the Clipperton Suite: the trophy is a little metal serving body
each U.S.T.A. trophy a marbled plastic base with a tall metal boy on top arched in mid-serve, looking rather like a wedding-cake groom with a very good outside slider.
Context
Clipperton's mantel of hardware renders the sport's whole reward system as a shelf of identical little bodies: every trophy topped by "a tall metal boy... arched in mid-serve," the institution's idea of achievement cast as a frozen service motion. The junior game promises a self and delivers a figurine — the body abstracted into a pose, mass-produced in brass, "a wedding-cake groom with a very good outside slider." Clipperton is "broke out in brass and plastic" and it means nothing, which is the entry's quiet point: the trophy-body and the real body have come completely apart.