Orin's B.U. punting and Joelle (pp. 283–284)
he’d suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he’d cleaned the clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin’s own clock at fourteen and fifteen—this had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit, Orin
Context
The first thing Orin inherits from Himself in this scene isn't a gesture or a doctrine but a schedule — the same late puberty that stalled his father as a junior stalls him at exactly the same age, the bodies that were smaller than his suddenly overtaking him. The transmission runs through the flesh and the calendar before it runs through anything chosen: Orin's tennis spirit breaks on a timetable his father already lived, and neither of them picked it. Everything else in the scene — the football swerve, the crush, the films — is the son improvising around an inheritance that arrived as pure biology.