Most sought-after Big Buddy; the plateaux / mastery teaching to Little Buddies

texture · YDAU

• When: YDAU (a challenge-day afternoon, scene 036)
• What: Despite the silence, Wayne is "the most sought-after Big Buddy at E.T.A." — you have to apply for him by random drawing. In a rare extended speaking role he coaches a knot of Little Buddies (via LaMont Chu's relay off index cards) on the doctrine of tennis mastery: progress comes not through talent but temperament, in a series of "plateaux" (he corrects the spelling aloud, "With an X. Plateaux."), each reached only by frustrating, humble, repetitive slog; the players who fail are the Despairing type and the Obsessive type, who overworks himself into chronic injury. The kids "all want to know how Wayne does it, #2 continentally in 18's at just seventeen."