Port Washington: a quantumish plateaux-hop, the game grown a beak
made a kind of quantumish competitive plateaux-hop [...] this year it seems to have grown a beak. No longer fragile or abstracted-looking on court, he seems now almost to hit the corners without thinking about it.
Context
Hal's year-of-explosion named in the theme's core idiom: a "quantumish competitive plateaux-hop," the discontinuous jump up the developmental ladder E.T.A. organizes everything around. The game itself hasn't changed shape — it's "grown a beak," the same delicate spinny attrition now suddenly predatory, "almost to hit the corners without thinking about it." The plateaux-hop is precisely this: not new strokes but the old ones gone automatic and lethal, the body having crossed some threshold where thought drops out of the shot.