Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays by David Foster Wallace Page A

apparently never occurring to Tracy Austin that a three-year-old hasn’t got enough awareness of choices to require any forcing. This was the child of a mom who’d spent the evening before Tracy’s birth hitting tennis balls to the family’s other four children, three of whom also ended up playing pro tennis. Many of the memoir’s recollections of Mrs. Austin seem almost Viennese in their repression—“My mother always made sure I behaved on court, but I never even considered acting up”—and downright creepy are some of the details Austin chooses in order to evince “how nonintense my tennis background really was”:
Everyone thinks every young tennis player is very one-dimensional, which just wasn’t true in my case. Until I was fourteen, I never played tennis on Monday… . My mother made sure I never put in seven straight days on the court. She didn’t go to the club on Mondays, so we never went there.
    It gets weirder. Later in the book’s childhood section, Austin discusses her “wonderful friendship” with a man from their country club who “set up … matches for me against unsuspecting foes in later years and … won a lot of money from his friends” and, as a token of friendship, “bought me a necklace with a T hanging on it. The T had fourteen diamonds on it.” She was apparently ten at this point. As the book’s now fully adult Austin analyzes the relationship, “He was a very wealthy criminal lawyer, and I didn’t have very much money. With all his gifts for me, he made me feel special.” What a guy. Regarding her de facto employment in what is technically known as sports hustling: “It was all in good fun.”
    In the subsequent section, Austin recalls a 1978 pro tournament in Japan that she hadn’t much wanted to enter:
It was just too far from home and I was tired from the travel grind. They kept offering me more and more money for an appearance fee—well over a hundred thousand dollars—but I said no. Finally, they offered to fly my whole family over. That did it. We went, and I won easily.
    Besides displaying an odd financial sense (she won’t come for $100,000+, but will come if they add a couple thousand in airfare?), Tracy Austin seems here unaware of the fact that, in the late Seventies, any player who accepted a guaranteed payment just for entering a tournament was in violation of a serious tour rule. The backstory here is that both genders’ player associations had outlawed these payments because they threatened both the real and the perceived integrity of pro tennis. A tournament that has paid some star player a hefty guarantee—wanting her in the draw because her celebrity will help increase ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, TV revenues, etc.—thereafter has an obvious stake in that player’s survival in the tournament, and so has an equally obvious interest in keeping her from getting upset by some lesser-known player in the early rounds, which, since matches’ linesmen and umpires are employed by the tournament, can lead to shady officiating. And has so led. Far stranger things than a marquee player’s receiving a suspicious number of favorable line calls have happened … though apparently somehow not in Tracy Austin’s experience.
    The naïveté on display throughout this memoir is doubly confusing. On the one hand, there’s little sign in this narrator of anything like the frontal-lobe activity required for outright deception. On the other, Austin’s ignorance of her sport’s grittier realities seems literally incredible. Random examples. When she sees a player “tank” a 1988 tournament match to make time for a lucrative appearance in a TV ad, Tracy “couldn’t believe it… . I had never played with anyone who threw a match before, so it took me a set and a half to realize what was happening.” This even though match-tanking had been widely and publicly reported as a dark consequence of skyrocketing exhibition and endorsement fees for at least the