B. J. Hollars at The Millions:
I might’ve stayed away from David Foster Wallace forever were it not for Coco Gauff, whose U.S. Open win last year stirred within me some need to try to fall back in love with tennis—not as a player, but as a literary spectator. Steering clear of the courts, I stuck close to the page, reading what I could of the sport (John McPhee’s Levels of the Game, and a slew of biographies on Arthur Ashe and Andre Agassi) before facing off with the man I’d been avoiding, whom John Jeremiah Sullivan hailed as “the greatest tennis writer of his generation.”
More here.