In pieces that range from his own success as a junior player to the sport-changing ability of Roger Federer, Foster Wallace combined a nerd’s outlook with a novelist’s gift for exposition
David Foster Wallace was, in his own estimation, “a near great junior tennis player”. Between the ages of 12 and 15, he competed in tournaments all over the Midwest, at one point achieving a regional ranking of 17. He wrote about the experience in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”, the first – and most challenging – of the five essays in this volume. “Derivative Sport” is unlike any other sporting memoir you’ll encounter: it combines a (somewhat sketchy) account of life on the junior circuit with voluminous divagations into climate, topography and geometry. Wallace’s aim appears to be to demonstrate that his success on the tennis court was largely accidental – less a reward for talent and perseverance than the unforeseeable outcome of freakish circumstance.
Because of where he grew up – the Illinois Corn Belt – Wallace felt at home “inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids”. A certain “weird proclivity for intuitive math” meant, moreover, that he found the “geometric thinking” required by tennis (all those rapid trigonometric calculations) straightforward. And most crucially, unlike practically every other player on the planet, he relished playing in the wind. (This, too, he links to his mathematical prowess: “I could … admit the differential complication of wind into my calculations.”) Being at ease with the wind gave Wallace a tremendous advantage, since he grew up in a pocket of Illinois known as Tornado Alley. The wind, he writes, “informed and deformed” life in his hometown, and did “massive damage to many central Illinois junior players”. Yet Wallace was able to cultivate a “robotic detachment” from his environment, and so spent his youth “beating up on” more naturally gifted players. Facing him – especially in a howling gale – must have been a nightmare.
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