Schtitt and Mario

Of all the players at the Academy, the one the old coach actually seeks out is the one who can't hold a racquet. Mario — fatherless since Himself's suicide, damaged past playing — is the person Schtitt talks to, the only one he lets his guard down with, the two of them out under the copper beech with a pipe while Schtitt spills his whole philosophy into a boy who mostly listens. It's the book's clearest picture of the substitution pole: the surviving father-figure and the son who lost his father finding each other precisely around the thing (tennis, performance, the body) that the dead father lived and died inside. Schtitt gets a candid listener; Mario gets, in the raw's own terms, "an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel." Neither is a replacement for what the other lost, but the shape of the bond is unmistakably paternal.