The fall and the verdict: "Yes, But He’ll Never Be Great."

pivotal · A.D. 1933, Tucson; he is "twelve or thirteen"

• When: "the A.D. year 1933, of the Great Bisbee Palm-Rot epidemic"; he was "your age... I was thirteen, and I’d started to play well, seriously, I was twelve or thirteen"
• What: A Tucson junior star (headline remembered as "TUCSON NATIVE QUALIFIES FOR NATIONAL JR CH’SHIPS"), he is playing an early-round local match against the pampered son of one of his father's clients when his father — who "never came once" to watch — appears for the client's sake and stands smoking in the frond-shade. Running down an unreachable drop-shot he could have conceded, the boy slips (on a widow, on frond pus — he never knows: "Something poisonous or infected, at any rate, unexpected and slick"), and comes down on both knees at a dead run, sliding from the service line to the net, leaving "twin tracks of brown red gray white like tire tracks of bodily gore," his knees ruined forever. The timing is the wound: the client had marveled ("Good godfrey Incandenza old trout but that lad of yours is good."), and the father's reply — delivered, the teller insists, only after the fall had already begun — was the verdict. "It’s a pivotal, it’s a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment, Jim." He is dragged off "like a boneless Christ, one man under each arm, feet dragging, eyes on the aether," his mother's knuckles between her teeth. [Attribution note: the entire event exists only inside his own 1960 monologue — a drinking man's telling, twenty-seven years after the fact, as printed.]