the supine morning: the sport handed over as a life-creed

One of Hal's first reading-memories is a church announcement-board off the Weston street, "the letters all spaced far out," offering the sport back to him as a philosophy of living. It's the tennis-as-fate doctrine at its most banal and public — the game not as a thing you do but as the shape existence supposedly takes, serve-and-win — pressed on a child before he can weigh it. The academy's whole metaphysics, pre-installed on a slotted plastic sign.