Yesterday during the first weekend of College Football, watching the teams steam through their campaigns up and down the gridiron - a fact struck like a bolt of lightning. At this early juncture in the season, offensive and defensive lines and their "non-star" positions, have not quite gelled into dependable machines. So, the bare-faced mistake of just one player results in a penalty that costs the entire team valuable field position.
On the other hand, Tennis is an individual sport where the play of just one finely-tuned performer largely depends on a battery of coaches and their supervision. Training the muscular players always to stretch themselves to a slightly higher limit than the one on the other side of the net takes years of conditioning. In addition, the mental acuity must be so high-functioning that the best players exist on the court in a constant meditative state.
Yet we hear about tennis only in passing. The highlights are trimmed down to a series of grunts, reaches, and 90-mile-per-hour control slowed down to fit our less accelerated pace. In Literature, tennis is both a mental and physical battle. It often represents the individual in life. A person whose skills must be dialed in when necessary, yet constantly updated like our phones these days.
Mississippian Barry Hannah revived two of short stories from 1978's "Airships" to fit into the larger narrative of 1983's "The Tennis Handsome." His player of note is the handsome and highly tuned French Edward. In Hannah's modern Seventies world of post-Watergate malaise and a hidden disregard for social mores, Edward knows that every game in life is won by rushing the net.
"Return To Return" reads like improvisation. Hannah refuses to spell out everyday life by planting a pair of Southerners in post-bankruptcy New York City. Like all dilettantes roaming the city, the local urchins stare at Edward like a statue until they have to be warned about admiring his good looks and physique. Edward shows his distaste in this choice of venue by dozing off on a couch. Sleep for Edward is a means of escape physically indicated by shedding his clothes "like an infant."
His experience fuels the multi-layered inner conversation in these dreams as he does on the court. He opens the case against his one-time trainer, Dr. Word again. Through this inner mind flashback, we see and understand French's motive for hating Dr. Word. Yet, we also understand that it was Word's foresight that took Edward from running all over the field as a quarterback to dominating in tennis.
What is French's motivation? His devious mother is engaged in acts of physicality with Dr. Word when his father ", a man turned lopsided and cycloptic by sportsmania" is out of town. Does French see his need to stand out as an individual on the court as both a means of winning over an absent father and proving that the grand lesson tennis is teaching him is that he truly needs no one else - in fact, they need him more?
It is only fitting that Hannah turns French Edward into a tennis pro ("You could've beaten Jesus at Wimbledon,") yet the experience of life slows him down on his climb up the ladder.
Perhaps it is Southern insouciance or even its association with the so-called hoi polloi, tennis also takes an important place in the late David Foster Wallace's masterwork "Infinite Jest." Wallace was a ranked junior league player, so he was writing what he knew. In the mammoth work, is tennis where Wallace goes to work out his problems like Hannah's characters?
The match between Hal Incandenza and Ortho Stice is staged as a pot-boiler for Wallace. No matter how talented everyone sees Hal (and whether or not it is an advantage that his family runs the prestigious Enfield Tennis Academy - its own set of problems) he cannot win the match to defeat his insecurity. Victory is expected, but just like his prodigious and dangerous brain capacity, it could further alienate him from everyone there.
This piece of inner conflict does not stop Wallace from running all of the physical combinations that the two players (of two different age groups) could be running. The attention to detail is engrossing. Stice is a "panther in a back-brace," while Hal's being left-handed immediately alters any conditioned and prepared strategy. As the two play, we are treated to a commentary where every move requires a "guess" as to what the other party will do. As these chances become more "fractional," the only way to outwit your opponent is to "wind-up" your forehand like you are thinking lob, and then hit it so hard you catch the other player flat-footed hoping the ball is called out. (Note: French Edward actually refuses to learn the lob regarding it as "non-masculine.")
With French Edward, the straight-line mentality is "win, and win at life." With Hal Incandenza, it is "win satisfactorily, but never be satisfied by life." In tennis and life as we learn from Literature, it's really only a win - if the people behind you can celebrate it with you.
—
Mik Davis is the record store manager at T-Bones Records & Cafe in Hattiesburg.
