A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again Read Free

chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes
     what football is to infantry and attrition.
    Tennis-wise, I had two preternatural gifts to compensate for not much physical talent. Make that three. The first was that
     I always sweated so much that I stayed fairly ventilated in all weathers. Oversweating seems an ambivalent blessing, and it
     didn’t exactly do wonders for my social life in high school, but it meant I could play for hours on a Turkish-bath July day
     and not flag a bit so long as I drank water and ate salty stuff between matches. I always looked like a drowned man by about
     game four, but I didn’t cramp, vomit, or pass out, unlike the gleaming Peoria kids whose hair never even lost its part right
     up until their eyes rolled up in their heads and they pitched forward onto the shimmering concrete. A bigger asset still was
     that I was extremely comfortable inside straight lines. None of the odd geometric claustrophobia that turns some gifted juniors
     into skittish zoo animals after a while. I found I felt best physically enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved
     corners. This was environmental. Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid: nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest,
     fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally
     in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest at
     Urbana, plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north. In the late morning,
     the Salerno guy’s statue had a squat black shadow-arm against grass dense enough to putt on; in the evening the sun galvanized
     his left profile and cast his arm’s accusing shadow out to the right, bent at the angle of a stick in a pond. At college it
     suddenly occurred to me during a quiz that the differential between the direction the statue’s hand pointed and the arc of
     its shadow’s rotation was first-order. Anyway, most of my memories of childhood—whether of furrowed acreage, or of a harvester’s
     sentry duty along RR104W, or of the play of sharp shadows against the Legion Hall softball field’s dusk—I could now reconstruct
     on demand with an edge and protractor.
    I liked the sharp intercourse of straight lines more than the other kids I grew up with. I think this is because they were
     natives, whereas I was an infantile transplant from Ithaca, where my dad had Ph.D.’d. So I’d known, even horizontally and semiconsciously
     as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I’m pretty sure I kept the amorphous
     mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children
     I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township’s planar
     layout, prized nothing crisp. (Except why do I think it significant that so many of them wound up in the military, performing
     smart right-faces in razor-creased dress blues?)
    Unless you’re one of those rare mutant virtuosos of raw force, you’ll find that competitive tennis, like money pool, requires
     geometric thinking, the ability to calculate not merely your own angles but the angles of response to your angles. Because
     the expansion of response-possibilities is quadratic, you are required to think
n
shots ahead, where
n
is a hyperbolic function limited by the sinh of opponent’s talent and the cosh of the number of shots in the rally so far
     (roughly). I was good at this. What made me for a while near-great was that I could also admit the differential complication
     of wind into my calculations; I could think and play octacally. For the wind put curves in the lines and transformed the game
     into 3-space. Wind did massive damage to many Central Illinois junior players, particularly in the