JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

in memory of David Foster Wallace.

This is going to be a tennis year. Good. If the world is going kaput in under 12 months we still have time to attend the major tournaments and behold Roger Federer with our own eyes. End it all with the sport you loved first and most.

Of the many things DFW wrote we like his tennis pieces the most: his 1997 essay on the journeyman Michael Joyce (Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness) in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again showed us the endless possibilities of tennis writing. The fusion of nerdiness and passion, the hilariously accurate portraits built through the accretion of minutiae, the footnotes that went on like jazz riffs—there is no one like DFW. (When we read his Roger Federer essay ten years later our seatmates could hear our neural circuits crackling with joy.)

To prepare for the Infinite Jest tennis tour of the end of the world we got a copy of Consider The Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace. It is ten times more portable than Infinite Jest (which we plan to dip into when we are at home and stationary) and it contains an essay about tennis.

In How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (1994) DFW asks two questions that boggle sports fans. One, Why are sports autobiographies so robotically banal? (Notable recent exception: Open by Andre Agassi.) Two, Why are great athletes so robotically banal in their post-game interviews? (Notable exceptions: Goran Ivanisevic and Marat Safin)

“The real secret behind top athletes’ genius…may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd noise and lines up the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all.

(It’s just occurred to us that DFW is Seymour Glass.)

“How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliche as trite as “One ball at a time” or “Gotta concentrate here,” and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, cliches present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative fu with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it…

“This is, for me, the real mystery—whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither.”

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We were talking to Straight Tennis Mike (to distinguish him from Gay Tennis Mike) and we agreed that this year The Fed should be good for one or two slams. As last year limped to a close his advantages over his younger competitors became apparent. The Fed’s “economical, no sweat” (in quotation marks because you need to be a genius in order to look like you’re not doing very much) style allowed him to keep playing at full capacity while the others had succumbed to exhaustion and injury. His timing was off in 2011—you’re supposed to play your best tennis AT the majors, not After—but 2012 will be better.

We don’t know how we know, we just know.

Photos from tumblr.

Marat Safin. We’d vote for him.

We want to know if Marat Safin was elected to the Russian parliament. Could you translate this report?

Naturally we assume that Marat won, but we need details. We gather he ran on the Putin ticket and the election is disputed. Ahh, disputed elections. Marat should just marry us and run in the Philippines.

Got the voting results for Marat’s district? Send them over.

P.S. If we wanted a machine translation we would’ve gotten a machine translation. We want an actual Russian speaker because we have questions.

Unlikely as it seemed only a few months ago, when Novak Djokovic was grinding the rest of tennis underfoot, Roger Federer entertains realistic ambitions of reclaiming his place as world No1 by the summer.

Federer holds off Tsonga to win World Tour Finals.

Roger seems to be wearing a hairy glove.

Photos from tumblr

CHENGDU, China (AP)—Famed for his outbursts on court, Marat Safin said Thursday he wants to put his oratory to use in the Russian parliament.

“I could be the best looking guy in the Duma,” Safin said. “But that’s only because all the other guys are over 60.”

Thanks to Kuyakoy for the alert.

Why vote for Marat?
1. He’s brilliant. Watch his post-match interviews.
2. He has a horrific temper but always plays fair.
3. Look at him.
4. Imagine the news coverage.
5. As a bonus, his first name is Marat. (Darling, don’t write in the bathtub.)

Novak Djokovic defeats Rafael Nadal at the US Open men’s singles final: 6-2, 6-4, 6-7 (3), 6-1.

All we can say is: Soplak! We need to see Rafa’s high kick again.

Read Steve Tignor’s excellent recap of how the Djoker beat Rafa at the US Open final this morning (Manila time).

We Federites can only console ourselves with the thought that the Djoker is keeping the Fed’s record safe from Rafa.

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Cartoon from the New Yorker Thanks to Bernard-Henri for the alert.

Brian Phillips tries to explain what happened at the Federer-Djokovic semifinal. Thanks to Jon for the alert.

We want athletes to be able to explain sports. Sport, at its most basic, is about physically realizing intentions — calculating the angle, plotting the spin, executing the shot. So surely the people who have the intentions, the people whose inner lives sport is expressing in some complicated way, are in the best position to tell us what really happens on the court. And to a certain extent that’s true. But one of the reasons it’s so scary to imagine going into the postmatch press conference as a loser is that it’s not entirely true. What happens during a match may concern you to an emotionally devastating degree, but what happens can also turn on tiny fluctuations of chance so complicated that they are astoundingly difficult to articulate — minute physical differences that fall within any conceivable margin of error, emotional swings that could have gone either way and went against you, who knows why.