JOI's father's tennis monologue (pp. 166–167)

This is the wound at the root of the whole male line — the grandfather's one sentence. Jim's father recounts his own father, a golf-playing man who "never came once" to watch him play, who finally showed up a single time (for a client, not the son), and who, asked if the boy was good, said after a long pause: "Yes, But He'll Never Be Great." The father insists the verdict and the fall weren't connected even as he places them in the same instant — running down a ball he could have conceded, he slipped on a widow or on frond-pus and tore his knees to the bone, sliding into the net "in the attitude of a mortified monk," his shot at greatness ended at thirteen. One sentence from an absent father breaks the son, who spends the rest of this monologue over-installing its opposite into his son ("You will be truly great"). Three generations deep, and the whole cascade turns on a father who wouldn't watch and then wouldn't lie.