“If you’ve never seen the young man play live,” David Foster Wallace once wrote about Roger Federer, “and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the ‘06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament’s press bus drivers describes as a ‘bloody near-religious experience.’”
In the aforementioned piece, called “Roger Federer as Religious Experience”, Wallace, in a single sentence, sums up the appeal of any sport: “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty.”
This beauty he writes of is not erotic nor supernatural nor necessarily even aesthetic, but rather, according to Wallace, “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.”
Taking this reconciliation as the true goal, and Fe...
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