Check out a round table over at The Morning News about sports writing, Paper Tigers, where David Foster Wallace's contributions end up getting quite a mention, including:
Katie Baker: [...] But the piece that grabbed me and never let go is “The String Theory” by David Foster Wallace, which is ostensibly about a young professional tennis player named Michael Joyce qualifying for a tournament but is really about T-shirts and physics and IQ and exponents and how much Wallace hates Agassi (“his domination…doesn’t make me like him any better; it’s more like it chills me, as if I’m watching the devil play.”) It’s the glorious opposite of the sport’s typically bubbly coverage. When you’re reading Wallace, tennis has never been more relatable or more melancholy. “The applause of a tiny crowd,” Wallace writes, “is so small and sad and tattered-sounding that it’d almost be better if people didn’t clap at all.”
Nic Brown: [...] But my favorite is going to have to be “Federer as Religious Experience,” the essay David Foster Wallace published in the New York Times Magazine in 2006, concerning—of course—the tennis star Roger Federer. It wasn’t until well after reading it that I realized Wallace wrote the entire piece without ever once interviewing the subject. I think it was his most generous work—to himself, and to the reader. It seemed like he was having fun, not something I associate with much else of his work. He also just knew so much about the subject and was so damn smart that it made every sentence leap screaming off the page. Again, the piece was excellent because it was really about beauty, obsession, precision, and the mysteries of the human condition. It just also happened to be about tennis as well.
[via thedailysnowman]
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