Sport and Kinetic Beauty - David Foster Wallace

From 'Federer, Both Flesh and Not'  by David Foster Wallace (2006):

'Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty... The human beauty we're talking about here is a beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation with the fact of having a body...

There’s a great deal that’s bad about having a body. If this is not so obviously true that no one needs examples, we can just quickly mention pain, sores, odors, nausea, aging, gravity, sepsis, clumsiness, illness, limits — every last schism between our physical wills and our actual capacities. Can anyone doubt we need help being reconciled? Crave it? It’s your body that dies, after all.

 

There are wonderful things about having a body, too, obviously — it’s just that these things are much harder to feel and appreciate in real time. Rather like certain kinds of rare, peak-type sensuous epiphanies (“I’m so glad I have eyes to see this sunrise!” etc.), great athletes seem to catalyze our awareness of how glorious it is to touch and perceive, move through space, interact with matter. Granted, what great athletes can do with their bodies are things that the rest of us can only dream of. But these dreams are important — they make up for a lot.

 

Of course, in men’s sports no one ever talks about beauty or grace or the body. Men may profess their “love” of sports, but that love must always be cast and enacted in the symbology of war: elimination vs. advance, hierarchy of rank and standing, obsessive statistics, technical analysis, tribal and/or nationalist fervor, uniforms, mass noise, banners, chest-thumping, face-painting, etc. For reasons that are not well understood, war’s codes are safer for most of us than love’s'

 

(Wallace's comments can be applied to all sports, but here he was writing about tennis and Roger Federer in particular. Players pictured from the top: French 1920s stars Suzanne Lenglen and Rene Lacoste; Venus Williams and Roger Federer)

 

The full essay is included in 'String Theory: David Foster Wallace on tennis'

 

 

Andy Murray - tennis and running

Andy Murray is going head to head with Roger Federer in the Wimbledon  semi-final later today, and it will not be a walk in the park. In fact, in the course of  playing a game of tennis, both players will do a fair bit of running. For instance, to win the Australian Open earlier this year Novak Djokovic ran 16.52 km over 24 sets - an average of 688m per set (source)

The running is naturally in short intense bursts, so the running tennis players do in training will often feature sprint intervals. Andy Murray's former fitness trainer Jez Green has said: "Running 200m and 400m targets the relevant energy systems for tennis better than steady state longer runs so they will make you perform better and longer in specific match conditions".

Andy Murray at Tropical Park in 2008

Andy Murray regularly trains in the Winter in Florida, including track sessions at the Tropical Park Stadium in Olympia Heights (near Miami) and running on the beach. An  observer of one of his sessions on the track there in 2008 watched him doing  10 x 200m intervals in the heat, while a 2012 report mentions him doing 400m intervals on the beach.. By all accounts he's pretty fast,  reporting in 2012  that he has run 400m in 53 seconds.

Arthur Ashe - proper hero

'Arthur Ashe: more than a champion' is an excellent BBC documentary about the great tennis player (1943-1993). Obviously I knew about his iconic status as the first black man to win Wimbledon (though not the first black Wimbledon champion for as the programme mentioned, Althea Gibson won the women's championship as early as 1957).  The prejudice he faced growing up in Richmond, Virginia - where he was prevented from taking part in some segregated local tennis tournaments - reminded me of current debates about the legacy of the pro-slavery Confederacy in the US Civil War. It was enormously political significant that a statue of Ashe was placed on Monument Avenue in Richmond, alongside the statues of Confederate leaders. Only last  week, 'Black Lives Matter' was sprayed on a Confederate statue there amidst calls to take down the Confederate flag from public buildings following the recent racist massacre at a black church in Charleston.

Ashe and Connors at Wimbledon

I was less familiar with Ashe's role in the Association of Tennis Professionals, the union which helped shift the power from the tennis establishment towards players in early 1970s. Ashe's victory over Jimmy Connors at Wimbledon in 1975 had another significance in this respect, as Connors had refused to join the ATP's boycott of Wimbledon two years earlier, imposed in protest at the Yugoslavian player Nikola Pilić being banned from the tournament. Although he had to retire from tennis due to health issues - initially heart problems and later AIDS- Ashe remained active in many fields up until the end. For instance he was arrested in 1992 for protesting about the treatment of Haitian refugees, not long before his death.

I was also unaware of Ashe's role as a historian - I must check out his work, A Hard Road to Glory: a History of the African American Athlete since 1946.

Of course like most tennis players, Ashe incorporated running into his training. Here he is jogging in London on 19 June 1979 during the Wimbledon fortnight

View image | gettyimages.com

The documentary is available until July 25th 2015 on BBC iplayer