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Authors: David Foster Wallace
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shot down the forehand line was blown out by a gust, that I knew Gil Antitoi suffered
when his pretty kick-serve (he was the only top-flight kid from the slow weedy township courts to play serve-and-volley from
the start, which is why he had such success on the slick cement of the West Coast when he went on to play for Cal-Fullerton)
was compromised by the sun: he was so tall, and so stubborn about adjusting his high textbook service toss for solar conditions,
that serving from the court’s north end in early afternoon matches always filled his eyes with violet blobs, and he’d lumber
around for the rest of the point, flailing and pissed. This was back when sunglasses were unheard of, on-court.
But so the point is I began to feel what they’d felt. I began, very quietly, to resent my physical place in the great schema,
and this resentment and bitterness, a kind of slow root-rot, is a big reason why I never qualified for the sectional championships
again after 1977, and why I ended up in 1980 barely making the team at a college smaller than Urbana High while kids I had
beaten and then envied played scholarship tennis for Purdue, Fullerton, Michigan, Pepperdine, and even—in the case of Pete
Bouton, who grew half a foot and forty IQ points in 1977—for the hallowed U of I at Urbana-Champaign.
Alienation-from-Midwest-as-fertility-grid might be a little on the overmetaphysical side, not to mention self-pitying. This
was the time, after all, when I discovered definite integrals and antiderivatives and found my identity shifting from jock
to math-wienie anyway. But it’s also true that my whole Midwest tennis career matured and then degenerated under the aegis
of the Peter Principle. In and around my township—where the courts were rural and budgets low and conditions so extreme that
the mosquitoes sounded like trumpets and the bees like tubas and the wind like a five-alarm fire, that we had to change shirts
between games and use our water jugs to wash blown field-chaff off our arms and necks and carry salt tablets in Pez containers—I
was truly near-great: I could Play the Whole Court; I was In My Element. But all the more important tournaments, the events
into which my rural excellence was an easement, were played in a different real world: the courts’ surface was redone every
spring at the Arlington Tennis Center, where the National Junior Qualifier for our region was held; the green of these courts’
fair territory was so vivid as to distract, its surface so new and rough it wrecked your feet right through your shoes, and
so bare of flaw, tilt, crack, or seam that it was totally disorienting. Playing on a perfect court was for me like treading
water out of sight of land: I never knew where I was out there. The 1976 Chicago Junior Invitational was held at Lincolnshire’s
Bath and Tennis Club, whose huge warren of thirty-six courts was enclosed by all these troubling green plastic tarps attached
to all the fences, with little archer-slits in them at eye level to afford some parody of spectation. These tarps were Wind-B-Gone
windscreens, patented by the folks over at Cyclone Fence in 1971. They did cut down on the worst of the unfair gusts, but
they also seemed to rob the court space of new air: competing at Lincolnshire was like playing in the bottom of a well. And
blue bug-zapper lights festooned the lightposts when really major Midwest tournaments played into the night: no clouds of
midges around the head or jagged shadows of moths to distinguish from balls’ flights, but a real unpleasant zotting and frying
sound of bugs being decommissioned just overhead; I won’t pause to mention the smell. The point is I just wasn’t the same,
somehow, without deformities to play around. I’m thinking now that the wind and bugs and chuckholes formed for me a kind of
inner boundary, my own personal set of lines. Once I hit a certain level of tournament facilities, I
when his pretty kick-serve (he was the only top-flight kid from the slow weedy township courts to play serve-and-volley from
the start, which is why he had such success on the slick cement of the West Coast when he went on to play for Cal-Fullerton)
was compromised by the sun: he was so tall, and so stubborn about adjusting his high textbook service toss for solar conditions,
that serving from the court’s north end in early afternoon matches always filled his eyes with violet blobs, and he’d lumber
around for the rest of the point, flailing and pissed. This was back when sunglasses were unheard of, on-court.
But so the point is I began to feel what they’d felt. I began, very quietly, to resent my physical place in the great schema,
and this resentment and bitterness, a kind of slow root-rot, is a big reason why I never qualified for the sectional championships
again after 1977, and why I ended up in 1980 barely making the team at a college smaller than Urbana High while kids I had
beaten and then envied played scholarship tennis for Purdue, Fullerton, Michigan, Pepperdine, and even—in the case of Pete
Bouton, who grew half a foot and forty IQ points in 1977—for the hallowed U of I at Urbana-Champaign.
Alienation-from-Midwest-as-fertility-grid might be a little on the overmetaphysical side, not to mention self-pitying. This
was the time, after all, when I discovered definite integrals and antiderivatives and found my identity shifting from jock
to math-wienie anyway. But it’s also true that my whole Midwest tennis career matured and then degenerated under the aegis
of the Peter Principle. In and around my township—where the courts were rural and budgets low and conditions so extreme that
the mosquitoes sounded like trumpets and the bees like tubas and the wind like a five-alarm fire, that we had to change shirts
between games and use our water jugs to wash blown field-chaff off our arms and necks and carry salt tablets in Pez containers—I
was truly near-great: I could Play the Whole Court; I was In My Element. But all the more important tournaments, the events
into which my rural excellence was an easement, were played in a different real world: the courts’ surface was redone every
spring at the Arlington Tennis Center, where the National Junior Qualifier for our region was held; the green of these courts’
fair territory was so vivid as to distract, its surface so new and rough it wrecked your feet right through your shoes, and
so bare of flaw, tilt, crack, or seam that it was totally disorienting. Playing on a perfect court was for me like treading
water out of sight of land: I never knew where I was out there. The 1976 Chicago Junior Invitational was held at Lincolnshire’s
Bath and Tennis Club, whose huge warren of thirty-six courts was enclosed by all these troubling green plastic tarps attached
to all the fences, with little archer-slits in them at eye level to afford some parody of spectation. These tarps were Wind-B-Gone
windscreens, patented by the folks over at Cyclone Fence in 1971. They did cut down on the worst of the unfair gusts, but
they also seemed to rob the court space of new air: competing at Lincolnshire was like playing in the bottom of a well. And
blue bug-zapper lights festooned the lightposts when really major Midwest tournaments played into the night: no clouds of
midges around the head or jagged shadows of moths to distinguish from balls’ flights, but a real unpleasant zotting and frying
sound of bugs being decommissioned just overhead; I won’t pause to mention the smell. The point is I just wasn’t the same,
somehow, without deformities to play around. I’m thinking now that the wind and bugs and chuckholes formed for me a kind of
inner boundary, my own personal set of lines. Once I hit a certain level of tournament facilities, I
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