Tennis Quote of the Day: "The most beautiful sport there is . . .

"I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that weird mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables . . . a net . . . two players in fixed positions . . .  angle, depth, pace, spin . . . And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables  . . .  height over the net . . . player's body position, grip on the racket, height of backswing and angle of racket face, as well as the 3-D coordinates which the racket face moves . . .  the ball on the strings . . . The tree of variables and determinants branches out and out, on and on, and then on much further when the opponent's own position and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he's sent to you to hit are factored in. No silicon-based RAM yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange; smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity . . . by fusing talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art."

--- David Foster Wallace, The String Theory, Esquire Magazine, July 1996