All Tennis Edition
The title tells all: This edition is about the game of tennis.
I’ve been sitting in the house, on the couch, holding a tennis racquet.
It’s my version of Tom Cruise’s “Where’s my bat? I think better with my bat?” scene from A Few Good Men. The racquet was my favorite Christmas gift from Courtney, and to her surprise on the night she gave it to me, it just followed me around the rest of my waking hours. Watching a movie? Racquet. Reading a book? Racquet.
Sometimes I just have it in my lap. Others I’m actually practicing my grip, moving it around as I’d change it in a match from serve to forehand to backhand. Still other times I actually bounce a ball, seeking out the smaller sweet spot on its face. (Did I mention this thing is way too good of a racquet for my level of “skill” as a tennis player? I should have mentioned that part.)
We’re still digging out from under a fair amount of snow here in Columbia, which just amplifies my eagerness to play. All the more enticing when I know that I can’t right now (at least not at our normal court). I’m like the 37-year-old version of my younger self (and kids still to this day) who got outside-centric gifts for Christmas and the season’s bitter cold kept me from using them any time soon. Except now I’m the adult in the house and don’t have to worry as much about stern looks and admonitions not to play inside the house lest I break something. (Not entirely without those looks and admonitions, but they’re fewer.)
And it’s not like I’m immune to the good common sense behind these looks. Am I the same idiot who took a poorly calculated backswing with a pitching wedge and shattered a ceiling fan globe 20-some odd years ago? I am. So when I stretch out and mime my serve motion, I’m constantly cognizant of the ceiling above me.
Add to the snowy/icy prison of outside the kick-off of professional tennis’s now-things-are-getting-serious season with the first major of the year: the Australian Open. I couldn’t be more excited, though this particular tournament is fairly tough to watch, at least if you’re hoping to watch a marquee player, usually with their later court times, since it’s already tomorrow in Melbourne.
But I love what it means for the coming year. The eventual warming of the days from more direct sunlight will lead to a resumption of one of my favorite parts of last year: Saturday morning tennis. I’m bouncing with anticipation, but until then, I’ll have to settle for split-screen views of multiple tennis matches at a time and twirling my racquet ever just so to avoid lamps and picture frames.
While I’m at it, I can’t help but think of a word of wisdom I heard sportswriter Wright Thompson say on a podcast once. He said, “The smaller the ball, the better the writing.” It’s certainly the case when one thinks about the annals of sportswriting history and the countless can’t-forget stories from the realms of baseball, golf, and of course, tennis.
So I decided to channel my restless energy into an all tennis edition of the newsletter. There’s talks with some of the biggest names in the game. There’s current pop culture hits worth your attention that center on tennis. There’s a look back into the age of dueling men’s magazines and the simultaneous publication of tennis stories. There are podcasts with former pros who’ve been chronicled by one of the best writers of all time, and there’s a contender for the single best piece of sportswriting (certainly tennis writing) ever put to paper. There’s bribery scandals at elite colleges based around the sport. All this to say: Even if you don’t love the game as much as I do, even if you’re not practicing your grip and swinging softly at phantom balls in the house, fear not—there’s something for you in here still.
Ten Worth Your Time
- This is coming to you on Day 3 of the Australian Open. Tied to the first big tournament of the year, GQ’s Daniel Riley has a long cover story profile on the sole remaining active player of the superstars known as the Big Three: There’s no more Federer; Nadal retired at the end of last year; that leaves only Novak.It’s a quote-heavy piece that lets Novak’s words speak for themselves on various topics, like the conventional end-of-career questions that will dominate whatever years he continues to play to thornier topics like his pandemic-and-vaccine-status-induced deportation from Australia a few years ago and his belief that he was poisoned while in a quarantined hotel. I found the most insightful and introspective bits were those related to Federer and Nadal, in whose shadows he existed for so long but has now eclipsed them both in terms of tennis accomplishments.
- In the GQ piece, Novak was asked to describe his rivals in one word.
Federer: Elegance. Nadal: Tenacity. Carlos Alcaraz: Charisma. Jannik Sinner: Skiing.
Hard not to read that as a bit dismissive of the current world number 1 player, but, as I learned from this shorter Esquire profile on Sinner, he was raised at a ski lodge. Quite literally: His father was a cook and his mother was a waitress at a resort in Sexten, Italy. Apparently he was a national junior champion in skiing. Though there are some interesting tidbits about Sinner contained in the piece (written, surprisingly to me, by the magazine’s editor-in-chief), I’m mostly including it because of its juxtaposition with the GQ story. It reminded me of the same two magazines—the giants of men’s lifestyle magazines—both ran tennis stories back in 1996: One on the number 1 player in the world, Andre Agassi, and one on a good-but-not-quite-great relative unknown named Michael Joyce. Though the Agassi piece, which was the cover story in GQ and written by David Granger, who’d go on to be EIC for Esquire, had all the pomp and circumstance that normally surrounds a cover story and one on a massive celebrity, it is the story of the unknown that people remember because it was written by David Foster Wallace.
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I’ve shared the DFW story before in a number of different newsletters, but apparently I’ve never shared this episode of the now-defunct Esquire Classic podcast (breaks my heart; such a great concept and there was such a deep well of untapped material) where Granger reflects on Wallace’s story and his own and marveling at the genius of Wallace’s approach and execution of his story. It truly staggers me that I haven’t shared this before, but even if I have, it’s well worth re-upping it here.
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While on the topic of 1) podcasts 2) about David Foster Wallace 3) that apparently I never shared 4) in a staggering departure from my normal M.O., I give you one of my favorite podcast episodes of all last year: Pablo Torre Finds Out with the subject of DFW’s famous piece, Michael Joyce. From the episode’s description:
“Today, in the middle of the U.S. Open, Pablo sits down with Michael Joyce — who’s since become a coach to players like Maria Sharapova — and they dissect the genius and the eccentricities of David Foster Wallace, who died in 2008. And we learn about the psychologies of two grotesque glories: writing and tennis.”
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In the spirit of the professional tennis season getting started and harkening back to Thompson’s adage that the smaller the ball, the better the writing, here’s a gift link to The New York Times story that Wallace did on Roger Federer—quite simply one of the best pieces of sportswriting ever.
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Wallace wrote so much about tennis over the years that it was collected into a book: String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis. John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose own style owed greatly to Wallace’s influence, wrote the foreword to the collection, which was excerpted in The New Yorker. If you get nothing else out of it (you will, though), then enjoy the origin story of the word “tennis” itself:
“Tennis” is a wonderful word in the sense that it never really existed. That is, although the game is French to the core—not one but two of France’s early kings died at the tennis courts, and the Republic was born on one, with the Tennis Court Oath—the French never called it that, tennis. They called it jeu de paume, the “game of the palm,” or “handball,” if we want to be less awkwardly literal about it. (Originally they had played it with the bare hand, then came gloves, then paddles, then rackets.) When the French would go to serve, they often said, Tenez!, the French word for “take it,” meaning “coming at you, heads up.” We preserve this custom of warning the opponent in our less lyrical way by stating the score just before we toss up the ball. It was the Italians who, having overheard the French make these sounds, began calling the game “ten-ez” by association.
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Here’s a relative rarity: Tennis-centric popular media. One of the most lauded films of early 2024 was Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers, the sexy love-triangle tennis romp starring Zendaya, Mike Faist, and Josh O’Connor. The Second Serve, a relatively new magazine devoted to tennis (and an outgrowth of Racquet) wrote about the film and how the reality of the game’s effect on players’ bodies is front and center.
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In The Second Serve essay, there’s this line:
“Director Luca Guadagnino—who most viewers may recognize as the man who captured Timothée Chalamet swooning under the Italian sun of Call Me by Your Name—plays with our physical relationship to the sport, at points literally launching the viewer across the net in a ball’s-eye view, with all the thrilling frenetic disorientation that entails.”
It’s worth bringing the film, though now already growing stale in viewers’ minds because the onslaught of content being continuously pumped at us has rendered it all but forgotten, because Academy Award nominations will be coming soon, and Challengers remains on the long list for a few noms, most notably for Best Original Score and potentially Best Original Screenplay. Here are two video essays discussing some of the movie magic on display: The first is a dissection of that shot referenced in the essay, where the camera becomes the tennis ball, and the other is about how Guadagnino shoots coverage of his scenes.
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Here are two episodes from Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast that were excerpted from his new book, The Revenge of the Tipping Point. The episodes deal with the Varsity Blues college admissions scandal, wherein celebrities and other wealthy sorts were accused of paying millions of dollars to get their kids into elite universities. Remember that? (Lori Loughlin, of Full House fame, and her daughter, Olivia Jade, were perhaps two of the most well-known names caught up in this scandal.) These two episodes center on, of all things, tennis. Here’s Part 1and Part 2.
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I’ve written in the not-so-distant past about my newfound love of actually playing tennis regularly. I was long an admirer and fan of the sport, but I didn’t start playing until recently. It was fitting that my inaugural year would also be the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey. This Washington Post review comes from a writer who was just as willing as I (if not more so) to write candidly about the uglier parts of his game.
But “The Inner Game of Tennis” convinced me that didn’t matter as long as I got every ball back across the net. In tennis parlance, I became a “pusher,” a craven retriever, a devotee of drop shots and lobs. Too ignorant to apologize, I was soon the nightmare of more experienced players, the kind of guy who wins with pure, or impure, intuition. My neighbor never complained, but one defeated opponent shook my hand at the net, snarling, “You make a beautiful game very ugly.” Later a teaching pro took one glance at my strokes and suggested, “Take two weeks off, then quit the sport.” Harsh criticisms, without a doubt, but I love his unselfconscious tone.
He simply found great use for the book’s wisdom, which make clear why people beyond devoted tennis players appreciate the book:
- “The secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”
- “All these skills are subsidiary to the master skill, without which nothing of value is ever achieved; the art of relaxed concentration.”
- “When we unlearn how to be judgmental, it’s possible to achieve spontaneous, focused play.”
- “Exercise no control; correct for no imagined bad habits. Simply trust your body to … toss the ball up, focus your attention on its seams, then let the serve serve itself.”
- “Once you learn how to learn you have only to discover what is worth learning.”
More From Me
Over on my blog, I’ve been writing about various topics of interest to me.
What’s Bringing Me Joy: Klein Tools Canvas Bags
It's Quitter's Day. Keep Going.
Have Tennis Balls Gotten Worse?
Culture Diary
Here’s a collection of what I’ve been consuming in the past week.
The legend for my list was stolen from Steven Soderbergh, where ALL CAPS represents a movie, Sentence Case is a TV show, ALL CAPS ITALICS is a short film, Italics is a book, and bold is a live performance or show. A number in parentheses after a TV show highlights how many episodes I watched. An asterisk after an entry means it’s a rewatch. The source of the movie or show, whether streaming service, physical media, or in theaters, is shown in parentheses as well.