Federer and the Snap.

Image: Roger Federer conducting a follow-through by Rob Tringali/Sports Chrome

I always thought that dynamic sportswriting was about verbs: the action word, the word of being, the beating heart of a great idea.

Today I learnt that a master writer can craft nouns and adjectives to create images of power and movement.

Consider the following extract from David Foster Wallace's 2006 NY Times article about Federer:

A top athlete’s beauty is next to impossible to describe directly. Or to evoke. Federer’s forehand is a great liquid whip, his backhand a one-hander that he can drive flat, load with topspin, or slice — the slice with such snap that the ball turns shapes in the air and skids on the grass to maybe ankle height. His serve has world-class pace and a degree of placement and variety no one else comes close to; the service motion is lithe and uneccentric, distinctive (on TV) only in a certain eel-like all-body snap at the moment of impact. His anticipation and court sense are otherworldly, and his footwork is the best in the game — as a child, he was also a soccer prodigy. All this is true, and yet none of it really explains anything or evokes the experience of watching this man play. Of witnessing, firsthand, the beauty and genius of his game. You more have to come at the aesthetic stuff obliquely, to talk around it, or — as Aquinas did with his own ineffable subject — to try to define it in terms of what it is not.

A trainee who was a former Olympic boxer read the passage today. I asked him what he thought. He said, 'Well, that's Federer. I've seen him play... '

I asked him how did the passage create such an arresting image of a tennis player. He underlined the following phrases :

a great liquid whip

the slice with such snap

the ball turns shapes

uneccentric, distinctive

a certain eel-like all-body snap

the beauty and genius of his game...

We spent the next twenty minutes discussing juxtapositions of 'great' and 'liquid'; 'uneccentric' and 'distinctive'. We explored the sound of a 'snap' as the trainee demonstrated a right hook that crackled through the air. We considered the impact of a ball 'turning' shapes and considered the impotence of another verb such as 'changing' shapes. We discovered how the nouns turned actions into objects with the potent and unexpected motion of 'whip' and 'snap'. We realised how the passage describes 'the beauty and genius' of movement that becomes 'the beauty and genius of his game'. What is his game? Playing Tennis? Strategy? Winning? Revelling in divine powers?

I shared the passage with the trainee to convince him he does not need to apologise for rarely reading books. I said:

'Read great writing. Read powerful writing. Explore deep ideas. Don't waste time reading what you think you should read, read what you desire. Read what you can't put down. That's how you learn to write. What is great writing anyway? It is saying something worthwhile in a way that your reader will never forget, let alone dare to disregard.'