice guy or a guy who’s very good at dealing with media—or (most likely) both.
“He never fidgets with the Sharpie.” Wallace says as much about Federer with that tiny line as he does with the rest of this very long article.
Best of all is Wallace’s opening to the story, which is an immortal description of what he calls, and what will forever be known as, a “Federer moment.” After narrating a ridiculous point that Federer wins in the 2005 U.S. Open final, Wallace writes of his reaction, “I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.”
Still, the article is also not as much fun as the one about Michael Joyce—Wallace doesn’t have to strain as hard to encapsulate the journeyman as he does the god. And in that straining, we can glimpse cracks in Wallace’s premise. First is his dismissal of Federer’s opponent in that year's Wimbledon final, Rafael Nadal. As he did in “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open,” Wallace sets up a battle of opposites between the players he's watching. At the 1995 Open, the “childlike and cute” Pete Sampras, with his “weird boneless grace,” had to face down the “malevolent and cyborgian” Mark Philippoussis—it was the poet versus the sledgehammer. A decade later, the dichotomy is even more elaborately drawn out:
There’s the great care Roger Federer takes to hang the sport coat over his spare courtside chair’s back, just so, to keep it from wrinkling — he’s done this before each match here, and something about it seems childlike and weirdly sweet. Or the way he inevitably changes out his racket sometime in the second set, the new one always in the same clear plastic bag closed with blue tape, which he takes off carefully and always hands to a ballboy to dispose of. There’s Nadal’s habit of constantly picking his long shorts out of his bottom as he bounces the ball before serving, his way of always cutting his eyes warily from side to side as he walks the baseline, like a convict expecting to be shanked.
Wow, I can’t decide who to root for in this match!
The question is, What was Wallace getting at when he described one player as “childlike and weirdly sweet” (not to be confused with the “childlike and cute” Pete Sampras) and his opponent as an indecent and paranoid felon? The writer gives us an idea at the start. It’s about “beauty”:
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war. The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.
Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s. You too may find them so, in which case Spain’s mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man’s man for you — he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations.
Let’s start at the end, with his characterization of Nadal. The Spaniard is cast as “totally martial,” the tennis player for men’s men everywhere. I’m going to go ahead and hope that if Wallace had lived, he would have changed his mind about this. At this year’s U.S. Open, Nadal seemed to enjoy, or at the very least laughingly tolerate, the ardent attentions of a male fan who ran on court to embrace him. Would anyone describe this Nadal as the living embodiment of sport-as-war? Overall, the passage, which paints the average male sports fan as a chest-beating fascist who would have trouble wrapping his cretinous mind around the beauty of Roger Federer’s tennis game, leaves me with the bad taste of condescension.
What is “beauty” in sports, according to David Foster Wallace? He says that Federer is among those rare athletes who exist beyond natural laws. He cites Michael Jordan and Muhammed Ali as others—the common denominator seems to be their ability to “float,” to make time stand still around them, to always have an extra second at their disposal. Wallace says these men create beauty with their bodies. While he never uses the word “effortless,” his argument about beauty really sounds a lot like an argument about class: the aristocratic Federer makes it look like he’s floating, like he’s not working out there, while Nadal grinds and grunts and sweats and shows off his muscles. This schism, this idea of effort vs. effortlessness, is a big part of what we find beautiful.
Wallace says later that Nadal has been “coached” to hit every ball high and hard to Federer’s backhand. At the same time he says of Federer that his “precision and variety are as big a deal as his pace and footspeed.” I’d also like to think that the writer would have updated these ideas the more he saw Nadal. He does hit most balls to Federer’s backhand, but part of that is to create an element of surprise at important points in a match. And I think we can say that “precision and variety” are just as big a part of his game as Federer’s.
Beauty remains in the eye of the beholder. You can’t fault Wallace for preferring Federer’s style to Nadal’s. I happen to find the Spaniard’s game “beautiful” for its energy; elegance isn’t the be-all and end-all for me. At the same time, you’ll never convince me that, say, Fernando Gonzalez is fun to watch.
Wallace succeeds in “Religious Experience” because he brilliantly details the reasons for his preference. But he also fails, because he assumes that it’s an either/or question—he can’t see that under his biceps and his Spanish style, Nadal is every bit the childlike warrior that Sampras and Federer are, and he plays with every bit of their variety and ingenuity. Fans of the ATP tour may be cretins, but we know there as many individual ways to love the sport as there are individuals who play it well. That’s the real beauty of tennis. What's tragic is that David Foster Wallace won't be here to call our attention to more of it.