Orin's defection: could not hear himself think out there
Orin said the thing he thought he liked was he literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a cliché, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as he’d never escaped himself on the court
Context
Orin's turn from tennis to the punt gets its fullest gloss: what he says he liked was that "he literally could not hear himself think out there," the stadium's roar doing what the court never could. On the tennis court the self was inescapable — Schtitt's "true opponent" is always the player himself — but the crowd's coital roar delivers "his own self transcended as he'd never escaped himself on the court," an outward transcendence bought from thirty thousand voices instead of drilled inward. It is the anthology's dark mirror of the creed: the same drive to transcend the self that Schtitt's pedagogy trains inward, only Orin found the exit in spectacle rather than in the body's own discipline. (The fame-as-Substance and crowd-theology are entertainment-self's; landed here is the athletic body's failed self-transcendence.)