A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace Page B
Authors: David Foster Wallace
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acceptance of
things as they actually were, on-court. I won a lot. At twelve, I began getting entry to tournaments beyond Philo and Champaign
and Danville. I was driven by my parents or by the folks of Gil Antitoi, son of a Canadian-history professor from Urbana,
to events like the Central Illinois Open in Decatur, a town built and owned by the A. E. Staley processing concern and so
awash in the stink of roasting corn that kids would play with bandannas tied over their mouths and noses; like the Western
Closed Qualifier on the ISU campus in Normal; like the McDonald’s Junior Open in the serious corn town of Galesburg, way out
west by the River; like the Prairie State Open in Pekin, insurance hub and home of Caterpillar Tractor; like the Midwest Junior
Clay Courts at a chichi private club in Peoria’s pale version of Scarsdale.
Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a
blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields
and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth’s curve, and the only part
of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid’s geometric relation to the distant church
spire at Combray), riding in station wagons’ backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets. I got steadily better; Antitoi,
unfairly assisted by an early puberty, got radically better.
By the time we were fourteen, Gil Antitoi and I were the Central Illinois cream of our age bracket, usually seeded one and
two at area tournaments, able to beat all but a couple of even the kids from the Chicago suburbs who, together with a contingent
from Grosse Pointe MI, usually dominated the Western regional rankings. That summer the best fourteen-year-old in the nation
was a Chicago kid, Bruce Brescia (whose penchant for floppy white tennis hats, low socks with bunnytails at the heel, and
lurid pastel sweater vests testified to proclivities that wouldn’t dawn on me for several more years), but Brescia and his
henchman, Mark Mees of Zanesville OH, never bothered to play anything but the Midwestern Clays and some indoor events in Cook
County, being too busy jetting off to like the Pacific Hardcourts in Ventura and Junior Wimbledon and all that. I played Brescia
just once, in the quarters of an indoor thing at the Rosemont Horizon in 1977, and the results were not pretty. Antitoi actually
got a set off Mees in the national Qualifiers one year. Neither Brescia nor Mees ever turned pro; I don’t know what happened
to either of them after eighteen.
Antitoi and I ranged over the exact same competitive territory; he was my friend and foe and bane. Though I’d started playing
two years before he, he was bigger, quicker, and basically better than I by about age thirteen, and I was soon losing to him
in the finals of just about every tournament I played. So different were our appearances and approaches and general gestalts
that we had something of an epic rivalry from ’74 through ’77. I had gotten so prescient at using stats, surface, sun, gusts,
and a kind of stoic cheer that I was regarded as a physical savant, a medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever,
sending back moonballs baroque with spin. Antitoi, uncomplicated from the get-go, hit the everliving shit out of every round
object that came within his ambit, aiming always for one of two backcourt corners. He was a Slugger; I was a Slug. When he
was “on,” i.e. having a good day, he varnished the court with me. When he wasn’t at his best (and the countless hours I and
David Saboe from Bloomington and Kirk Riehagen and Steve Cassil of Danville spent in meditation and seminar on just what variables
of diet, sleep, romance, car ride, and even sock-color factored into the equation of
things as they actually were, on-court. I won a lot. At twelve, I began getting entry to tournaments beyond Philo and Champaign
and Danville. I was driven by my parents or by the folks of Gil Antitoi, son of a Canadian-history professor from Urbana,
to events like the Central Illinois Open in Decatur, a town built and owned by the A. E. Staley processing concern and so
awash in the stink of roasting corn that kids would play with bandannas tied over their mouths and noses; like the Western
Closed Qualifier on the ISU campus in Normal; like the McDonald’s Junior Open in the serious corn town of Galesburg, way out
west by the River; like the Prairie State Open in Pekin, insurance hub and home of Caterpillar Tractor; like the Midwest Junior
Clay Courts at a chichi private club in Peoria’s pale version of Scarsdale.
Over the next four summers I got to see way more of the state than is normal or healthy, albeit most of this seeing was a
blur of travel and crops, looking between nod-outs at sunrises abrupt and terribly candent over the crease between fields
and sky (plus you could see any town you were aimed at the very moment it came around the earth’s curve, and the only part
of Proust that really moved me in college was the early description of the kid’s geometric relation to the distant church
spire at Combray), riding in station wagons’ backseats through Saturday dawns and Sunday sunsets. I got steadily better; Antitoi,
unfairly assisted by an early puberty, got radically better.
By the time we were fourteen, Gil Antitoi and I were the Central Illinois cream of our age bracket, usually seeded one and
two at area tournaments, able to beat all but a couple of even the kids from the Chicago suburbs who, together with a contingent
from Grosse Pointe MI, usually dominated the Western regional rankings. That summer the best fourteen-year-old in the nation
was a Chicago kid, Bruce Brescia (whose penchant for floppy white tennis hats, low socks with bunnytails at the heel, and
lurid pastel sweater vests testified to proclivities that wouldn’t dawn on me for several more years), but Brescia and his
henchman, Mark Mees of Zanesville OH, never bothered to play anything but the Midwestern Clays and some indoor events in Cook
County, being too busy jetting off to like the Pacific Hardcourts in Ventura and Junior Wimbledon and all that. I played Brescia
just once, in the quarters of an indoor thing at the Rosemont Horizon in 1977, and the results were not pretty. Antitoi actually
got a set off Mees in the national Qualifiers one year. Neither Brescia nor Mees ever turned pro; I don’t know what happened
to either of them after eighteen.
Antitoi and I ranged over the exact same competitive territory; he was my friend and foe and bane. Though I’d started playing
two years before he, he was bigger, quicker, and basically better than I by about age thirteen, and I was soon losing to him
in the finals of just about every tournament I played. So different were our appearances and approaches and general gestalts
that we had something of an epic rivalry from ’74 through ’77. I had gotten so prescient at using stats, surface, sun, gusts,
and a kind of stoic cheer that I was regarded as a physical savant, a medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever,
sending back moonballs baroque with spin. Antitoi, uncomplicated from the get-go, hit the everliving shit out of every round
object that came within his ambit, aiming always for one of two backcourt corners. He was a Slugger; I was a Slug. When he
was “on,” i.e. having a good day, he varnished the court with me. When he wasn’t at his best (and the countless hours I and
David Saboe from Bloomington and Kirk Riehagen and Steve Cassil of Danville spent in meditation and seminar on just what variables
of diet, sleep, romance, car ride, and even sock-color factored into the equation of
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