[cf. “The String Theory”] …I’ve rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin’s 1992 Beyond Center Court: My Story, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow. This is a type of mass-market book—the sports-star-“with”-somebody autobiography—that I seem to have bought and read an awful lot of, with all sorts of ups and downs and ambivalence and embarrassment, usually putting these books under something more highbrow when I get to the register. I think Austin’s memoir has maybe finally broken my jones for the genre, though.

Here’s Beyond Center Court’s Austin on the first set of her final against Chris Evert at the 1979 US Open: “At 2–3, I broke Chris, then she broke me, and I broke her again, so we were at 4–4.” And on her epiphany after winning that final: “I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled.” [more]

…How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves a cliché as trite as “One ball at a time” or “Gotta concentrate here”, and mean it, and then do it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, clichés present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or falsehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not…Those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

…The real, many-veiled answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up the free throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all…What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash [that permanently ended her career at age 27], “I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it”, the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? Is someone stupid or shallow because she can say to herself that there’s nothing she can do about something bad and so she’d better accept it, and thereupon simply accept it with no more interior struggle? Or is that person maybe somehow natively wise and profound, enlightened in the childlike way some saints and monks are enlightened?

It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it—and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence.

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