Extreme topspin is the hallmark of today’s power-baseline game. This is something that Wimbledon’s sign gets right.12 Why topspin is so key, though, is not commonly understood. What’s commonly understood is that high-tech composite rackets impart much more pace to the ball, rather like aluminum baseball bats as opposed to good old lumber. But that dogma is false. The truth is that, at the same tensile strength, carbon-based composites are lighter than wood, and this allows modern rackets to be a couple ounces lighter and at least an inch wider across the face than the vintage Kramer and Maxply. It’s the width of the face that’s vital. 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 (recall) requires a tilted face and upwardly curved stroke, brushing over the ball rather than hitting flat through it—this was quite hard to do with wood rackets, because of their smaller face and niggardly sweet spot. Composites’ lighter, wider heads and more generous centers let players swing faster and put way more topspin on the ball… and, in turn, the more topspin you put on the ball, the harder you can hit it, because there’s more margin for error. Topspin causes the ball to pass high over the net, describe a sharp arc, and come down fast into the opponent’s court (instead of maybe soaring out).
So the basic formula here is that composite rackets enable topspin, which in turn enables groundstrokes vastly faster and harder than twenty years ago—it’s common now to see male pros pulled up off the ground and halfway around in the air by the force of their strokes, which in the old days was something one saw only in Jimmy Connors.
Connors was not, by the way, the father of the power-baseline game. He whaled mightily from the baseline, true, but his groundstrokes were flat and spinless and had to pass very low over the net. Nor was Björn Borg a true power-baseliner. Both Borg and Connors played specialized versions of the classic baseline game, which had evolved as a counterforce to the even more classic serve-and-volley game, which was itself the dominant form of men’s power tennis for decades, and of which John McEnroe was the greatest modern exponent. You probably know all this, and may also know that McEnroe toppled Borg and then more or less ruled the men’s game until the appearance, around the early mid-1980s, of (a) modern composite rackets13 and (b) Ivan Lendl, who played with an early form of composite and was the true progenitor of power-baseline tennis.14
Ivan Lendl was the first top pro whose strokes and tactics appeared to be designed around the special capacities of the composite racket. His goal was to win points from the baseline, via either passing shots or outright winners. His weapon was his groundstrokes, especially his forehand, which he could hit with overwhelming pace because of the amount of topspin he put on the ball. The blend of pace and topspin also allowed Lendl to do something that proved crucial to the advent of the power-baseline game. He could pull off radical, extraordinary angles on hard-hit groundstrokes, mainly because of the speed with which heavy topspin makes the ball dip and land without going wide. In retrospect, this changed the whole physics of aggressive tennis. For decades, it had been angle that made the serve-and-volley game so lethal. The closer one is to the net, the more of the opponent’s court is open—the classic advantage of volleying was that you could hit angles that would go way wide if attempted from the baseline or midcourt. But topspin on a groundstroke, if it’s really extreme, can bring the ball down fast and shallow enough to exploit many of these same angles. Especially if the groundstroke you’re hitting is off a somewhat short ball—the shorter the ball, the more angles are possible. Pace, topspin, and aggressive baseline angles: and lo, it’s the power-baseline game.
It wasn’t that Ivan Lendl was an immortally great tennis player. He was simply the first top pro to demonstrate what heavy topspin and raw power could achieve from the baseline. And, most important, the achievement was replicable, just like the composite racket. Past a certain threshold of physical talent and training, the main requirements were athleticism, aggression, and superior strength and conditioning. The result (omitting various complications and subspecialties15) has been men’s pro tennis for the last twenty years: ever bigger, stronger, fitter players generating unprecedented pace and topspin off the ground, trying to force the short or weak ball that they can put away.
Illustrative stat: When Lleyton Hewitt defeated David Nalbandian in the 2002 Wimbledon men’s final, there was not one single serve-and-volley point.16
The generic power-baseline game is not boring—certainly not compared with the two-second points of old-time serve-and-volley or the moon-ball tedium of classic baseline attrition. But it is somewhat static and limited; it is not, as pundits have publicly feared for years, the evolutionary endpoint of tennis. The player who’s shown this to be true is Roger Federer. And he’s shown it from within the modern game.
This within is what’s important here; this is what a purely neural account leaves out. And it is why sexy attributions like touch and subtlety must not be misunderstood. With Federer, it’s not either/or. The Swiss has every bit of Lendl’s and Agassi’s pace on his groundstrokes, and leaves the ground when he swings, and can out-hit even Nadal from the backcourt.17 What’s strange and wrong about Wimbledon’s sign, really, is its overall dolorous tone. Subtlety, touch, and finesse are not dead in the power-baseline era. For it is, still, in 2006, very much the power-baseline era: Roger Federer is a first-rate, kick-ass power-baseliner. It’s just that that’s not all he is. 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—all this has exposed the limits, and possibilities, of men’s tennis as it’s now played.
… Which sounds very high-flown and nice, of course, but please understand that with this guy it’s not high-flown or abstract. Or nice. In the same emphatic, empirical, dominating way that Lendl drove home his own lesson, Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today’s pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men’s tennis, and for the first time in years the game’s future is unpredictable. 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—all as well as the standard-issue grunts and booming balls. Whether anything like a nascent Federer was here among these juniors can’t be known, of course. 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.
2006
Afterword
Part of my excitement in reading Wallace’s Federer essay involves the special torque he puts on what we called the “mimetic fallacy” back in college. Briefly: You don’t convey boredom by being boring, or confusion by being confusing. But there are exceptions. In this essay, Wallace presents the sui generis brilliance of Roger Federer’s tennis-playing by not only deploying his own brilliantly sui generis writing chops, but doing so within a subtly apt structural frame. For starters, he draws on the more kinetic and athletic register of his prose (as opposed to, say, his more abstract, concept-parsing register), and in the process he incorporates—channels—the tactical intelligence he ascribes to Federer through the staggered progression of the essay. Finally, in the closing section, he makes a very bold move that asks to be seen as his own mirroring homage to the game he has been writing about: Federer vs. Nadal, Wimbledon 2006.
Wallace was a nationally top-seeded tennis player in his teens, and he has written about the game in essays as well as in sections of Infinite Jest. He had the double advantage of being both a participant-insider, a connoisseur of the game’s t
actile nuances, and being Wallace, which is to say possessing a mind of great refractive analytical power, one that could do justice to the strategic cat’s cradle of any high-level face-off. I speak as a nonplayer, nonwatcher, and my own learn-as-you-go reading testifies to this writer’s ability to simultaneously illuminate the game—its physical scope and demand—and allow me to see it as an art form on a par with any other. That is a kind of seeing that cannot be unseen. As the cliché goes: I will never think of tennis in the same way again.
In his best passages you can feel Wallace’s prose strain for that extra bit of reach, the thrust of a still keener accuracy. He writes: “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.” That “liquid whip,” that sense of the ball turning “shapes in the air”—we feel the language mime Federer’s own transcending of normal physical limits.
Just as any brilliant serve or return is but one moment in a greater unfolding contest, so are Wallace’s various tours de force also moves in the essay’s unfolding strategy. The logistics are canny. First, he introduces the Wimbledon match that will showcase Federer at the very top of his game. Then he draws back, digresses, fills in various perspectives and bits of background. There is the held breath of the coin toss. Then the switch to more background. Wallace uses the time-honored technique of building suspense, and at the same time he gives us the insider’s vision of the game’s complexity. He attunes us to its amazing subtleties and surprises, even as he moves toward one of his own devising. One that we get only on a double take, after it’s over. All this time, you see, we have been reading, as trained, toward the climactic moments of the match. And then, then—where are they? Why, he dropped them just over the net, far from where he had us scrambling. Into a footnote. We’ve heard of journalists burying the lead, but this is something else: burying the climax. In the reduced-size print of a footnote, just where we would be most apt to read right by it. Point and game.
—Sven Birkerts
About the Contributors
Jo Ann Beard is the author of the novel In Zanesville and the essay collection The Boys of My Youth.
Sven Birkerts is the author of nine books, including The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, My Sky Blue Trades, and, most recently, The Other Walk: Essays. His next collection, On or About: Writing the Digital Divide, will be published by Graywolf Press. Editor of the journal AGNI, he also directs the Bennington Writing Seminars.
Mark Costello is the author of two novels, including the National Book Award finalist Big If. He lives in New York City.
Kevin J. H. Dettmar is W. M. Keck Professor and Chair of English at Pomona College. He is the author or editor of a number of scholarly books on modernist literature and popular music studies.
Anne Fadiman is the author of At Large and At Small, Ex Libris, and The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, and is at work on a short memoir about her father and wine. She is the Francis Writer-in-Residence at Yale.
Gerald Howard is an executive editor at Doubleday. He acquired and edited David Foster Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, when he was an editor at Penguin Books in the 1980s, and he subsequently published Wallace’s story collection Girl with Curious Hair at W. W. Norton.
Born in London, Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007), and Gods Without Men (2011), as well as a short-story collection, Noise (2006), and a novella, Memory Palace (2013). He was a 2008 Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library and is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New York City.
Nam Le is the author of The Boat.
Nick Maniatis is the owner of The Howling Fantods (http://www.thehowlingfantods.com/dfw), a website that has been dedicated to promoting the works of David Foster Wallace for eighteen years. He is also an English teacher at Campbell High School in Canberra, Australia.
Deborah Treisman is the Fiction Editor of The New Yorker.
David L. Ulin is the author, most recently, of the novella Labyrinth. His other books include The Lost Art of Reading: Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time and the Library of America’s Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He is book critic of the Los Angeles Times.
A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Sally Foster Wallace received her MA in English from the University of Illinois. From 1973 until her retirement in 2003, she was a professor of English at Parkland College in Champaign, Illinois. The Council for the Advancement and Support of Education named her the national Outstanding Community Colleges Professor of 1996. She is the author of Practically Painless English.
Copyright Acknowledgments
“The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing” originally published in Amherst Review in 1984 and in Tin House in 2009.
The Broom of the System originally published by Viking Penguin in 1987.
Girl with Curious Hair originally published by W. W. Norton & Company in 1989. “Little Expressionless Animals” originally published in the Paris Review in 1988. Part of “Little Expressionless Animals” makes use of the third stanza of John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” from John Ashbery’s Selected Poems (Viking Press, 1985, pp. 192–193). “My Appearance” originally published in Playboy in 1988 under the title “Late Night.”
Infinite Jest originally published by Little, Brown and Company in 1996.
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men originally published by Little, Brown and Company in 1999. “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life” originally published in Ploughshares in 1998. “B.I. #14” originally published in Harper’s in 1998. “Forever Overhead” originally published in Fiction International in 1991. “The Depressed Person” appeared previously, in slightly different form, in Harper’s in 1998.
Oblivion originally published by Little, Brown and Company in 2004. The following stories appeared previously, in slightly different form, in the following publications: “Good Old Neon” in Conjunctions #37 in 2001 and in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2002; “Incarnations of Burned Children” in Esquire in 2009. “The Suffering Channel”’s snippet of Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” is from Swift: Poetical Words, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford University Press, 1968).
The Pale King originally published by Little, Brown and Company in 2011. The following chapters appeared previously, in slightly different form: Chapter 6, published as “Good People” in The New Yorker in 2007; Chapter 33, published as “Wiggle Room” in The New Yorker in 2009; Chapter 36, published as “Backbone” in The New Yorker in 2011.
“Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” originally published in Harper’s in 1992 under the title “Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes,” and as “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” in the anthology Townships, ed. Michael Martone (University of Iowa Press, 1993), and in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown and Company, 1997).
“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” originally published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1993, and in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown and Company, 1997).
“Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All” originally published in Harper’s in 1994 under the title “Ticket to the Fair,” and as “Getting Away from Already Pretty Much Being Away from It All” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown and Company, 1997).
“A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” originally published in Harper’s in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out,” and as “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (Little, Brown and Company, 1997).
“The Nature of the Fun” originally published in Fiction Writer in 1998, and in Both Flesh and Not (Little, Brown and Company, 2012).
“Some Remarks on Kafka
’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed” originally published in Harper’s in 1998 under the title “Laughing with Kafka,” and as “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness from Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed” in Consider the Lobster (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).
“Authority and American Usage” originally published in Harper’s in 2001 under the title “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and Wars over Usage,” and as “Authority and American Usage” in Consider the Lobster (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).
“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s” originally published in Rolling Stone in 2001, and in Consider the Lobster (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).
“Consider the Lobster” originally published in Gourmet in 2004, and in The Best American Essays 2005 and in Consider the Lobster (Little, Brown and Company, 2005).