Requiem for a Writer: Roger Rides Again in the Ultimate Federer Moment:

“A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.“  David Foster Wallace, on the 2007 Wimbledon final

The Federer Moment, Defined

The last thing we thought would happen – Roger wins the French– happened. And today the stories are predictable rehashes of debates we’ve already had and will continue to have. Namely, is Federer the Greatest of All Time (GOAT)? Can he be the GOAT if he can’t beat his rival? Which is more impressive, the career grand slam, or winning 14 majors?

My answer to all three questions is “I don’t know, ” with the corollary “who cares?” In a sports world defined by 24-hour news-on-demand with near constant highlights and analysis, athletic achievement has become defined strictly by numbers. We marshal evidence as if we were in a courtroom, trotting out stats to back up our position, yelling back and forth to each other in a never ending debate over which numbers mean more.

In focusing so hard on these questions, we lose sight of what drew us to sport- to tennis– in the first place:  the way the court feels under our feet, the punch we feel in our arms when the racquet strikes the ball… and all the things that truly make Roger Federer a revelation:  he plays tennis with a beauty and grace bordering on religious experience.

Which brings me to my requiem for David Foster Wallace, the writer who ended his life last September. He is the man who coined the term “the Federer Moment,” in his essay Roger Federer as Religious Experience. If you haven’t read it, I implore you to do so now, because there is nothing I can say that will even approach the words he wrote. And Roger deserves the very best.

When it was published in 2007, the consensus was that the essay was the best piece of sportswriting of the last 25 years. That a non-sportswriter could win praise from the self-centered hacks known as sports “journalists” was impressive; that the essay was about men’s tennis, which the mainstream American media abhors, is even better. That the piece was written by the man many of us considered the greatest living writer is a truly priceless gift.

Consider that for a moment. The greatest living writer was also the greatest tennis writer. Like all of you, I’ve struggled to explain to the non-tennis fan what makes Roger so compelling and unreal. The essay articulated his brilliance in ways that statistics simply can’t. 

It starts with DFW describing the Federer Moment—the ecstatic reaction Federer provokes in tennis fans. (“These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.”) DFW then unrolls a twenty-six line sentence describing a Federer Moment in the 2005 US Open final between Federer and Agassi. He concludes:

It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” 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.

Anyway, that’s one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV — and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.

If there’s one line I wish I had written in my life, it was that last one. “TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.”

There’s more:

Interestingly, what is less obscured in TV coverage is Federer’s intelligence, since this intelligence often manifests as angle. Federer is able to see, or create, gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision, and television’s perspective is perfect for viewing and reviewing these Federer Moments. What’s harder to appreciate on TV is that these spectacular-looking angles and winners are not coming from nowhere — they’re often set up several shots ahead, and depend as much on Federer’s manipulation of opponents’ positions as they do on the pace or placement of the coup de grâce.

In the course of the essay, DFW would talk about war and peace, history and philosophy, religion and art, physics and kinetics, the advent of power tennis[1], the history of Wimbledon and how it is at once both glorious and obsequious, the inability of television to ever accurately capture tennis, and even then he had more to say that was exactly on point and needed to be said, and so he dropped his characteristic footnotes — because he thought it was important to add details like Federer’s handshake (“the hand itself is like a carpentry rasp (for obvious reasons, tennis players tend to be very callusy”)), and observations like Nadal and Serena Williams looking “more like cartoon superheroes than people.”

He observed:

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. 

More on DFW as a writer below the fold.

Why am I segueing into an obituary? Because when David Foster Wallace committed suicide, I wrote large chunks of this essay but couldn’t finish. If DFW never wrote a sentence about tennis, he still would have been my favorite writer. He routinely made me laugh hysterically and just as often broke my heart. Although his magnum opus, Infinite Jest[2], was extraordinary, it was in the now very crowded field of creative non-fiction where he was most accessible. 

When I read his first essay collection I kept thinking “this is exactly what it is to go to the state fair” or “this is how it feels to play tennis on blacktop in the Midwest” or “this would be me if I was on a cruise ship” and what I mean by that is that he does an extraordinary job of  describing all the things we perceive but can’t describe. We are in the golden age of creative non-fiction. Superb writers are everywhere. But no one else really sounded like they were having an experience the way DFW did.

The commentary on DFW’s death pissed me off. Obituaries rolled in from all over the world, most of them containing little asides about DFW not reaching his potential somehow, and not writing enough or as much as he was expected to given the brilliance of his twenties. It never really occurred to me to ask for more. I mean, how easy is it really to crank out a 1,079-page novel with 400 footnotes? More to the point, how hard is it to live with the type of intellect and whirring-brain that leads one to produce a 1,079-page novel with 400 footnotes to tell the tale of the tennis prodigy and the drug addict and the future and the past and America?

Seeing things from his perspective doesn’t mean I understand his Depression or the reasons he took his life. Mental illness and Depression do not cause artistic genius and we shouldn’t mythologize them. It’s easy to sift through his writing for proof of depression, morbidity even… it’s easy to find little items of “proof” like his commencement address to Kenyon College. And this is exactly what the press seized on in the wake of DFW’s suicide . I hate how we reduce his kind of incredible creative output to a few lines that prove someone was going to hang himself. 

We don’t know what causes genius. Some people are just able to bend the rules of tennis or writing to their will. Only a special talent could compose a few paragraphs about a kid who beat cancer without it being maudlin or “You’ll Never Walk Alone”-ish But in the description of Federer and the sublime, the story of the kid with cancer winds up having a serious point.

And you can find the point in DFW’s footnote 17, which  is the actual ending of his essay:

 By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience. Because there is one. It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that.

Back in August 2007, DFW was remarkably prescient about the explosion of great players that would soon change men’s tennis, largely because of Fed’s influence.  (“You should have seen, on the grounds’ outside courts, the variegated ballet that was this year’s Junior Wimbledon. Drop volleys and mixed spins, off-speed serves, gambits planned three shots ahead.”) It’s only appropriate that we end here, because what he said about Federer’s genius and influence[3] applies equally to the master himself, David Foster Wallace:

Genius is not replicable. Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform — and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.

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[1] Which he notes, correctly, was created by Ivan Lendl in the late 1980s and dominates the game today. What this style of tennis is not is boring, said DFW—just static and limited. He wrote a line that people probably ignored or didn’t believe, that Roger re-animated men’s tennis and made it for the first time unpredictable. How could anyone claim men’s tennis would be unpredictable when Roger was in the midst of domination like nothing the game had ever seen? Well, DFW was right. This new day for men’s tennis was on grand display in 2008, where a group of ten new faces lit up the game with youthful brilliance.  

[2] “A fellow of infinite jest” is how Hamlet describes the dead court jester Yorick in the famous graveyard scene. Infinite Jest in the novel is the name of a film produced by Poor Yorick Productions. The film eventually kills its viewers by entertaining them to death.

[3]As others have said, some writers are noted for their popularity, others almost solely for their influence. DFW’s influence is everywhere on everything. He spawned legions of imitators dropping excessive numbers of footnotes and writing long, complex sentences. The thing is, most of us simply can’t make up words and write thirty-five line run-on sentences that touch on everything from god to lobsters and sound like anything other than total boobs and posers.

 When you’re a lawyer, like I am, first you learn to over-annotate your writings (when you’re young); then you learn to hack down the footnotes with a weedwacker (if you’re smart) so you can get away from sounding smart in favor of actually being understood. Being understood and being entertaining can only happen when you find your own voice, not through sheer imitation. So what I’m trying to say is don’t even try it, MFA in creative writing students.

And indeed, the three footnotes here are included by way of tribute only. Footnotes won’t be appearing regularly on the blog. (Relief!)

Posted in: DFW, Federer