"-the caprice and unfairness of it all"

Was David Foster Wallace America's tennis laureate, its Whitman celebrating the barbaric yawps of modern serves?

Isaac Butler thinks he just might be, as we head into the US Open:

Wallace’s method of playing tennis isn’t unique; the approach even has its own book, though not a literary one. It’s called Winning Ugly: Mental Warfare in Tennis, written by the superstar coach and ESPN commentator Brad Gilbert. Gilbert’s philosophy is simple: tennis is about winning games and sets. Forget about transcending the self – play the opponent physically and psychologically, play the conditions, use every advantage you can muster, and don’t worry about perfection. It’s not clear if Wallace ever read Gilbert’s book (he never mentions it), but it’s likely he did. The book was extremely popular in the 1990s. And in today’s tennis, winning ugly is probably best represented by the current world No 1, Novak Djokovic. He plays the game with a style something like the T-1000 from the Terminator movies, morphing around whatever you throw at him to become even deadlier until you go mad trying to beat him. 

It was Federer’s much more elegant style, which could be called “winning beautiful”, that drew Wallace to him. Wallace spent almost no time interviewing Federer for his virtuosic essay Roger Federer as Religious Experience, originally published in the New York Times Magazine. Wallace’s argument was that Federer’s greatness lay in the way he turned compositional beauty into a kind of weapon, in the way he transcended the limits of the human body and the speed at which we think. This made Federer a somewhat uninteresting person, nearly self-less, but capable of unimaginable physical grace. 

It’s hard not to see some element of self-awareness in all Wallace’s praise of Federer. His writing always betrayed some of his desire to win ugly. It’s hard to think of a writer whose voice more relied on the presence of the authorial self on the page. Wallace reveled in subverting magazine assignments, and liked to use every trick in the book to move, impress and thrill a reader. In a way, his writing is often like an extended match between Federer and Djokovic, with Wallace playing both parts, luring you into traps one second, moving you to tears with beauty and grace the next.