viz.

Image Credit: New York Times

This might be my last viz. post for the year, and so I thought I’d take a moment and say something that I’ve been dying to say for about 18 months or so: David Foster Wallace’s “Federer as Religious Experience” (New York Times Magazine, August 2006) is an allegory for what Wallace thinks fiction can (and should) be after postmodernism. Please forgive me if any of this seems obvious. In early July of 2006 Wallace headed over to south-west London to take in Wimbledon for the Times. Ostensibly, the magazine piece that resulted was a long definition of Rodger Federer’s talents as a tennis player. Wallace’s argument turned out to be that “if you’ve never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon…then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a ‘bloody near-religious experience.’” Religious sentiments are present throughout the article, and Wallace works hard to articulate the ways in which perfect beauty can be found at the highest level of sport. It all has to do with “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body,” Wallace suggests. To parse this out, Wallace explains the evolution of professional tennis tactics since the days of Jimmy Connors.

Image Credit: woodtennis.com

Tennis rackets changed significantly around 1980. Carbon-based rackets replaced the wooden artifacts that can now be seen lining any thoughtfully-decorated sports bar, and the effects of this switch were huge. (Wallace likens the revised rackets to aluminum baseball bats.) The composite materials allowed for lighter rackets with broader faces, much like the way iPhones and iPads allow for lighter backpacks that contain more information. Having only played tennis in sixth and seventh grades (well after composite rackets were introduced), I defer to Wallace on how the new rackets changed play:

"A wider face means there’s more total string area, which means the sweet spot’s bigger. With a composite racket, you don’t have to meet the ball in the precise geometric center of the strings in order to generate good pace. Nor must you be spot-on to generate topspin, a spin that…requires a tilted face and upwardly curved stroke, brushing over the ball rather than hitting flatly through it – this was harder to do with wood rackets, because of their smaller face and niggardly sweet spot."

This all forced the advent of power-baseline tennis, in which players could roam the baseline and spin balls at their opponents with great speed. It’s helpful to think of Jimmy Connors here, although Wallace clearly states that Connors was not “the father of the power-baseline game.” Connors played from the baseline (not in front of it, as folks were want to do during the serve-and-volley era), and his shots went barely over the net but with blazing speed. This was a complete revision of serve-and-volley tennis, which had previously dominated the men’s game for decades. Wallace goes on to explain how Ivan Lendl’s game was the first designed specifically around new racket technology: Lendl’s “goal was to win points from the baseline, via either passing shots or outright winners. His weapon was his groundstroke, especially his forehand, which he could hit with overwhelming pace because of the amount of topspin he put on the ball.” This combination of pace and topspin allowed Lendl to hit shots at a number of different angles, which Wallace points out was in some ways reminiscent of the serve-and-volley game but also designed specifically to handle the serve-and-volley game. Lendl’s range took the baseline game of Connors and melded it into the power-baseline game of Andre Agassi.

Image Credit: New York Times

The first time I read all of this, I couldn’t but help think of modernism and postmodernism, and how literary styles are always evolving given what’s come before. Modernism and postmodernism probably came to mind because those aesthetics are entirely grounded in the technologies of their day. James Joyce mused on the relativity of urban spaces lined with advertisements, and Thomas Pynchon attempts to synthesize an ever-increasing onslaught of information. And while pundits have claimed that power-baseline tennis is the final evolution of that sport (similarly, I’ve heard many different people claim that postmodernism is here to stay), Wallace praises Federer for his ability to offer something unmoored from the rudiments of fancy and completely natural to the challenges at hand. Sure, Federer has a great power-baseline game, but, as Wallace notes, “There’s also his intelligence, his occult anticipation, his court sense, his ability to read and manipulate opponents, to mix spins and speeds, to misdirect and disguise, to use tactical foresight and peripheral vision and kinesthetic range instead of just rote pace.” And let’s not forget Federer’s humanity. In Footnote 3, Wallace recounts how an International Tennis Federation guy tactlessly asked Federer for an autographed game-worn jersey that might cheer up a very sick neighbor, and how Federer complied with dignity and humanity. “He doesn’t pretend to care more than he does.” Empathy is clutch.