After my other adventures on Friday night, I decided to read for a while. I’m currently working on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, but I didn’t want to exacerbate my already bad mood by immersing myself in a world of flea-ridden “soldiers” graphically scalping and getting scalped by Apaches, so I decided to start re-reading one of my all-time favorite books, David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again”.
The very first essay is a reflection on the author’s experiences as a junior tennis great in downstate Illinois. In that part of the country, wind was a huge factor in the game, and Wallace attributes much of his success to his ability to deal with the concomitant frustrations more coolly than his better-prepared opponents could:
I, who was affectionately known as Slug because I was such a lazy turd in practice, located my biggest tennis asset in a weird robotic detachment from whatever unfairnesses of wind and weather I couldn’t plan for. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many tournament matches I won between the ages of twelve and fifteen against bigger, faster, more coordinated, and better-coached opponents simply by hitting balls unimaginatively back down the middle of the court in schizophrenic gales, letting the other kid play with more verve and panache, waiting for enough of his ambitious balls aimed near the lines to curve or slide via wind outside the green court and white stripe into the raw red territory that won me yet another ugly point. It wasn’t pretty or fun to watch, and even with the Illinois wind I never could have won whole matches this way had the opponent not eventually had his small nervous breakdown, buckling under the obvious injustice of losing to a shallow-chested “pusher” because of the shitty rural courts and rotten wind that rewarded cautious automatism instead of verve and panache. I was an unpopular player, with good reason. But to say that I did not use verve or imagination was untrue. Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind.
I don’t know how I missed it the first time around, but I think the parallels to tilt in poker are clear.
Great analogy. I have been meaning for years to read this. I’ll have to pick up this book and give it a go.
There’s a coffee shop right across the street that has really good-looking baked goods I’ve been wanting to try, so I stopped in to buy a cookie but all they had left were some dry looking scones. Could I run any worse?
That made me laugh out loud.
Best regards,
Bill O.
Hi Bill, flattered that you’re still reading the blog! Thanks for commenting.
Excellent post.
The most evocative and ambitious treatment of sports psychology I’ve ever read is DFW’s “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart.” I have found it useful for thinking about poker psychology.