Lyle's weight-room supplicants (pp. 388–389)
He wants to get to the Show so bad it feels like it’s eating him alive. To have his picture in shiny magazines, to be a wunderkind, to have guys in blue I/SPN blazers describe his every on-court move and mood in hushed broadcast clichés.
Context
Spectation turned inside-out: the hunger not to watch but to be watched. LaMont Chu's crippling obsession is to become the object of the gaze — his picture in magazines, his every move narrated by the blazered broadcasters, himself converted into content for others to consume. It's the theme's other pole from the passive viewer: the appetite to be the spectacle, to exist as an image in someone else's attention. And it's eating him alive in a way that mirrors the viewer's fate exactly — where the watcher dissolves into the screen, Chu is dissolving into the wish to be on it. The two hungers are the same coin: a self so unsure of its own reality that it needs either to be filled by images or to become one.