Something about the essay on Federer that no one sees, that maybe no one wants to see. But you see it. You do all the searches, and there are a few mentions, but no one else seems to see it, see the necessity of the sadness to the essay, to sports.

*

You first came upon the essay by chance, long before you started teaching it, though you know with certainty you read the essay before his suicide because the suicide hit hard and your reaction, how it hit you, involved the essay. Not because you were a fan of Wallace’s (like some you knew) but rather because — and this was your thought at the time, and it is difficult and awkward to confess now, but you must, because it is true — because, you thought, wouldn’t the person who could write something as good as this be happy? Put another way: you thought, if I could write something like this I would surely be happy. You did not think you were sad at the time.

*

Back then you appreciated the aspects of the essay that had made it famous: Wallace’s intricate descriptions of tennis points; his sharp observations of Federer off the court; his ability to weave insightful histories of the game and racquet technology into the narrative of a fan’s experience of a Wimbledon men’s final; and, maybe most of all, the way the essay delivers on what you, and though you’re not sure maybe you alone, see as its implicit promise to confirm, something apparently important to you, that an athlete is a type of artist, one whose work is as worthy of your attention and time as the poetry you study and teach.

*

These days you read and teach the essay in a book that contains Wallace’s tennis writings, organized chronologically. The first essay, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” is about growing up in Illinois as a serious junior tennis player. The essay is about learning to play in ever-present wind and about the comforts of the lines and angles of a tennis court. But it’s also about coming to terms with no longer being a good player, about a moment — and here you connect to the essay, here you know what is being described, here you have the discomfiting experience of another human describing a version of a moment in your own life that, if you’re being honest, haunts you in the sense that it remains with you and also that there is something about it you cannot fully explain to yourself — a specific moment that comes with a new feeling. Wallace calls it “adult sadness.”

*

You are probably ten or eleven years old, on a hockey team coached by your dad. A thing happens during this particular season, a thing that baffled you then, and that baffles you now. It occurs to you that it is weird, and possibly a problem, to care still about this, to wonder. But you cannot deny to yourself that there is some mystery here.

To put it simply (is there a more complicated way?): at the start of the season you were really good, possibly the best player on the team; by the end of the season you were not a good player anymore. The transformation occurred — if nowhere else — in your self-conception. You went from viewing yourself as a good player to viewing yourself as a below-average one.

Only two game-memories remain with you from the season in question. It is odd that there are only two: even if you strain, you cannot recall anything else.

The first: it is late in the third period at home, under thirty seconds left, and you possess the puck on your forehand, facing the net, a few feet right of the slot, and you release a wrist shot towards the top left corner of the net, which glances off the goalie’s right shoulder and then glances off the top of the post almost where it meets the crossbar, and for some reason everybody thinks it went in the net (and bounced out quickly), so the arena feels loud with coaches and parents yelling, and because it looked to be a goal a lot of the players on both teams have kind of stopped, but you know it wasn’t a goal, either because you saw it stay out of the net or because you saw (and you recall this clearly) the ref signaling “no goal,” so what you did, while everyone else was confused and milling around, was go get the puck (you think it was in the corner), circle back out front of the net and send another wrist shot at the net, this one clearly scoring. You tied the game in the final seconds and were celebrated. The moment is suffused with light and lightness that you can still feel, a feeling you know you had at the time, which, it seems, can be attributed to the happenstance of everybody else stopping and you still playing, being right that the puck was live, you as it were floating lightly, lightly floating among the ice-bound bodies around you.

*

It may be worth making clear that you do not play hockey anymore; that you have not played hockey for a very long time; and that you do not wish to play hockey again. What do you do? You run a lot of trails, you lift a little bit, solitary endeavors “to stay healthy,” involving the often-unacknowledged promise of perpetual improvement, a few more miles or another set always in theory possible, which you know to be a kind of sad end-run around facing the obvious limitations of middle age.

*

The second memory from that season: an away game, you can picture the rink with its bad lighting, against a team you’d beaten earlier in the season, but this game is close late, and you feel lost out there, one of those games when you’re simply, to use the phrase from back then, “not in the game,” though you’re of course in the game, playing, but it means you’re not affecting the game, never touching the puck, always — and maybe this is the term — out of sync with the flow of the game, the movement of the puck, and this, this feeling of being excluded from the natural rhythm of a hockey game, this is what became of you during the season in question, this. Being out of rhythm, and seeking (it seems now) to disrupt the flow you could not otherwise enter, you take a penalty, trip a kid (their best player) in the neutral zone, an obvious penalty and easy call for the ref — a stupid penalty to take, if you’re being honest, but also one that is out of character (a phrase to pause over) for you, surely one of the least penalized youth players of your generation because, being a smart and thoughtful kid, well aware of the rules and not inclined towards violence, you knew that most penalties were really honestly stupid because they hurt your team. (Well down the page, definition III, 14 b. of “trip, v.” is “to undergo a sudden change of state.”) Why you remember this trip you don’t know, because what you did later in the game was even dumber, and you kind of can’t believe it because never had you done, or would you (and your hockey career continued for another seven years or so) ever do again, something like this. But: there was a scrum (a term of approximation borrowed from rugby) in front of your own net, the puck dangerously just outside the crease, and you decide to lie down across the goal line to keep the puck out (which might make sense up to this point, if you were to have blocked a shot), but what happens is that the puck slides slowly towards you, and then under you, so that you are covering the puck in the goal crease, which, if you know hockey rules (and you did know this rule then), means that the other team is awarded a penalty shot. Which they were, and on which they scored, resulting in a loss for your team.

*

The one person with whom at the time you discussed Wallace’s suicide was one of your dissertation advisors. He didn’t know Wallace’s writing, but you recommended he read some. You recommended the nonfiction specifically. You tried to convey why the suicide hit you hard but you remember that you could not find the terms. Or, it was that what you did find sounded foolish. 

This is the advisor who said once, in a seminar, that the theme of every autobiography ever written is: nobody ever loved me enough. 

*

You try to teach the adult sadness of the tennis essays. Let’s start with the last one, the Federer essay, you tell them, and work back. The highlight compilations on YouTube that you show cannot really convey the beauty of Federer on the court — but we know this, you tell them, because Wallace establishes this early on, comparing the gulf between Federer on TV and Federer in person to the difference between pornography and “the felt reality of human love.” You don’t know if they know that reality yet, that difference, well aware that you all live in a world of sports highlights, of images.

To be honest never are they impressed with the thesis of the essay, the whole “religious experience” thing, and it’s not something (a religious experience, that is) they’re going to get from the essay or even approximate from YouTube tennis highlights.

So, you ask them, why does he keep mentioning William Caines?

*

The first mention of William Caines occurs when Wallace identifies him as the child who flips the coin to determine first serve in the final. “William Caines is a seven-year-old from Kent who contracted liver cancer at age two and somehow survived after surgery and horrific chemo. He’s here representing Cancer Research UK.” 

What does Wallace see here? (You ask because he doesn’t really say.) You imagine he sees beyond Federer and Nadal standing there, beyond the symbolism of a coin toss, through to the sadness, the sadness associated with (you almost write: the sadness we all invariably feel about) a disease such as Caines’s, at Caines’s age especially. You talk to them about limits, about forces out of our control that can affect us, can define our lives, about how sports is one of, if not the, ways we come to terms with this, experience these limits, which are physical limits, through watching, spectating, but also through playing and living them, the limits. 

*

It is here that some might recall, or notice for the first time, the late footnote (the last footnote in the essay) that contains the final mention of William Caines. They probably see that this footnote is truly the essay’s proper conclusion. It’s rather different, and to be honest much sadder, than the essay’s actual final sentence, which reads: “Inspiration, though, is contagious, and multiform—and even just to see, close up, power and aggression made vulnerable to beauty is to feel inspired and (in a fleeting, mortal way) reconciled.” Contrast that, you tell them, with the way Wallace puts it at the end of the lengthy footnote, number 17, which he locates as occurring in the third set of the 2006 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal: “But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there.”

*

You know that the phrase “whatever deity, entity, energy or random genetic flux” could very easily have been taken from “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” from the passages wherein Wallace is coming to terms with the simple fact that his teenage peers are growing bigger and stronger when he is not, from the first sense he ever has of limits, of colliding with them and the knowing and feeling them through sports. The same vagueness and approximation of phrasing in the Federer essay at this juncture characterizes the object of Wallace’s emotions as his junior tennis career began heading downhill: “I began to experience the same resentment towards whatever children abstract as nature,” he writes; “the call to height and hair came from outside, from whatever apart from Monsanto and Dow made the corn grow”; and then, “I began, very quietly, to resent my physical place in the great schema.”

*

Wallace attends a tournament and writes a profile of tennis professional Michael Joyce, noting: “a big part of my experience of the Canadian Open and its players was one of sadness.” You see that he mentions this same sadness in the Michael Joyce essay again and again, to the point that it becomes, you see, the quiet heart of this essay as well. Wallace reflects again on his own competitive junior tennis career and claims, with humor you appreciate, that prior to arriving at the Canadian Open and watching Joyce and other pros in person he had been planning to ask Joyce to hit around. He abandons the idea, calling it “obscene.” You read this as a coming to terms (“obscene”) with limits, and once you do, you see that Wallace’s understanding of sports, as presented in his description of the tournament matches, centers on the idea of each player colliding with, and experiencing, their individual limit in a particular match (and centered not on, or less on, what would be the more common view of a match: that someone won and someone lost a contest of effective equals.) So now you see that this explains how Wallace characterizes Joyce’s first match against Dan Brakus: “carnage of particular high-level sort: it’s like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator.” And it’s only now, really, honestly, that you notice the term right there in the essay’s revised title: “Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.”

*

Wallace writes a review of tennis Hall-of-Famer and former world-number-one Tracy Austin’s autobiography, confessing up-front a certain kind of sadness, that of heartbreak (“How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” is the title), but you know the other sadness, that of limits, is there too – even right there in a sentence building to the breathtaking (to you) closing of this essay: “It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones truly able to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied.” “A cruel paradox,” Wallace writes: yes, but also, surely, a gift of its own kind, the limit, which is the bound, of course, but also, – and he knows this, given the title and motif of the essay on his junior tennis career – the limit also names what happens near a boundary point, approaching it, and though you remember nothing of calculus but some terminology, you spend some time on Khan Academy, and read, in a tutorial titled “Limits intro”: “That's the beauty of limits: they don't depend on the actual value of the function at the limit. They describe how the function behaves when it gets close to the limit.”

*

You see here that you are approaching a version of the conceit of Wallace’s own reflections on being a young athlete, which use the language (and a real understanding) of mathematics both to explain his understanding of tennis as well as to signpost his transition away from sports and to academics, a transition, these essays make rather clear, that haunted him, in the sense that, taken as a body of work, the essays are suffused with the sadness of the limit. But the terminology of functions and of geometry is not your own, they’re not what haunts you when you think about that season, that seemingly abrupt transition in self-conception from good at hockey to not so good, though you do wonder why it took so long (decades, which strikes you as absurd) to view it squarely, to see what you still abstract as nature, and then to accept that it’s not the trail miles or sets and reps alone that can undo it, that what you needed was the coming to terms.

MATTHEW C. BORUSHKO is a writer and scholar living in Massachusetts.