Schtitt & Mario's walk: tennis as a tragic enterprise

The creed's tragic hinge: the limits you drill to transcend are "the animating limits" that "make the game possible in the first place," so to succeed is to destroy the thing that made success mean anything — "to be killed and mourned, over and over again." This is why the regimen is sad as well as beautiful; the body's whole project is a self-vanquishing that can never be finished, the athlete perpetually at war with the self he needs. It is the doctrine that makes sense of every plateau-trapped, goal-reached casualty the anthology will catalog.