Orin's defection: delayed puberty broke his tennis spirit
he’d suffered athletically from the same delayed puberty that had compromised his father when Himself had been a junior player, and having boys he’d cleaned the clocks of at twelve and thirteen become now seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged and starting now to clean Orin’s own clock [...] this had sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit
Context
The body as the author of the athletic fate: Orin peaked at thirteen and then "delayed puberty" — the same that "compromised his father" — let boys he'd once dominated turn "seemingly overnight mannish and deep-chested and hairy-legged" and beat him. What the late-developing body did to his ranking, it did to his spirit: the physical betrayal "sucked some kind of competitive afflatus out of him, broken his tennis spirit." The scene will spend pages disputing whether puberty was the real cause, but the datum stands as the anthology's clearest case of the body deciding the career before the will gets a vote.