Proposed: David Foster Wallace Should Be in the International Tennis Hall of Fame

David Foster Wallace won just as many tennis majors as he entered: zero. He never played the professional tour, he never played D1 college tennis, and he was acutely aware of his shortcomings on the court—which were numerous, and which he outlined at length in a famous Harper’s essay, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”—but David Foster Wallace deserves, perhaps more than anyone, to be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame.

You’ll periodically hear people joke that the Olympics should feature a “normal person” competing alongside the athletes so viewers can have more perspective about how insane the athleticism on display is. David Foster Wallace was, for professional tennis, that metaphorical “normal person”: a writer who could, without getting bogged down in statistics and play-by-plays, bring you into the sport and help readers everywhere — regardless of their level of familiarity — understand tennis at its deepest, most metaphysical level. A good sports journalist or color commentator can give you insight into the technical or psychological aspects of the game. Wallace, unlike anyone who has written about tennis before or since, captured the game’s spirit, and translated its artistry and beauty for the rest of us normals.

Once upon a time, Wallace was a tennis player, and—for a stretch, as a junior—a darn good one. But he possessed what may be the most painful level of skill for any sport: He was good enough to know what it took to be great, but not talented enough to reach greatness. That sad contrast meant he would never be a Grand Slam contender. But it put him in a perfect position to observe and study the game.

Great players, as Wallace observed in another essay, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” are typically inarticulate about their own genius. So much of it is natural or formed by habit over years of performing physical actions that must, necessarily, happen without thought. Anyone who thinks too much on a tennis court will break under the otherworldly pressures top athletes face. In Austin’s autobiography, which Wallace was nominally reviewing when he wrote about her, she provides only surface-level information about her life and none of the insights into her own brilliance that Wallace sought. Wallace bemoaned this fact and his continually thwarted hunger to inhabit the minds of tennis geniuses he admired.

Wallace’s desire to understand the greatness he knew he would never achieve on the court motivated all of his writing on the subject. The sense of awe and camaraderie he felt with journeyman Michael Joyce is palpable in “Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry,” in which Wallace explores what it’s like to be incredibly, mindbogglingly good — but still not good enough to make it to the top of the game.

But it was tennis’ most perfect example of genius embodied, Roger Federer, who provided Wallace with his greatest canvas for exploring the beauty of tennis. Wallace took a single short interview with Federer and turned it into the definitive piece of tennis writing, a treatise on the sport as “human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.”

Reading the piece — originally titled “Federer Both Flesh and Not” and perhaps more famously known as “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience” — one is struck first by the viscerality of the language. Federer’s forehand is “a great liquid whip,” his service motion has “a certain eel-like all-body snap,” and Wallace’s description of his ultimate “Federer Moment,” a groundstroke exchange, “with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game[,]” between Federer and Andrew Agassi, paints that exchange so intensely and descriptively that readers understand the raw ridiculousness of the point as well as if they had watched it themselves. (I’ve watched the point many times—Wallace’s description may be even more impressive than the impossible shot Federer pulls off.)