Game, Set, Match

You don't have to be a tennis fan to appreciate David Foster Wallace's description of a memorable moment in the sport. Pay attention to your own reactions as you read the passage.

"It’s the finals of the 2005 U.S. Open, Federer serving to Andre Agassi early in the fourth set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Federer and Agassi yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Agassi hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Federer way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Federer gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Agassi dines out on, and as Federer’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Agassi’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Federer, which in fact he does
— Federer’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Agassi’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Federer now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Agassi at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Agassi’s side, a winner — Federer’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the New York crowd before it erupts, and John McEnroe with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), `How do you hit a winner from that position?'”

Did you find, as I did, that you read faster and faster, that you felt your head bouncing back and forth as you tried to keep up with the action, that you could hardly take a breath?
 That's because Wallace doesn't let us. That 258-word tournament of a sentence refuses to end until the point is made. Like the players, it runs, it lunges, it careens, it scrambles, it dances. It teases us with ellipses and dashes, but we don't get to take a breath--we don't get a period--until the final ball lands. And when we do at last get a break, what comes next is "that familiar little second of shocked silence." The perfect marriage of style and content. (And don't overlook the strong, active verbs in present tense--hallmarks of great sports writing.)

David Foster Wallace, "Federer as Religious Experience,"  The New York Times, August 20, 2006

D.T. Max wrote about Wallace in The New Yorker six months after the word-struck writer took his own life. His description of Wallace's style deserves its own attention:

"There was also Wallace’s outsized passion for the printed word at a time when it looked like it needed champions. His novels were overstuffed with facts, humor, digressions, silence, and sadness. He conjured the world in two -hundred-word sentences that mixed formal diction and street slang, technicalese and plain speech; his prose slid forward with a controlled lack of control that mimed thought itself. `What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant,' he wrote in `Good Old Neon,' a story from 2001. Riffs that did not fit into his narrative he sent to footnotes and endnotes, which he liked, he once said, because they were `almost like having a second voice in your head.'


"Wallace began to doubt the aspect of his work that many readers admired most: his self-consciously maximalist style. He was known for endlessly fracturing narratives and for stem-winding sentences adorned with footnotes that were themselves stem-winders. Such techniques originally had been his way of reclaiming language from banality, while at the same time representing all the caveats, micro-thoughts, meta-moments, and other flickers of his hyperactive mind."