DAVID FOSTER WALLACE was not interested in cycling. I’m not saying he rejected it; it likely never came into his life. Unless you had cycling in your family—a happy genetic mutation—the only way you might have fallen in love with the sport in the pre-internet era was to see a race come through your hometown. For Foster Wallace, growing up in suburban Illinois, that was a slim chance. The sport that Foster Wallace did fall for was tennis.
As a teenager, he played tennis at regional level—he later described himself as a “near-great” junior player. Being pretty sharp at math, too, he loved this game of angles, of court-bound trigonometry. Tennis is a psychological battle, perfect for introverts, because the player is out there completely alone. No team, no coach in an earpiece, no pep talks during the breaks. Even if the crowd is huge—and it generally was not so for regional junior matches in the Midwest—players have to motivate and manage themselves. Not unlike being a writer.
The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws.
–David Foster Wallace
By 16, Foster Wallace had realized his limitations as a tennis player. He did not know it at the time, but the things that held him back in tennis were going to help him become a superlative writer. On court, under pressure, his consciousness went into overdrive. He said a narrative stream would rush through his mind, an endless pouring of “what ifs” and “if onlys,” freezing his physical abilities. He felt alienated from his own body. Moments of flow, when his body was beautifully tuned into the court, the racquet, the sun and the wind, became rarer. He slipped down the rankings. This was not just teenage self-consciousness. It was the cranking up of a brilliant mind. A genius. Foster Wallace’s brain was not going to be held back by a random sport with idiosyncratic scoring.
I came late to reading Foster Wallace, having been put off by the reputation of his seminal novel “Infinite Jest” as long and difficult—my preference is for short novels with a European bent. I still struggle with his novels, but I love his nonfiction. He has written several essays about tennis, including “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” which mentions his “near-greatness.” In 2016, eight years after his death, the Library of America published his collected writing on tennis in a book titled “String Theory.”
Having given up on his tennis dreams, Foster Wallace became an academic and a writer. “Infinite Jest” was published in 1996, when he was 34, and quickly became recognized as one of the most important American novels of the late 20th century. His nonfiction essays appeared regularly in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone and the The New Yorker, covering an eclectic range of subjects from the 9/11 attacks to filmmaker David Lynch.
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