Schtitt and Mario (pp. 83–84)
Schtitt’s thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario’s late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself.
Context
Whenever Schtitt speaks doctrine, the dead founder is speaking too. The raw is explicit that Schtitt's whole philosophy — tennis as self-competition, the opponent as "partner in the dance," the animating limits within — was "his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario's late father," the reason Incandenza begged him to E.T.A. against the riding-crop scandal. The two men found themselves "totally simpatico," the optics man and the coach who did math like a Taiwanese kindergartner, and the passage even ventriloquizes the corpse: "Were he now still among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the paradoxical terms of what's now called 'Extra-Linear Dynamics.'" So Schtitt's mentorship of Mario is doubled — the substitute father transmits, verbatim and daily, the doctrine of the real one. Mario inherits his father not through the films but through the coach's pipe-smoke.