the Fresno case: the survivor type is a grim machine
It’s possible that the only jr. tennis players who can win their way to the top and stay there without going bats are the ones who are already bats, or else who seem to be just grim machines à la John Wayne. Wayne’s sitting low on his spine in the dining hall with the other Canadian kids, watching the screen and squeezing a ball without any readable expression.
Context
The chapter's grim thesis about who survives the machine: only the already-cracked or "just grim machines à la John Wayne." And there's Wayne, embodying it — "sitting low on his spine... squeezing a ball without any readable expression," a body that keeps working precisely because there's no inhabiting self to break. The academy's warning cuts both ways: reach the top with too much self and you go the way of Clipperton and Fresno; reach it as a grim expressionless machine and you survive, but as the undead instrument Schacht saw in him. Neither is quite a person who made it.