Tuesday
As a tennis player, I was in awe this past weekend as Naomi Osaka won the U.S. Open while, at the same time, shining a light on black victims of police and vigilante violence. The tennis victory tennis gives me an excuse to share an old Paris Review article, which shows how literary depictions of the game can enhance one’s appreciation of it.
Ross Kenneth Urken recalls a middle school crush upon a girl who could “goose egg” him (6-0, 6-0) while playing left-handed. To recapture her magic, he turns to Nabokov’s Lolita, Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus (which I cited last week), and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.
For Humbert Humbert, Dolores’s tennis playing is part of her nymphette mystique:
In Lolita, Humbert Humbert describes how Dolores Haze plays singles at least twice a week with a classmate, Linda Hall, employing teasing tactics against her and “toying with [her] (and being beaten by her).” The particular beauty of Dolores’s tennis game is, for Humbert, a prerequisite for an amenable afterlife, or so he whimsically hyperbolizes one crisp afternoon as Dolores plays in Colorado: “No hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right …”
The rightness encompasses all his senses: “The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke.” Not only is there acoustic beauty in the musicality of her hits but also riveting elegance to her movements: her serve has “beauty, directness, youth, a classical purity of trajectory” while “her forehand and backhand drives…were mirror images of one another.”
Urken observes,
As any player knows, this type of equilibrium raises the serotonin in the brain, makes the world seem ordered, cements the visuals into our heads so firmly that years later we can reflect upon those moments of total harmony. This is what I found so exciting in my own youth, and as Nabokov perhaps implies, with tennis’s peculiar focus on both finesse and power, it’s perhaps no surprise that the game includes erotic grunting—uvularly high-pitched, ecstatic screams on the women’s side and heaving-throatiness on the men’s.
While well beyond Humbert Humbert’s required nymphette age range of 12-16, Osaka had a little girl aura when she won the U.S. Open at 20 two years ago, exhibiting a painful shyness while accepting the trophy. It’s exciting to see her step into maturity, using her platform for social good. As a world-class athlete who also possesses an interesting mind, Osaka could become a worthy successor to Roger Federer as the leader of world tennis. To his credit, Nabokov’s pedophile protagonist, at the end, acknowledges that the real life Dolores Hayes is far more interesting than his fantasy nymphette.
Brenda Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus shares nothing with Osaka (other then, perhaps, a relentless will to win) so I won’t return to that work. Wallace’s work, on the other hand, captures how Osaka rose to every challenge in this tournament. In her hard-hitting match with Jennifer Brady in the semi-final match and then her come-from-behind win over Victoria Azarenka, she drew on dimensions of her game she didn’t know she possessed, miraculously increasing the power of her serve by an extra 6 miles per hour.
Here’s how Wallace explains such moments:
There is a mathematical brilliance to a good tennis game that David Foster Wallace describes in Infinite Jest... In the novel, James Incandenza’s father tells ten-year-old Jim about his own views on the otherworldly, physics-bending elements of tennis, which are so beautiful they’re magical: “You enter a trance…You slip into the clear current of back and forth, making X’s and L’s across the harsh rough bright green asphalt surface, your sweat the same temperature as your skin, playing with such ease and total mindless effortless effort and entranced concentration … You’re barely involved. It’s magic, boy. Nothing touches it, when it’s right.”
Nothing touched Osaka in the third set of her matches against Brady and Azarenka. It felt like magic.