As a beginner jazz musician, I saw Pat Metheny in concert -- he killed, of course -- and afterwards, I asked him what he thought about when he played. His reply? "I don't think; I just play."
Clearly, Pat Metheny is not devoid of insight. He put in years and years of preparation so that when the time comes, he can go for it. If you asked him after the fact to analyze one of the improvised solos he played that night, he could write it out on manuscript and go through what he was doing harmonically and melodically at any given point. But improvising it live, in real time, is a different thing. And having the chord changes, the instrument mechanics, and so forth down to muscle memory doesn't make for a shallow player; it clears the way for operating on higher levels of abstraction like emotion, language, and motivic development.
Maybe Tracy Austin is really that boring. Or maybe she and her ghost writer focused on what people think they want to know about rather than where the depth really is. You want to really learn what makes a great athlete? Sit with them as they watch the game video afterwards and see how they analyze things. See how they translate those insights into practice, into actionable items that you can deploy at a moment's notice during a game.
Your analysis is a gesture towards his conclusion: "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."
Moreover, DFW speaks of the cliches evident in the internal narratives of athletic genius as, perhaps, perceived by their speakers as simple truths, imperatives to be acted on or ignored, not reflected on.
He also specifically calls out as foolish the idea that gifted athletes are dim, citing examples of technical analysis similar to the ones you've mentioned.
Finally, this piece is very specifically about the physical techne of athletes in relation to their internal and external narratives, which I, and I think DFW based on this piece, do not find of a kind with musical genius.
People who do, don't need fancy words or justifications, the proof is already in the pudding. Fetishizing language is the province of the thinker, the ponderer, the stay-at-home-and-read-er. Just like a seasoned pornography enthusiast, the shine of the base experience wears off.
"I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled."
“Brazilian superstar Neymar's brain activity while dancing past opponents is less than 10 percent the level of amateur players, suggesting he plays as if on auto-pilot, according to Japanese neurologists.”
If you are extremely comfortable doing something to the point that you can do so automatically, then actually thinking about it will be much less effective.
There were also a number of bad pilots who functioned as targets; taking so much time and concentration to merely keep the plane in the air that they didn't realize there was a killer behind them.
A popular culture reference shows up in this clip that's pretty good https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbecIBvR3mE
I've always thought that this phenomenon is what is being referred to when athletes talk about being in the zone.
Wolownick's book might be my favorite climbing memoir. Wolownick is Alex Honnold's mother, but she's not cashing in on his success; this is her own story about finally embracing her own life after years of self-sacrifice in an unhappy marriage. She is a writer first and foremost, and she tells a beautiful story about life. The climbing scenes are gripping and relatable because she is such an ordinary person--which makes her accomplishments all the more extraordinary.
> Because I am a long-time rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular, I've rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin's 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.
On further reading, wow, that's pretty savage. Sure seems disproportionate to me. For example, I wonder if you can be as outraged as DFW that:
> The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends.
as opposed to that allegiance being to the reader, whom she owes because, it seems, of the reader's interest in her:
> Obviously, a good commercial memoir's first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who's spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet.
In fact, as someone who has at times enjoyed DFW immensely, it's hard to imagine a writer who writes more for himself than DFW, so the complaint comes across as a bit off-base to me.
I was reminded of this essay when listening to Lewis Hamilton's interview for the ‘Beyond the Grid’ podcast. I vaguely dreaded this very prospect in advance, but Hamilton really shamelessly overshot my expectations, it's almost a Hollywood-esque story of perseverance by the whole family. Guess I'll stick with watching the man's pole laps, they're way more satisfying.
Also, that line ("The author's primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends") is unequivocally ironic. "Seems to be"? As though it's a surprise? DFW knew what he was doing. If anything the line is an indictment of his (and our) indignation at not getting access to Austin's consciousness and lived experience for the cost of a paperback.
I'm sure that there is some of the subtext you mention in it—this being DFW, I'm sure there's every kind of subtext imaginable in it—but I'd be more inclined to buy that it wasn't also a fully meant indictment of the author if it weren't part of a pages-long attack that, though it could surely be profitably directed at the genre, is also, to my mind excessively, personal. You can be ironic all you want, but "there's little sign in this narrator of the frontal-lobe activity required for outright deception" is just mean.
I don't think this is entirely true. He understands his job, as he'll admit in the middle of some essays.
Consider one of his more famous essays, "Consider the Lobster":
At one point:
> I should add that it appears to me unlikely that many readers of Gourmet wish to think about it, either, or to be queried about the morality of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 MLF, and thus to spend several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.
And later on:
> For those Gourmet readers who enjoy well-prepared and -presented meals involving beef, veal, lamb, pork,chicken, lobster, etc.: Do you think much about the (possible)moral status and (probable) suffering of the animals involved?
He's very specifically targeting the reader.
I think the common charge against Wallace is that he is very smart, which is fine, but he is so _obviously_ intelligent; so neurotically intelligent that he couldn't leave any stones unturned or examined. And that's inexcusable, since obviously anyone who writes as such must be fully up their own ass. His struggles with mental health and self-worth push back on that analysis.
Most importantly, I think, is that his job is to be those things. Anyone hiring Wallace _is_ paying for that work. He is entirely himself and delivers on that product. His disappointment in this autobiography is that it fails to deliver.
This, I think, is the point. I could not dream of accusing Wallace of not understanding his job. However, what he wrote was still for him; it was his vision of himself and the world around him, and if someone were to complain that it did not live up to their vision of him, then he—while doubtlessly adding that criticism to his inner monologue—would surely not have thought he should adjust his writing one whit because of it.
Here, though, he seems to be complaining that Austin isn't who Wallace expected her to be, not that she's not authentically herself. He seems to be complaining that she's shallow, while fully acknowledging that he's partaking of a genre that he knows does not demand or reward deep soul searching.
As on a simple thing such as a luxury cruise in "A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again":
"They’ll make certain of it. They’ll micromanage every iota of every pleasure-option so that not even the dreadful corrosive action of your adult consciousness and agency and dread can fuck up your fun. Your troublesome capacities for choice, error, regret, dissatisfaction, and despair will be removed from the equation. You will be able – finally, for once – to relax, the ads promise, because you will have no choice."
http://archive.harpers.org/1996/01/pdf/HarpersMagazine-1996-...
For a more technical one I can also recommend Sampras's Champion's Mind. An amazing tennis memoir.
My takeaway from the essay was not that athletes are vapid or unaware of how much more skilled they are than laymen or amateurs.
My takeaway is that when you're really good at something, to where you can say you're better than a lot of people at it, you're often not aware of exactly how good you are at it and may even see it as banal. Where other people might look at some skill you have and be blown away and wonder what it's like to be so good at something, you just recognize it as your default and unremarkable state.
An analogy I can think of is literacy. Many years ago, I taught myself literacy in a non-Latin script for a language that I had grown up speaking but had never actually learned how to write. Reading in a new script was incredibly slow at first, as I would literally have to sound out every individual letter in my head, and then manually put them together in my head to understand the word. A sentence would take me minutes to read. Over time, I would see words that I had read many times and I wouldn't need to sound out the letters in my head anymore, I would simply "recognize" the word: my brain would recognize the collection of letters as an image associated with a concept.
I realized that I had always done this with English and had never been aware of it. When I read English, I'm not really reading each word as a collection of individual letters; I'm reading each word as an image for lack of a better term that I can immediately associate with meaning in my head, and I think this is how most people read English.
How this is relevant to this essay is that if you were asked about your ability to do this, you would think it something completely banal and regular. You might not even have any particular comment to make, as you'd simply see your literacy as your personal status quo. You've spent most of your life actively training your skill of literacy and have attained mastery, but to you its...just reading. Suppose you talked to someone barely literate, or someone learning literacy in English, about this ability -- to them this ability would be much more impressive because the gap between their skill and your skill is much wider.
I think realizing this about yourself has all sorts of applications: confidence in your ability lets you experiment more or take action when you have less info or security on the outcome of your action. Realizing what comprises a given skill gap would help you teach others how to get to where you are in a way where you teach them at their level, not yours.
