the garage gospel: a tennis ball is the ultimate body
Jim, a tennis ball is the ultimate body. Perfectly round. Even distribution of mass. But empty inside, utterly, a vacuum. Susceptible to whim, spin, to force—used well or poorly. It will reflect your own character. Characterless itself. Pure potential.
Context
The creed's central object-lesson: "a tennis ball is the ultimate body" — perfect, evenly massed, "but empty inside, utterly, a vacuum," and therefore "pure potential" that "will reflect your own character." The ball is the body-doctrine's purest specimen because it is characterless and so shows only what is done to it. The father tears one open along the seam to prove it hollow, and the moral is the athlete's: the body, like the ball, is a susceptible vacuum, its worth wholly a function of the force and touch applied to it, "used well or poorly."