Wallace’s aim appears to be to demonstrate that his success on the tennis court was largely accidental – less a reward for talent and perseverance than the unforeseeable outcome of freakish circumstance.īecause of where he grew up – the Illinois Corn Belt – Wallace felt at home “inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids”. “Derivative Sport” is unlike any other sporting memoir you’ll encounter: it combines a (somewhat sketchy) account of life on the junior circuit with voluminous divagations into climate, topography and geometry. He wrote about the experience in “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”, the first – and most challenging – of the five essays in this volume. Between the ages of 12 and 15, he competed in tournaments all over the Midwest, at one point achieving a regional ranking of 17. D avid Foster Wallace was, in his own estimation, “a near great junior tennis player”.
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