Tennis Lessons from David Foster Wallace
I might’ve stayed away from David Foster Wallace forever were it not for Coco Gauff, whose U.S. Open win last year stirred within me some need to try to fall back in love with tennis—not as a player, but as a literary spectator. Steering clear of the courts, I stuck close to the page, reading what I could of the sport (John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, and a slew of biographies on Arthur Ashe and Andre Agassi) before facing off with the man I’d been avoiding, whom John Jeremiah Sullivan hailed as “the greatest tennis writer of his generation.”
One night, shortly before midnight, I attempted one of Wallace’s tennis essays, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley.” I pressed play on the audiobook for the collection in which it was included, and then slowly dozed off to sleep. Within minutes, I woke to the word “Galesburg.”
I wondered, clawing my way out of half-sleep. A quick rewind confirmed that he had. Not just any Galesburg, but Galesburg, Illinois, the city where I’d attended college, played Division III tennis for a year, and hung up my racquet for good. Wallace had apparently played a tournament there in his early teens,
