Reliving a Masterpiece: David Foster Wallace, Michael Joyce, and the Psychology of Tennis

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

Wimbledon is where I read it and I remember reading and I was like, what the f is this?

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Michael Joyce, do you know why I summoned you into this room today?

A little bit.

David Foster Wallace.

Yeah, yeah.

I've never done an episode like this where I'm like, let me talk to the subject of one of the greatest essays that has ever been written.

And I was just curious at the start, like, how often does this happen where someone wants to talk to you about David Foster Wallace?

You'd be surprised a lot.

Okay, so that actually does make sense to me.

It does make sense that I would be far from the only person who has wanted to find out the story behind a masterpiece of writing.

A masterpiece, by the way, that you don't need to have read in order to appreciate this episode.

Although I do think that you need to meet our pair of disparate and, as you will see, cosmically connected characters.

Because the subject of this piece, who is in studio with me today, is Michael Joyce, a pro-tennis player in the 90s whose relative anonymity is what drew the curiosity of the piece's author, the famously eccentric David Foster Wallace.

An elusive genius and cripplingly self-conscious critic, and a guy that the New York Times once posthumously called the best mind of his generation.

Wallace spent large portions of his life scrutinizing and playing one sport in particular,

as he discussed with Charlie Rose in 1997.

Do you still play tennis?

I do play tennis.

I no longer play competitively.

You played as a junior.

And you were competitive and good.

I was good.

I was not even very good.

I was was between good and very good.

I was good on a regional level.

And one of the things about writing the piece about Michael Joyce, who was 100th in the world and junior champion, is I really had to realize that there were a lot of levels beyond the level that I was on.

And that is where the relevant portion of this TV interview, which was ostensibly about Wallace's epic thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest, could have ended.

But no.

That essay for me, which I know you haven't asked me about in the entirety of that,

ended up, it's a very weird, and I'm surprised Esquire even bought it.

It ended up being way more autobiographical than it did.

It was supposed to start as a profile.

But it was about you.

Yeah.

Unfortunately, a lot of these, I think, end up being, I think so, too, as a couple of years.

And then, therefore, back to David.

Esquire ran Wallace's essay titled The String Theory 30 years ago now.

It remains the funniest and most transcendent examination of tennis that I, and apparently many other people Michael Joyce encounters, have ever read.

And so this week, in the middle of the U.S.

Open, where he has been busy coaching, Michael Joyce agreed to open up about what it was like to be scrutinized by the best writer of his generation,

and also about competing against the very best tennis players of his generation.

while clearly not being one of them.

All of which meant that the subject of this piece could finally scrutinize the author

what happens all the time some random guy will be like oh hey man like i got into tennis because of that david foster wallace yeah and you know i have people still every once in a while want me to sign the book and and different stuff and you know it's and then unfortunately when he you know when he died it like everything tripled you know it was like years later and then all of a sudden, after he passed away, I think it's when he started to become even more famous.

And that's when people started to reach out to me more and I'd hear about it even more.

And so it's pretty amazing to look back.

That was me through his story.

Right.

At age 22, being profiled by a man who would, I think, only posthumously become appreciated in full as maybe the greatest tennis writer.

Right.

You're in this collection of his works that I have been, as a fan of both sports and and writing, pretty obsessed with to the point where, like, you being here across from me is pretty cool.

It's crazy to think, even my life back then, and you know, we didn't have social media, we didn't have nothing like we have now.

And even when it came out, I was in England like a year later playing Wimbledon.

I had to have my parents go to their store and find it and read it.

Yes.

Wait, hold on.

We got to pause and start with that.

I'll tell you the whole story.

Yeah.

What do you remember about the first time you met David Foster Wall?

Well,

it's interesting because I had just started to do pretty well.

I think it was 1995.

Yes.

I got to the fourth round of Wimbledon.

Oh, that's such a brave shot to play from the American at such a moment.

And I just reached top 100 and then when I came home is

they have the tournaments like they do now like DC, Canadian Open, you know, leading up to U.S.

Open.

And I had to fly overnight like all the tennis players do and then play qualifying the next day in Canada, in Montreal.

And so I was playing like my first match.

There was only maybe a handful of people there.

And I remember it being really like warm, hot, like summer.

And I saw this guy kind of sitting like on the side with like leg warmers and like a snow cap, you know, like hippie-ish guy.

Cause you know, you're playing, you can kind of see who's around.

Not a ton of people to watch you and Dan Brock.

Right.

No, not at all.

And I kind of was like thinking, oh, it's, you know, quick thought, this guy's, what's this guy doing here in the middle of summer and dressed in winter clothes?

Yeah.

And I kept seeing the guy, but, but I didn't know who he was.

And then finally, after I qualified, he came up to me and he's like, hey, Michael, he's like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm doing this story on a young American tennis player who's really good, who's coming up.

At the time, American tennis was really big.

I mean, we had Agassiz and Sampras and Chang and Jim Currier.

Courier.

We had so many like superstar men.

Your generation.

I was, yeah, our generation was incredible.

Unbelievable.

Even I think my career high was 62.

And probably at 62, I was like the 10th best American.

Well, opposite of today.

Today.

It's getting better.

I just saw that there's four Americans top 20.

But if you look at like Roddick and Fish, like those guys were great players, but there was only a few of them for years.

At the time that David Foster Wils goes to visit you, there is sort of like this food chain.

There's so many options

on the menu for like up-and-coming slash great slash relatively anonymous Americans.

I remember him telling me there was three good American coming up.

It was myself, this guy Tommy Ho, who was a great player.

He had some injuries, but he won Kalamazoo when he was 15.

And then this other guy named Chris Woodruff, who was from Tennessee.

And we were all ranked around 80 coming up.

And he felt that I had like the best personality or something.

And he asked if I'd be willing to let him kind of just follow me around.

And I said, sure.

My coach was a really nice guy at the time.

He writes about him and their

Sam Aparicio, right?

And he became very close with Sam, but also like we went out to dinner a couple of times.

What's dinner with David Foster Wallace?

And this is funny.

I swear for the first two days, he wore the same thing because I remember these like socks that looked like leg warmers.

And he had the long hair and the like a do-rag you know right the bandana slash do-rag an iconic thing exactly later on later on I think when he approached me and everything Sam started to read that infinite jest like it had come out but again it wasn't like well known I took a look at it I'm like I'm I couldn't even I could do bicep curls with it approximately a zillion pages exactly I'm like where do I even stop

no interest one of the most towering works literally and figuratively of American fiction incidentally What happened is Details magazine had like contracted him to do this piece.

And then he had like a stipend or something.

Oh, yeah, the magazine.

Right.

As a former magazine writer,

he was expensive reports.

Exactly.

So he was going to get the most out of it.

So I actually got to the point where I actually liked going to dinner with him because he would take us to some fancy steak place and pay for it.

That's better and moved by David.

Right.

So he knew what he was doing.

So he went to Montreal.

I actually went back to L.A.

There was a term in L.A.

He didn't go to that because I ended up beating Jim Currier at the time.

Right.

Your hometown, Al.

My hometown.

So that summer, part of why I think I remember everything so well is like that summer was like my breakout summer.

And it just so happened to kind of be in conjunction with him doing the story.

So it's pretty cool.

And then I ended up going to New Haven.

It was the week before U.S.

Open, the Volvo used to be, and he went there.

And I remember going out to dinner with him like three times there because they had all the fish restaurants and crabs.

We went to the pizza.

But it was interesting because I never felt like he was interviewing me.

Right.

So far, you guys are just eating a lot of food.

We're just eating food.

We're eating food and he's following me around.

And, you know, the only thing sometimes we'd be in the car and I'd, you know, mention something to Sam and he would all of a sudden, I found out later when I read a lot of the article how much he did, which I never really felt like he was even interviewing.

me or anything.

And he's why this is so funny to hear you say this because a great magazine writer, and by the way, David Foster Wallace, moonlighting as a magazine writer, essentially, because he can write these towering books, but he is basically practicing an art that can be otherwise pretty unremarkable.

You know, like you kind of go through the meat grinder of like doing a lot of interviews.

Okay, a magazine guy's following me around, but you read this piece and you're like,

the entire time, I imagine, he is observing you in a way that you had no idea.

No idea.

Yeah, I had no idea.

And obviously when it came out and I read it, that was what I've said a few times.

Like, actually, at the time when it came out, I really didn't like it.

Yeah, I didn't like it only because of what we're just talking about.

Like, you know, he'd ask me about girls, like, or something or girlfriends.

And I would just be, you know, at dinner and I'd be, you know, just talking in a normal conversation.

Then he comes with like four pages of talking about me being a virgin and stuff, right?

Which actually worked out pretty good at the time because all of the girls that read it were like, you know, hey, let's, let's, let's take care of this.

So he actually did me some favors at the time.

That's incredible.

No, but like, it was hard for me to kind of take in at the time, like, how I almost felt like violated in a way.

Well, this is, this is at the time.

So I'm fascinated on all of these levels, truly, because as a magazine writer, I always am sort of calculating like,

okay, what am I going to tell the subject about what I'm going to write?

And this is what David Foster Wallace ends up writing about you.

If I can just read you some of the description, he wrote, quote, the quickest way to describe him would be to say that he looks like a young and slightly buffed David Caruso.

He is fair-skinned and has reddish hair and the kind of patchy, vaguely pubic goatee

of somebody who isn't quite old enough yet to grow real facial hair.

When he plays in the heat, he wears a hat.

He wears fila clothes and uses Yonex rackets and is paid to do so.

His face is childishly full, and though it isn't freckled, it somehow looks like it ought to be freckled.

And as I sit across from you, I'm like, I could see that.

I could see that.

And then he goes on to say about the aforementioned virginity, which is, which is, again, like, I'm like, this is a bold paragraph.

Quote, he's dated some.

It's impossible to tell whether he's a virgin.

It seems staggering and impossible, but my sense is that he might be.

Then again, I tend to idealize and distort him, I know, because of how I feel about what he can do on a tennis court.

His most revealing sexual comment was made in the context of explaining the odd type of confidence that keeps him from freezing up in a match in front of large crowds or choking on a point when there's lots of money at stake.

Joyce, who usually needs to pause about five beats to think before he answers questions, thinks the confidence is partly a matter of temperament and partly a function of hard work and practice.

And then he quotes you saying this, if I'm in like a bar and there's a really good looking girl, I might be kind of nervous.

But if there's like a thousand gorgeous girls in the stands when I'm playing, it's a different story.

I'm not nervous then when I play because I know what I'm doing.

I I know what to do out there.

End quote.

As time went on and I read it again, and then eventually, I think about eight or nine years later, when it came out in the book, that

was such a fun thing.

And it was a longer version of it.

I just read the whole thing and I was like, man, this guy is amazing.

As an interviewer, I cannot speak to David Foster Wallace.

Your experience suggests that he was even more of an observer than he was a conversationalist.

But what he says about Agassiz, I mean, and this is something he does with,

I think, a real like

admiration

for you in the end, for Agassiz, who he says that you guys have practiced together, you and Agassiz?

Yes, yeah, yeah.

And so he sort of like sees himself as truly an outsider to these people, you and Agassiz, as far apart as you are, you are still inside of this universe of professional tennis that he very unsparingly describes as totally alien to him, despite being a high rank.

And he loved tennis.

He was a player himself.

Yeah, I think that's part of what got him to do it and everything, that he, you could tell he loved tennis.

He loved the sport.

He played, he would never, I never saw him play.

I even asked him a few times when I was practicing, he'd be on the side, oh, you want to hit a few balls, which most people would be like, yeah, of course.

He didn't, he refused to do it.

This is what he says about the idea of playing you, just even hitting the ball around.

He says, quote, the idea of me playing Joyce or even hitting around with him, which was one of the ideas I was entertaining on the flight to Montreal, is now revealed to me to be in a certain way obscene.

And I resolved to not even let Joyce know that I used to play competitive tennis.

No, I didn't know, exactly.

And I'd presumed rather well.

I'd presumed in an embarrassing, self-effacing parenthetical.

And I'd presumed rather well.

This makes me sad is what he says.

And he goes on, I could not meaningfully exist on the same court with these obscure, hungry players, nor could you.

And it's not just a matter of talent or practice.

There's something else.

Right.

And that something else, which

he sort of,

you know, again, it's hard not to see this with the full benefit of hindsight.

Sure.

But he's talking about psychology.

Yes.

And he's talking about the commitment that you made as a kid

to a sport that can be pretty clearly deeply lonely,

let alone difficult.

If you look at like nowadays, you know, I was just out at U.S.

Open yesterday and you watch like these qualifying players and the average, like average fan or people don't really give them enough credit because they're not playing in the main U.S.

Open or they're, you know, somebody ranked 200 or even the Challengers.

And you realize how good these women and men are and how close of

a difference between being Alcaraz and being somebody nobody knows that's even 200 in the world or 300, whatever, or the college college players and i think that's kind of what he probably you know referring to there i mean same with me like i was a very good player i played similar to aggassi um he you know he helped me some he's four years older than me but my game was kind of very similar to his and and on a certain day or in practice i could play right with him but then you know agassy was agassy and i'm you know i was i have to work after playing tennis so and

you're a vaguely pubic goatee dave caruso lookalike yes and then you have a bunch of people that looked at me like that, right?

And so you have like the levels and what really separates it?

What makes it like, why are some better than others?

Why are some superstars and others aren't?

To come out in writing and explain that, it's obviously his genius.

He says that your focus, your level of intensity, he describes it as the same pleasantly grim expression you see on, say, working surgeons or jewelers.

Right.

The level of

dedication that does date back to when you were a little kid.

Sure.

I mean, if you could describe just what the backstory is to what it takes to be in that crevice between AAA and the majors, it seems like

it's just unfathomably consuming.

Yeah, I think part of what when I when I mentioned that I read the article at first and I didn't really like it that much because it was so truthful.

I mean, now that I'm older and I've been around for a long time, you know, even 25 years ago, I started to appreciate it, whatever.

But now when I look back, what great players do and even myself and good play is like how when you're playing or training or like how present you are.

And I learned that really young.

Like when I step on the tennis court, it was like a sanctuary for me.

Like I knew I was good.

That probably goes to the comment about the girls and stuff.

Like, you know, I wasn't even focused on, you know, you're focusing on hitting the tennis ball, playing.

And that's like everything.

And you have ultimate confidence that you're doing that because you've done it since you you were a kid.

It's like learning how to walk.

And he points out, again, I'm just going to keep quoting David Foster Wallace here, which is, I think, a fairly safe move when it comes to just making myself feel smarter than I am.

Quote, the realities of the men's professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin, which I think now I see the backstory of all of these steak metaphors, given what you're doing.

Yeah, that's true.

That's right.

Good point.

But he says, you know, you could think of Michael Joyce's career as now kind of on the cusp between the majors and triple-A-ball.

Right, right.

The idea that in this crevice between the stuff you know on television and this almost hidden world of deeply competitive, high-level tennis are all of these characters.

It's something that I didn't appreciate embarrassingly until I read the story.

And I was like, oh.

I kind of get it now.

I'm now more curious about what's in here.

The ball doesn't lie.

They say, I I mean, if you win matches, you're going to get up there.

If you don't, you're probably not.

You don't really always know the backstory of how they get there.

Everybody's different, obviously.

Everybody from different countries and tennis being like a one-on-one sport.

You know, nobody can tell you where you can play and not play.

And so the amount of steps that a normal player goes through to actually get to a point where they're making a living is

incredible.

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Something that comes through in your description just now is the way in which your happiness seems intertwined

with how you're doing.

For sure.

For sure.

Which can be, by the way, both incredibly rewarding if you find a way to stick in the game and to find a fulfilling career path, as you clearly have as a coach now, still very active in the game.

But it's also the thing that's tormenting, I think, for people who don't get to do that.

It's a hard transition.

I've had pretty good luck.

I mean, most of the players I've worked with, it's from like when they're young, kind of transitioning to like the pros.

And it's such a difficult time because you take like a young girl or a guy who's really good.

If they're good enough to come from the juniors, maybe go to college for a year, maybe go straight to the pros.

If they're good enough to do that, they're used to winning all the time.

And now all of a sudden you go on the pros and you're losing every week.

You know, I'm sure it's like that in all sports.

If you're, you know, a kid and you're good and

you're learning that if you're winning or playing well, winning, then everybody's happy.

Everything's

not just your happiness.

It's actually kind of sick.

Let's be honest.

I was about to say

you're training a child to understand that the happiness of his loved ones and their love for him is almost conditional on whether they're winning or not.

Absolutely.

But at the end of the day, that's kind of like, it's your life.

And

everything, you know, is that's your life till you're probably 30 or maybe even later now, 35.

I would imagine that, you know, something, something someone once told me about just, you know,

when your ego is jeopardized and you no longer can believe the story that you tell yourself about yourself, that crevice between AAA and the majors can feel like a bottomless canyon that you're just falling into.

In my case, I remember being like 22 and doing really good.

I'm like 60 in the world.

Like, look back, it should have been the happiest time of my life.

Well, that's an emphatic tiebreak from Michael Joyce.

But it really wasn't in a lot of ways because now people are like looking at you.

They're judging you.

You're just used to winning.

You think you're great.

Now all of a sudden you're not good at this.

And it's even harder now because of social media and stuff.

The players get like.

Yeah, this was, we're talking about you in the mid-90s.

I can't even imagine how hard it is now.

You know,

David Foster Wallace goes on to describe you in a way that sort of reflects his evolving understanding of you as he's hearing you talk about this stuff now 30 years ago.

But he says, quote, you couldn't even call him sincere because it's not like it seems ever to occur to him to try to be sincere or non-sincere.

For a while, I thought that Joyce's rather bland candor was a function of his not being very bright.

This judgment was partly informed by the fact that Joyce didn't go to college and was only marginally involved in his high school academics, stuff I know because he told me right away.

What I discovered as the tournament wore on was that I can be kind of a snob and an asshole, and that Michael Joyce's effectless openness is not a sign of stupidity, but of something else.

What is that something else?

That's a really interesting statement because I remember it clear as day because that was one of the first things that I, that I read that I didn't like.

I heard that first and I'm like, oh, who's this jerk?

You know, whatever.

And then as time went on, I actually like loved it because I like to tell the truth.

And so as a tennis too, like if I had coaches, I always appreciated the ones that kind of told me the truth, even if it wasn't always what you wanted to hear.

And so at that time, I remember specifically when he'd asked me these questions and different stuff, or he saw, I was always pretty truthful about like where I thought I was or where I was going because it was always related to tennis.

Wallace also is in this piece describing people, other tennis stars, in a way that is just unparalleled.

So there's, again, I don't know how you feel about

these passages or if you have relationships with, you know, John McEnroe, for instance.

But he says McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was.

At his peak, say 1980 to 1984, he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived, the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented, a genius.

For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff, lame, truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a gap ad.

I don't actually think I remember that one or read it, but he's right.

And I just want to, again, quote Wallace here about Agassiz, who, and this just makes me laugh, honestly.

He says, Agassiz's facial expression is the slightly smug, self-aware one of somebody who's used to being looked at and who automatically assumes the minute he shows up anywhere that everybody's looking at him.

He's incredible to see play in person, but his domination of Washington, he was watching this match, doesn't make me like him any better.

It's more like it chills me as if I'm watching the devil play.

Agassiz, as this figure in this Venn diagram of your interests, Wallace's and yours, as well as like the patron saint almost of grinders.

Sure.

Yeah.

Explain that dynamic and why he is revered in this context.

I remember also, and I've had some people talk to me about this article.

So when you watch like Jokovic play against a guy who's unbelievably good, but maybe he's 60 in the world, let's just say.

You know, most of the time, time, that player who's better, they're a little bit, see the ball a little bit quicker, maybe get to the ball a little bit earlier, create a little bit better angle because of that split second that they're moving up to the ball, return a serve.

So because of that, it makes them more consistent.

And so what he was trying to explain, which I felt always playing Agassiz, was that like, it was almost like I felt like I was playing kind of like myself because our games were similar.

He just had a little better timing, a little better, you know, saw the ball a little bit earlier, which then ultimately maybe gave him more confidence, which, you know, and all of those little 1% here, 1% there,

that adds up to like 10%.

So you lose 6-3, 6-4 or something, right?

And you can't really like, no matter how hard I worked or no matter what I could have done different, or no matter, sometimes it's just confidence.

Wallace describes Agassi as amazingly absent of finesse.

And he describes here the power baseline sort of style, which you also.

Yeah, I mean, Agassi had had pretty good touch.

I did too, but but again, it's one of those things too, like we didn't use it maybe, especially Agassi didn't use it as much as he could have because it wasn't going to help him.

Or like you have that split second where, you know, you're going to take this ball, you're going to rip it, you know, you're just going to do it, right?

So that's kind of like sometimes it's just you go with what's your instinct, you know, you're playing like an automatic pilot kind of thing.

Right, right.

But the idea of just like you're there to grind down your opponent, right?

Which Agassiz felt like.

Yes.

And that, you know, you're not in that case uh prioritizing the aesthetics of how you're doing it right but you know again to i remember playing agassy the first time in dc actually right before he started writing this i lost 6-2-6-2

and i won like four or three matches there and i remember the next day i felt like i got hit by a truck because he made me move that much more everything was happening faster you know i'm sure that's what it feels like to play alcaraz and these guys right so you you almost felt like like punished you like he was gonna wear you down you know sampras was totally different Sampress was easy to play, but in a way, like, physically, but then you couldn't return a serve because he could hit an ace at any time.

So, at least with Sampers, you like knew it was going to be pretty close.

You probably wouldn't win, but it's going to be pretty close.

Agassiz could make you look like a fool on the court.

Yes, yes.

He describes Wallace does Agassiz as akin to the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion.

Just this almost like heavy metal kind of aspect to just being destroyed.

He's spot on with everything.

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How he describes you as a paradox.

Do you remember this part at all?

I remember.

And when I first read it, it, I had no idea what paradox even meant.

I think that was what I remember being in England.

I think my parents faxed over that.

Yeah, so give me, give me the story of you actually first getting this.

After he did the whole article and everything, it was a couple months later.

And I remember he called me up and he was really down.

He's like, hey, Mike, he's like, you know, details decided not to run the piece.

He's like, he didn't really even get into it.

I'm like, oh, that sucks.

You know, you spend a lot of tea.

He's like, but I'm going to like shop it around and see if somebody will pick it up, if that's okay with it.

I'm like, sure, man, you know, whatever.

And so I kind of almost like forgot about it.

And about literally like a year later, no, I actually remember it was in like in the spring because I I had just like shaved my head.

This is how you remember these things, right?

And I got a call before even hearing from him, I got a call from this lady who was like, hey, we need to send a photographer.

I was in Birmingham, Alabama.

And can we do a photo shoot for Esquire?

And I'm like, who's this lady?

And then and then that same day he called me and said Esquire was going to run the article and I was like damn man I just shaved my head whatever and so they did like a shoot like in the magazine there's pictures of me like serving and different stuff and I remember they shot it in Birmingham and then the article came out while I was at Queen's Club in England because I knew it was going to come out like in June or something they said but again like it was only in the I think in the US or I don't know if Esquire was worldwide whatever but I remember my mom went to the grocery store.

I think for like a few days I'm like, go to this store because I had no idea what it was.

Like, I mean, I knew it was an article but mid-90s yeah there's nowhere

I didn't know if it was a five two page thing one paragraph you didn't know it would be the greatest tennis essay of all time right I had no idea so I remember my mom called me and again we didn't have cell phones then you know so I'm calling home every couple days whatever and I remember my mom like picked up went to the store and found it was like in the magazine department and she picked it up and she opened it.

She was shocked.

She's like, Mike, there's 22 pages.

I'm like, what?

She's like, you're all over the thing.

You open

40 foot mics.

What?

Yeah.

And, and I was, yeah, she was like, we hadn't even read it.

And then they were coming over to watch me at Wimbledon.

And so for like two weeks, I, I didn't even, even, maybe she read a few things or whatever, but she brought one with her.

So at Wimbledon is where I read it.

And I remember reading and I was like, what the f is this?

Like, like, this is ridiculous.

And my coach and my coach was like,

Sam.

Yeah, how does Sam handle your reading?

Why did he call him the Mexican Dustin Hoffman or something?

I don't know, for something.

It was so funny, but it was exactly right.

Sam, Sam was like, he was the most calm, never gets stressed, nicest man ever, like more of even a better man than like a tennis coach.

And I traveled to my first pro tournaments with him when I was 16.

I knew him.

He hit with me when I was like seven.

So I remember he calmed me down.

He's like, Michael, it's really good.

Like it's really, I'm like, what is he talking about?

He's saying I'm a virgin.

He doesn't know I called you Hispanic Dustin Hoffman.

Hispanic Dustin Hoffman.

I got cubes on my face.

Yeah, exactly, right?

And you could tell he likes Sam.

Yeah, I'm like, oh, he loves Sam.

You loved it.

Of course you like this article, Dustin Hoffman, you know, and I'm like, but this guy's saying I'm grotesque, you know?

And so, you know, but that's the paragraph.

He says,

he calls you a paradox.

Yeah, he talks about how the restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque.

Sure.

And he's 100% right.

But at the time, I didn't know better.

And this is my life.

And this is, I'm trying to like accomplish something here.

Like to me, my life was normal.

Right.

And now that I look back, especially now I have an eight-year-old daughter.

And I, now I look and I'm like, like, would I choose this life?

People ask me a lot, like, do I want my daughter to play tennis?

I really don't.

Like, if she wants to play and have fun and she goes out, that's fine.

But do I really want her?

Because the people, the two, 1% that people see that are winning great things, I mean, and doing, making a ton of money, but a lot of those people struggle too, because it's their whole life.

So, you know, for me, I remember reading this article and then, and then it was interesting because I, you know, I learned to embrace it, whatever.

But, but again, it wasn't thrown around like it would be now because now it's on social media.

Like you actually had to get the magazine, read the magazine.

I think my parents bought like 10 of them.

We have them in some scrap.

There was no viral thing about that.

At all.

And then like a few years later, when it came out on the book, it was the same kind of thing.

Oh, it's cool.

You can go get a book.

Now I think it's probably, if people go back and read it, I mean, even your show will probably bring people to read it and then it's going to pop up again.

In 2020, there was, you know, this, there was a dance piece.

Oh, my God.

My wife showed me that one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In a ballet or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I will quote St.

I will quote the description.

The Qualies was the name of the piece.

It was

insane.

It was, here we go.

Fleur, I believe is how you pronounce that.

Flewer Darkin is the choreographer, I suppose, the artistic director.

She has taken, taken, quote, the seminal U.S.

writer David Foster Wallace's groundbreaking study of the American tennis player Michael Joyce and brought it to life as a dance for four men, 32 minutes.

And this is about you.

Wow.

That's, yeah.

But to go back to the paradox thing and the grotesque thing, because you had this

grotesque,

intense, all-consuming approach to greatness in tennis since you were seven, eight years old, it enabled you to do something that is beautiful, which has become, as he says, a transcendent practitioner of an art.

And so, in the grotesqueness of your life, there is this beauty.

And I just can't help but think of

David Foster Wallace in a similar way.

Right.

You know, with the full benefit of hindsight now,

that the thing that he was so great at to the point where we're still reading and I'm quoting him, we're laughing and

really

we are in in awe of his of his work is because it seemed like on some level he had a similar all-consuming approach to the way that writing mattered to him it's true I mean I think later in his life, he taught.

It was funny.

He ended up going, I think, Whittier College and teaching there,

which is funny because I was from LA.

He was from, I think he was from Illinois or something when I met him.

And then the fact that he went out and it was interesting too is that he was in Whittier, I think, for about 10 years and he never really contacted me.

I was going to ask.

No, did you guys talk?

No, it was really weird because I know he, I found out later that he had actually reached out to Sam like a couple times.

But that was it.

For Michael Joyce and David Foster Wallace, that was it.

Wallace had always seemed more comfortable around Michael's coach, Sam Aparicio, instead of Michael himself, this player that Wallace, again, could not meaningfully exist on the same court with.

But what Wallace would have learned if he had reached out to Michael Joyce sometime in the mid-2000s is that his former subject had transcended his previous station as a player.

Because one day in 2001, in a match against Michael Chang, another major champion from this generation, Michael Joyce had suddenly ruptured a tendon in his already janky left wrist and could no longer feel his left hand, which led to surgery and almost two miserable years of rehab, after which his world ranking plummeted and plummeted down into the 130s.

And when Michael's mother got diagnosed with cancer at age 49, her son decided to be with her at at home in Los Angeles

and finally get off tour.

Which is all to say that by September 2008, when the world heard that David Foster Wallace was gone out of nowhere,

Michael Joyce was doing what both Sam Apparicio and Professor Wallace

had been doing.

Michael had found his new, even greater calling as a teacher,

Or, in other words,

a coach.

I know when he passed away, I was coaching Sheripova, Maria, and I was in the middle of it.

So, she had already, like, you know, won U.S.

Open and Wimbledon.

And so, she was a big start.

So, he must have seen me as her coach.

And the fact that he didn't actually ever ask for tickets or come to the match or write me or like,

it showed kind of what kind of person he was in a way, because I was, especially at that point I became almost a lot more famous being Maria's coach than I had of being a player.

Yes.

So I had people always

contacting me or writing me or you know people from my past who you know whatever would always come forward and want to see me or want something.

And the fact that he never like I lived literally 45 miles away and I didn't I never felt like he did that because he didn't like me or something.

He just respected what I did and what I was doing and he didn't really fair, you know, want to reach out.

I felt like that was I mean out of a hundred people

one person and it was him that would do that because when he finally passed when he passed away I remember I was kind of like shocked you know people started how did you find out it was crazy actually I actually had a blood clot I was with Maria we were in Arizona she was recovering from shoulder surgery And every Friday, we would do,

like I'd go to therapy with her for shoulder.

And we were at one of these Arizona places and a lot of athletes there.

And we used to do like like fun, like this Olympics where all the athletes would jump over hurdles and all of a sudden she'd always want me to do it with her.

And so I did it on like Friday.

And that particular year, she was coming to the U.S.

Open because it was like a five-year anniversary of her winning or something.

And I decided to drive home to L.A.

And so I drove seven hours without stopping.

I just went straight through.

And when I got to L.A., I had this like, that night, I had a cramp in my leg.

And it turned out I had like

one of those blood clots in my calf, which I didn't know.

I thought I pulled a muscle or something.

I ended up going to the hospital and make a long story short, I was actually in the hospital recovering from this blood clot when the news came out that he, you know, passed away.

And then within like

12 hours, I had literally like 50 people contacting me because of him passing away, the article.

It was thrown all over the internet.

But I remember sitting there saying to like a couple people visiting me, I was like, this is crazy.

Like, first of all, I'm in the hospital, let alone I'm getting, getting, so I had a, I wasn't working or anything.

So I was looking at my phone.

At that point, we had phones, and I'm like, getting message after message.

Can you talk about him?

And this, and then obviously the way he did it, you know, it was just like, for a week, it was just overwhelming, kind of.

I did not realize that you were in the hospital yourself.

It was one in a million.

It just suggests.

Look, I, I don't know.

I know how much.

It's crazy.

Sometimes the universe just sort of signals something and I don't know what to make of it, except for the fact that in this case, we've just had a conversation about psychology and about the way in which a grotesque life can lead to beauty.

Yeah.

As well as when it's not in check, when you are dealing with mental health issues,

an ending that

can be tragic.

And when David Foster Wallace kills himself, he hangs himself in 2008.

And this is a headline that in the world of certainly literature and journalism was this asteroid that just hit yeah hit the planet um i didn't realize that you were in a hospital confronting in a sense your mortality and also contemplating the guy who had the most unsparing psychological examination of you right at the same time it's crazy and i hadn't even thought of him or thought of it you know i'm i'm in the

in the midst of coaching the number one player in the world and she's recovering from shoulder and we had a couple months and she had surgeries it was literally had to be about the week of the us open

and then i sat there in the hospital bed for like a day or two thinking like man like first of all it made me feel you know as a coach you put kind of your past like when you're coaching you put your player first everything i mean you know you you kind of have to be good at be a good coach especially on the road you know if you're teaching a kid an hour or whatever it's a little different but when you're traveling and you know you put your family to the side see as a coach you kind of put that person ahead of you or even loved ones a lot of times.

The good ones do, you know, which again, it's kind of a grotesque thing in a way, but it's what you do, right?

So at that point, I had Marie, it was all about me coaching Marie.

And I was a coach.

And then, and then all of a sudden, when this, when that happened, it made me for like a couple of days think about myself again and my past and this.

And to think like nobody really saw this coming of him.

He was teaching classes like a day before.

Like it was really like a really weird time in my life, to say the least.

I mean, I mean, even now thinking about it, a lot of that stuff, you kind of like just block out in a way and move on.

But that is kind of a coincidence that that happened.

Did you have any sense at all that mental health was a thing that David Foster Wallace had been dealing with?

Zero.

I mean, like I said from the beginning, he was, I hate to say the

use the word like a weird guy, but you know, that would be like my, like a really nice guy.

The fact that he could come out with such an unbelievable piece and not really feel like he was even,

he was never even writing anything down.

Like he wasn't sitting there with a pad.

You know, you have people interviewer.

He never even like walked around.

Like, I don't even know when he did it.

Like it was just all going in his head.

He was seeing my interviews, the car roads.

He was a genius.

I mean, he was a genius to have all that.

You know, maybe when he was sitting by himself, he'd write some notes or something, but he never around me had a pad.

He didn't have a tape recorder.

You know, some of the back then they had the little, none of that.

So it was all his, you know, it was all like done on cue kind of that he could go back and write this.

And I, and I know he was disappointed when they detail.

By the way, just what I found out today, one of the worst decisions in the history of the written word is Details magazine passing on this estimate.

Can you imagine?

Exactly.

And I remember them say, he said that it was like they felt it was like too deep for their audience.

You know, they were more like kind of young adults,

whatever.

But still, can you imagine?

They could still be going.

I mean, it's just, it's just, it's, it's a crazy thing.

Yeah, it's crazy.

You know, when I was looking at the testimony from people who knew David Foster Wallace the best, the most sort of intimate friends in his life, something that I heard someone say, a friend of his, about

why

his life ended in the way it did, amid all these frustrations and the things that you always, I think,

feel if you're a friend of somebody who

takes their own life.

He says that David Foster Wallace felt like he couldn't write anymore.

I mean, he couldn't write anymore for whatever set of reasons.

And if he can't write,

you know, marriage, being someone's son, being someone's brother,

do some charity work.

Well,

I'm not judging him.

I'm just saying for him, that ceased,

that wasn't enough Velcro to keep him on the planet.

And that the last piece he wrote, actually, was this piece about Roger Federer, another tennis story, another all-time tennis story.

So he couldn't write anymore.

The Federer piece was the last time that his ass left the chair, as he used to put it, that the writing was so inspired that he no longer felt, you know, his butt in a chair as he wrote.

It was transcendent.

Again, that word,

this transcendent experience in which his ass left the chair.

He was sort of levitating.

It was this sort of like communion that you had with the universe.

And then it's sort of the UFO stopped coming.

He could no longer see this thing arrive that changed everything.

So he couldn't write.

And that without that ability, without the ability to write a story, let alone believe the story that maybe he told himself about himself, it just didn't feel like it was enough.

And of course, people who were close to him would hope that, would say, what about this reason?

What about this reason?

What about the people who personally care about you?

And it just didn't end up being enough.

Next question over there.

And at the end here, what I'm really like getting back around to

is how he ended the piece.

Do you remember how he ends the piece?

No.

So I'll just read it to you.

Joyce is, in other words, a complete man.

Yeah, I remember now.

Though in a grotesquely limited way.

But he wants more.

He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media.

He wants this and will pay to have it, to pursue it, let it define him, and will pay up with the regretless cheer of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant a long time ago.

Already for Joyce at 22, it's too late for anything else.

He's invested too much, is in too deep.

I think he's both lucky and unlucky.

He will say he is happy and mean it.

Wish him well.

I remember clearly now.

And again, that's something that now,

with all the experience I've had,

I can look and say he's spot on.

When I look back at like tennis, especially my upbringing, it was like all I knew.

It was what, you know, it was more important in a way that I went and hit.

practiced my serve and hit the spot 10 times than it was getting an A on a report or whatever.

It's funny.

I'll tell you a real quick story.

When I was coaching Maria, I remember her winning U.S.

Open here.

And that night after she won, we went out for an hour, had some drinks, whatever, like celebrate.

And then a couple days later, I was home for three or four days.

And then you have like a week and then you were going to Europe to play.

And I remember her dad called me and her dad said, hey, how you doing?

I'm like, oh, I'm good.

And I'm like, how you doing?

He's like, hey, I'm kind of depressed.

And I'm like, yeah, I am too.

It's crazy.

Like, cause you all of a sudden reach the mountaintop, but it keeps going in a way.

Like, like, if you were like 13 and you won a tournament and you're all celebrating, this is great.

We did it.

You know, all of a sudden, you're never going to be that good.

Right.

And it's the same if you lose.

It's like end of the world.

So the best are able to kind of maintain that.

And I think that's kind of his closing is like that.

Like, that's, that's your goal.

You want to hold trophies, this and that, but it's also part of your life and it's what you do.

Right.

It is remarkable that despite everything, everything that's difficult about this, what you and he both seem to agree on very clearly is something else that he says.

Another famous line that he wrote, which is that he submits that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and also the most demanding.

From a physicality standpoint, it's definitely one of the hardest because

you got to play day after day, recover.

You don't have teammates.

The mental side,

you can't take a seat for five minutes if you're struggling or, you you know, it's five all in the third and you're dying.

You can't have somebody fill in for you.

You know, your wins and losses that you take with yourself and maybe a couple, your couple of your parents and your coach or whatever, a couple people.

You know, probably the closest thing maybe would be like boxing or something, but then they're fighting every three months or four months, not every single day.

So I think that's why tennis is so beautiful

because it's so incredibly hard.

You know, like the pickleball now, everybody's going nuts about pickleball.

And I think it's great that like old people can play pickleball or whatever, but it's like, to me, it's like playing mini tennis.

Like it's easy.

That's why people like it, right?

And it's fun.

I mean, it's great that people can do that, but you can never even put it in the universe of tennis because it's something that's easy.

So something that's very difficult, I think is what makes people respected.

Yeah, yeah.

Michael Joyce.

I'd love to see David Foster, what he's doing about pickleball rolling.

Oh, God, yes.

Among the many

I wish David Foster Wallace was alive to chronicle pickleball suddenly.

Absolutely on the list.

Michael Joyce, as you go out to go continue to compete and

live and breathe a beautiful and difficult thing,

I wish you well.

Thank you, Pablo.

This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark media production.

And I'll I'll talk to you next time.