James Incandenza woos Schtitt to E.T.A.: the meeting of tennis minds

pivotal · B.S. 1989 (first meeting) → ~B.S. 1997 (hire, at E.T.A.'s founding)

• When: first meeting B.S. 1989 (U.S.T.A. convention); hire at E.T.A.'s founding, "the moment the Academy's hilltop was shaved flat"
• What: JOI — himself an ex-optics man who "approached competitive tennis more like a pure mathematician than a technician" — "wooed fiercely" and "just about begged" Schtitt to come aboard at E.T.A.'s founding, over deLint/statistician objections about the riding-crop reputation. The two had found themselves "totally simpatico" at a B.S. 1989 convention: Schtitt, whose formal-math knowledge is "about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner," nonetheless knew real tennis was about "not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty" — an aleatory, expansive "Cantorian" continuum of infinities of move and response, "mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained." (JOI would call it "Extra-Linear Dynamics.") deLint, the hands-on stats wonk, is Schtitt's standing reductive foil here.