the grief-therapy call: the standard term is Tightening Up

Here the toenail joke docks directly onto real E.T.A. match play: the self-consciousness feeding on itself "is why Pemulis and Troeltsch always seem to let a lead slip away. The standard term is Tightening Up." Hal names the academy's diagnosis for the choke — the body that can't recover the unconscious groove once the mind has intruded — and applies it to his frozen clippers, "the unconsciousness to actually clip" now unreachable. The Zone and Tightening Up are the two poles of the tennis psyche, and the scene walks Hal from one to the other in real time.