Tennis-as-mathematics — the mind that turns a court into a plane
echoes
From: Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley
- Early text: "competitive tennis, like money pool, requires
geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but
the angles of response to your angles"; a court reduced to lines that "make
textbook tennis plane geometry"; "I was extremely comfortable inside straight
lines." [mid-essay] [e-text]
- IJ echo: E.T.A.'s explicitly mathematized tennis culture — the geometry/
calculus register of the academy, Hal and Pemulis's mathematical cast of
mind, and above all the Eschaton set-piece, where tennis is literalized into
a coordinate-geometry war-game and breaks down over a category error about
the map and the territory. The essay is the autobiographical root of IJ's
fusion of tennis and math.
- Weight: prefiguration