Schtitt and Mario (pp. 81–83)
One of the reasons the late James Incandenza had been so terribly high on bringing Schtitt to E.T.A. was that Schtitt, like the founder himself (who’d come back to tennis, and later film, from a background in hard-core-math-based optical science), was that Schtitt approached competitive tennis more like a pure mathematician than a technician. […] In short, Schtitt and the tall A.E.C.-optics man (i.e. Incandenza), whose fierce flat serve-and-haul-ass-to-the-net approach to the game had carried him through M.I.T. on a full ride w/ stipend, and whose consulting report on high-speed photoelectric tracking the U.S.T.A. mucky-mucks found dense past all comprehending, found themselves totally simpatico on tennis’s exemption from stats-tracking regression.
Context
Both of the screen's hit phrases sit in one long paragraph of the Schtitt-courtship excursus. The career arc is given in a parenthesis — "come back to tennis, and later film, from a background in hard-core-math-based optical science" — and the man himself is tagged by vocation: "the tall A.E.C.-optics man (i.e. Incandenza)," the Atomic Energy Commission epithet carrying the weapons-optics phase of the biography that roster scene 020 gives in full. Note also how the two men met: a U.S.T.A. convention "on photoelectric line-judging" (pp. 81-82, just before the quoted span), with JOI contributing a "consulting report on high-speed photoelectric tracking" — the optics career and the tennis career crossing in apparatus before they cross in a hilltop academy. The doubled construction "was that Schtitt, like the founder himself (…), was that Schtitt approached" is quoted as written.