JOI's father's tennis monologue — "You will overshadow and obliterate me…"

The whole theme has its headwater here: a failed Tucson actor pouring his ruined ambition into a ten-year-old on the boy's first day with a racquet, and predicting greatness with a fervor that's really about himself. "You will overshadow and obliterate me" is offered as a gift, but the wish to be obliterated-by-the-son is the father's, not the boy's — the son conscripted as the vessel that will redeem a "busted-up used-up old Dad." Everything the book later shows James Incandenza doing to Orin and Hal (the engineering, the expectation, the love routed through performance) is here in its seed, being done to James himself. The prediction is a bequest and a burden in the same breath, and the boy just stands there, "goggle-eyed."