the Feral Prodigy script: the Game is about managed fear
See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.
Context
The anthology's definition of the sport, and scene 130's whole thesis stated first here: "the Game is about managed fear," its object "to send from yourself what you hope will not return." Tennis is recast from athletic contest to a discipline of dread — the ball you hit away is the thing you fear, and mastery is the management of that fear rather than its absence. This is what the regimen is really conditioning: not strokes but a body's relation to fear, the plateaux and the mirrors all in service of learning to keep hitting into the terror.