David Foster Wallace was considered one of the best and brightest American writers.  He was the son of academics.  His father, a professor of philosophy who graduated from Cornell University (and Ithaca, home of the Big Red was DFW’s birthplace).  His mother, an English professor.  He’d study both in college having an affinity for the written word as well as mathematics through philosophy.  He would pen, as much as one does that in the time of computers, his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and it would feature a tennis player at an academy modeled rather loosely on himself.

Late in the summer of 2008, David Foster Wallace, who had long suffered from depression and whose medications were suddenly failing, decided to take his own life by hanging himself.

The date of his suicide seems eerily relevant.  September 12, 2008.

On September 9, three days earlier, Roger Federer would fight off the demons that affected him that year, demons that lead to a semifinal loss in the Australian Open to Novak Djokovic, partly to blame, says Roger, to mono: demons that lead him to lose the French Open easily, once again, to Rafael Nadal, and then to surrender the crown of grass that had hung on his head for so long to his Spanish rival.

If Federer represented grace and power, then his rival, Nadal, represented power and power.  His muscly style of play, his tenacity that would not let him give up on points, his pinpoint precision to hit angles heretofore unseen.  They vexed Roger Federer.

David Foster Wallace would have understood this.   For, as much as he had one foot in hallowed ivy, a child of the university, an academic blue blood and a frat brat of the highest degree, there was one part of him that took that less traveled path, the one that lead him to junior tennis.  He was never so good that a pro career was possible, but never so bad that he didn’t know talent when he saw it.

He was a kind of Salieri to Federer’s Mozart.  In Federer, he saw a tennis entity so perfect, so beautiful, as if a Greek god had been bestowed to us, in our lifetime, and chose, as an expression of this beauty, to play tennis.  And, like Salieri, David Foster Wallace was mesmerized by this talent. He’d write lovingly and knowingly about Roger Federer in one of his few tennis articles titled “Roger Federer as a Religious Experience”.  It’s hard to say how important religion was to DFW, but even the most ardent atheists may believe in a transcendent experience here on Earth.  And, in Federer, a many more Germanic than Greek (perhaps Sampras has to wield that mantle), he saw what he believed was the embodiment of tennis perfection: part beauty, part menace.

DFW was something of a tennis historian.  Some of us remember the early 1980s, with Borg, Connors, and McEnroe.  This was old-school tennis in its death throes.  A revolution was brewing, a genie about to spew from its bottle never to be placed back again.  That revolution came in technology and in a man and a woman.

The technology was graphite.  Up until then, any attempt at technology met with tepid enthusiasm.  Steel racquets had been round for decades.  Rene Lacoste, not only a brilliant tennis player, but a brilliant inventor, had designed the most unique racquet of the 20th century: the Wilson T2000, wielded by one James Scott Connors who loved its springy nature, claiming it gave him untold powers.  Indeed, Connors was the 1970s man of steel.  Still, few followed in his footsteps.  Not Borg, not Evert, not Austin, not Navratilova, not McEnroe.  The benefits of steel weren’t so compelling that any of them were willing to abandon classic wood.

But in 1982, graphite was starting to make headway.  Mats Wilander would uphold Swedish dominance at the French and win his first title on the dirt of Roland Garros over Argentine veteran, Guillermo Vilas.  He would win with a graphite racquet.  So instrumental was graphite in the revolution of tennis that a mere two years later, in 1984, nearly everyone, even for a brief moment, Jimmy Connors, switched to graphite.  McEnroe, Evert, Connors all switched.  It may have been telling that in his lowest moment, Borg retired, never to seriously return, never to know whether he would embrace the graphite technology.  He already despised the lights at Flushing Meadows, claiming his eyes could not adjust to the harshness of the spotlight.

Many would argue that Bjorn Borg changed tennis.  His two-handed backhand.  His heavy topspin, as if topspin had not existed before Borg.  But, in a sense, it hadn’t.  Although the traditional Europeans were the last bastion of topspin, tennis was dominated by the Australians first and the Americans second.  And grass was the surface of choice.  Strange given the maintenance nightmare that grass is, but perhaps indicative of a time when country clubs lavished fortunes on a surface so fragile as grass.  An example of man trying to tame nature, one imagines.

No, it wasn’t Borg.  It was Ivan Lendl.  Borg was icy, emotionally reserved, but he had 1970s matinee good looks, blond hair, flowing down restrained only by a Fila headband.  The girls screamed for him.  Ivan Lendl, by contrast, had sunken eyes, dark hair, a surly demeanor, and East European looks that made him, by jingoistic American standards, slight inbred-looking.  Pundits claimed Lendl was just another Borg, but he wasn’t.

Lendl was smart, as tennis players go, and meticulous.  When most tennis players did all their preparations on court, Lendl began to worry about his diet.  Commentators fretted he had lost too much weight when he started this.  He wanted to maintain fastidious control.  He was the first player to regularly invite aspiring juniors to hit with him.  He was the first player to do off-court training (Martina was doing the same among women at roughly the same time).  He was the first to hire a master stringer to get the balance of his racquet perfect.  He was the first to change his racquets after every ball change.

Lendl would hire the men that laid down the courts at the US Open to lay down the exact same courts at his Greenwich, Connecticut home.  He wanted to make sure everything was pitch-perfect.  He would get lefties to serve a foot or two inside the baseline to emulate McEnroe’s serve.

About the only thing Lendl didn’t work on was his mental toughness.  It’s easy to dismiss the mental side of the game, and it took a long time for Lendl to play a final where he played his best tennis.  He had reached final after final with no result.  He lost in the finals of the 1981 French Open to Borg.  He lost in 1982 and 1983 to Connors at the US Open.  He lost in the 1983 Australian Open to Mats Wilander.  It would take until his fifth try, the 1984 French Open, that Lendl would win his first Slam, and much of it was due to McEnroe’s serve going wayward in the final sets.  Had McEnroe’s serve been humming, there’s no doubt that McEnroe would have hoisted the trophy.  Lendl hung in just tough enough to win that very first Slam.

Today’s players have Lendl to thank for their modern style of play.  Nearly every player switches racquets at changeovers, most notably, Roger Federer himself.  Federer invites juniors to hit with him in Dubai and even journeymen pros of the left-handed variety.

Federer addressed the one area that Lendl didn’t work on: his mental attitude.  Federer has constantly beamed positive confidence, bordering on arrogance.  None of that gracious British humility for  him.  British critics have often blamed Henman’s lack of big success on being a touch too nice.  Federer is nice as well, but he always believes he can beat anyone at any time.

Today’s players prepare for any shot.  It used to be said that you were born with touch.  Lendl was not the most graceful hitter.  He managed to make himself into an adequately good volleyer, an amazing feat given how rarely players try to add a major piece to their game.  But the drop volley?  As hideous as can be.  Although there are now players who have long enjoyed the drop shot: Djokovic and Murray come to mind, a great a talent as Federer now uses it quite a bit more in his old age.  A shot he used to disdain has now become part of his arsenal.  But more importantly, many other players now see the drop shot as just another shot.  Much like the rarely seen backhand overhead, the drop shot is a shot that needs to be mastered.

Everyone marvels at how much fight Rafael Nadal has.  He chases after every shot.  It’s not to say that other pros don’t do the same.  Surely, they run too.  But Nadal is so quick, so skillful, that he reaches more shots than most players, and when he’s there, he his amazing shots.  It seems unfair, after barely reaching the ball, that he can still hit a winner.  Some only see him getting to the ball as his biggest strength.  While that’s half the story, the other half is hitting an impossible ball at an impossible angle.  People forget Nadal still has to hit the ball.  If he reached every ball and hit it in the net, few would marvel at how he “never gives up”.  Never giving up, you see, includes making the shot once you get there.

But what’s equally remarkable, if not more so, is Nadal’s ability to handle any kind of ball.  Hit a high looper and make Nadal hit shots around shoulder height.  No problem.  Andy Roddick, a man that lacks anywhere near the talent of Federer or Nadal (or their athleticism, to be frank), is as fiercely intelligent as any player.  His model good looks and his wife’s model good looks (because she is, after all, a model).  Apparently both Mr. Roddick and the Mrs. are both very bright, very beautiful individuals.  Andy Roddick tried a different strategy against Nadal.  Roddick, who has tried a dozen different things against Federer (most of them failures), decided to spin the ball up high.  He wanted to buy himself more time.  It’s just that high balls are Nadal’s game, and he can hit winners off balls that height.

And it’s not like low balls bother Nadal either.  Witness being a two-time finalist at Wimbledon and winning it twice.  Andy Murray rose to the top of the game because he knew many players get into a rhythm.  The machismo of Fernando Gonzalez (who all but disappeared this year after a respectably good 2009) is just such a man.  He never found a ball he didn’t want to bash the heck out of.  Murray would junk up the balls.  Slice, hard shot, high shot.  Eventually, other players caught on, and learned how to deal with his junk, and eventually Murray caught on too, trying to limit how much pushing he does.

The point is, the best pros work long and hard at the most obscure shots.  Federer might hit half a dozen tweeners in a year, tops, and yet he practices it like he will hit it every other game in a match.  These pros hit hundreds of forehands, backhands, serves.  But it’s the time they devote to the unusual shot, the drop shot off the drop shot, the volley lob off the response to a drop shot, the behind the back overhead slap.  The overhead off an overhead.

Not only do they spend time working on weird scenarios that they may see once in 2 months, they also work on balance, running.  With pros able to hit winners from any corner, footspeed is king.  You have to get to the ball no matter where it’s hit.  McEnroe would never have survived in today’s game.  Maybe his talent would have let him do magic against today’s players, but the killer is footspeed.  Today’s players who have had him hitting off his heels every single shot, and that’s if he could even reach the ball.  Lendl was able to beat McEnroe by making him stretch for balls.  And he only did that sparingly.  With pros like Soderling, McEnroe would be seeing balls whizz by.

If Lendl was the godfather of modern tennis, then Federer is his worthy successor, pushing the concepts Lendl put down back in the early 1980s to the stratosphere.  One can only imagine what today’s early teens might do to change the game once again.  The game is so physical, so quick, so skilled, it’s hard to see where we’re heading next.  Will players begin hitting all their shots as swinging volleys to rob time from their opponents?

DFW was savvy enough to credit Lendl as being the father of modern tennis, and prescient enough to see Roger Federer take those original theories and extend them in ways both beautiful and awesome.  He may have picked the day of his death deliberately.  For as much pain as he was in, and as much as he loved writing, he may have loved tennis as much.  And to see Federer, a man that struggled as much as a great player struggles (which is fractionally as much struggle as DFW), get a victory over an up-and-comer (in Andy Murray), that must have given a brief respite to the despair.  And although he chose to leave this Earth, he can savor the moments of a genius on (and off) the court staring defeat and triumph and treating the two impostors just the same, and in his own self-defeat feel a pang of triumph.