[HN Gopher] How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (1994) [pdf]
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How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart (1994) [pdf]
Author : thomasjbevan
Score : 38 points
Date : 2021-06-21 07:01 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (sites.psu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (sites.psu.edu)
| mewse-hn wrote:
| This piece has always stuck with me for describing how some
| champion athletes succeed because of their lack of introspection
| rather than in spite of it.
| cafard wrote:
| My recollection is that Bill Bradley's _A Sense of Where You Are_
| wasn 't bad. But I must have read it forty-odd years ago, and
| don't remember whether he had a ghost-writer.
| noumenized wrote:
| This is one of my favourite essays because it completely changed
| the way I thought about my own skills. Namely, it taught me that
| a good way to evaluate my own skills is to examine the gap that
| exists between my skillfulness in some given field and the
| skillfulness of people who are not in that field or are novices
| within it.
|
| 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.
| JadeNB wrote:
| Because I find the title gives no indication what to expect, the
| author is David Foster Wallace, and here's the first paragraph:
|
| > 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.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| But DFW writes for himself _by doing what he 's demanding_:
| exposing his consciousness, his self-commentary, his inner
| life.
|
| 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.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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.
| GavinMcG wrote:
| It sounds as though "just mean" is an obvious impeachment
| in your view, and if your position is that we shouldn't
| write and publish mean things, then...well, that's fair.
|
| I'll agree it's mean. But in many ways I think the piece
| teaches worthwhile lessons by being very specific, which
| may also be excessively personal. For example, the novel
| idea of the author occupying a reality that "is not just
| un- but anti-real" doesn't land without the preceding
| litany of cliches. That sets up the next couple pages,
| which asks how we should read this sort of unreliable
| narrator, and proposes the explanation that maybe she's
| just _that stupid_. You objected to this--the "frontal
| lobe activity" bit--but so did DFW, rejecting that
| explanation and calling it "literally incredible" then
| proving it with examples.
|
| I don't think that arc makes much sense in the abstract.
| And the specificity is even more necessary in the next
| move, from page 148 to 151, making the larger point about
| the depth and potential that existed in her specific story.
| And that, of course, gives us a grounding to consider the
| broader questions: DFW acknowledges that "neither Austin
| nor her book is unique" and turns to the central question:
| _why_ the fact that athletes are "stunningly inarticulate"
| is "always so bitterly disappointing," which _is_ about the
| genre.
|
| The conclusion--the last four paragraphs of the piece--
| isn't just dusting over the meanness. The possibilities
| discussed on the last page are real ones and also deeply
| troubling to intelligent people, DFW included, who derive a
| lot of self-worth from their "interior struggle."
| handrous wrote:
| Maybe it's wrong, but highly-regarded authors writing
| _really_ mean reviews of work they consider embarrassingly
| (for the author of the work under review, had they any
| shame and the good sense not to subject the public to this,
| which clearly they do not, is the usual implication or
| outright statement of the review) terrible or highly over-
| rated is practically a literary genre of its own. This
| hardly stands alone, and is a continuation of a time-
| honored (if, again, maybe wrong, or bad, or what have you)
| tradition.
|
| ... in fact, much of the tone of writing on the early and
| mid-period Web was pretty similar, including some that was
| among the most well-known, and strong backlash against that
| in favor of gentler writing has only come in the last
| decade or so. Simply common and normal, hardly meriting
| comment, then. Perhaps humanity has recently experienced a
| great moral leap forward.
| tyre wrote:
| > it's hard to imagine a writer who writes more for himself
| than DFW
|
| 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.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > 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.
| telesilla wrote:
| >He is entirely himself and delivers on that product
|
| 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-.
| ..
| aasasd wrote:
| The essay in fact makes one salient point: if athletes' life
| stories and interviews are often unbelievably vapid, perhaps
| it's because athletes don't have much of a mind for anything
| beyond perfecting one thing that they do well. Specifically
| they don't do much self-reflection in poetic and witty terms.
|
| 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.
| whydoineedthis wrote:
| why is this on hackernews? its just a popular author complaining
| about a book he didn't like, co-written by a sports person he did
| like. Who cares? Certainly it's not tech related news.
| sbelskie wrote:
| "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting.
| That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to
| reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that
| gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
| jldl805 wrote:
| Know how I can tell you didn't finish it?
| stan_rogers wrote:
| How? Please enlighten me. I know that there are people who
| rather like DFW's navel-gazing and projection, but there's
| nothing of substance in it otherwise. At all.
| cgh wrote:
| Thanks for submitting this. I've read a few athletes'
| autobiographies and was always let down by the banality of the
| prose and the lack of insight. A good example is Lynn Hill's
| "Climbing Free: My Life In The Vertical World". Even the title is
| dull. Lynn Hill is surely one of the most extraordinary athletes
| to ever live, and yet her book reads like ghost-written ad copy.
| DFW's conclusion at the end of this piece offers some reasoning
| behind this. It's kind of incredible and I'll be thinking about
| it for a while.
| markdjacobsen wrote:
| If you're looking for good climbing autobiographies, try Tommy
| Caldwell's "Push" or Dierdre Wolownick's "The Sharp End of
| Life." Caldwell's book is well-written and shows deep insight,
| perhaps due to the severe hardship he experienced. If you liked
| "The Dawn Wall" (one of my favorite films), you'll like the
| book.
|
| 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.
| songeater wrote:
| or Anatol Boukreev: "Above the Clouds: The Diaries of a High-
| Altitude Mountaineer"
| biggieshellz wrote:
| I think the author misses the point.
|
| 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.
| w0de0 wrote:
| With respect, I think you rather missed his point. He is not
| making an argument that "Tracy Austin is really that boring,"
| though he does set the reader up for this thought, so that he
| can playfully turn on it on the way to his conclusion.
|
| 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.
| hedon1 wrote:
| Here is some data to support the assertion that nothing is going
| through their head during their performance:
| https://sports.ndtv.com/football/neymar-s-brain-on-auto-pilo...
|
| "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."
| xwdv wrote:
| More machine than man
| shuntress wrote:
| It's the opposite of "choking".
|
| 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.
| hackeraccount wrote:
| That reminds me of a fairly common place observation about
| combat pilots in world war II. Flight experience was necessary
| but not sufficient - the most successful fighter pilots were so
| good that flying was largely an after thought but there were a
| large number of very good pilots who - whatever they wanted to
| happen - would use their flying abilities to stay out of
| trouble and not much else.
|
| 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.
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