Roger Federer Killed David Foster Wallace By anaesthetica in Culture Sat Aug 22, 2009 at 02:16:46 AM EST Tags: tennis, federer, dfw, suicide, an hero, footnotes, religion, depression (all tags)
	On 14 September 2008, David Foster Wallace's wife, Karen L. Green, discovered the writer's body, hung in an apparent suicide. The conventional story goes like this: Wallace had suffered from depression for over 20 years. He needed antidepressant medication to be productive. However, Wallace began to experience severe side-effects from his primary antidepressant, phenelzine. He began to wean himself from phenelzine in June 2007, right around the start of the 2007 Wimbledon Championships. His depression returned. He tried other treatments, such as electroshock. Returning to phenelzine, Wallace found that it was no longer effective. His depression became even more severe. Wallace committed suicide. The conventional account bears the semblance of truth. But it is fundamentally incomplete. It is a post-Freudian tale of a man and his psyche only. Freud believed that God was an illusion, but not so David Foster Wallace. Wallace was a believer, and the religious experience is what is missing from the story of Wallace's untimely end. Indeed it was Freud's star pupil, Jung, who divined that one's problems past the age of 35 are fundamentally religious in essence. Herein lies the final piece of the puzzle.

Everyone Chooses Their Own Religion Wallace outlined his concept of the omnipresent religious experience of human life in a commencement speech given to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College: Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship… Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on. The Faith of Wallace What did DFW choose to see, to consciously give meaning, to worship? Tennis. More specifically, it was "Federer as Religious Experience." And it was Rog who ate him alive. The specific thesis here is that if you've never seen the young man play live, and then do, in person, on the sacred grass of Wimbledon, through the literally withering heat and then wind and rain of the '06 fortnight, then you are apt to have what one of the tournament's press bus drivers describes as a "bloody near-religious experience." … Wimbledon is strange. Verily it is the game's Mecca, the cathedral of tennis; but it would be easier to sustain the appropriate level of on-site veneration if the tournament weren't so intent on reminding you over and over that it's the cathedral of tennis. Here DFW exposes the sacred in his life, the Ka'bah acting as polar center to his universe, the cathedral whose flying arches meet at a point high above, directing him to the transcendent. [W]ar's codes are safer for most of us than love's. You too may find them so, in which case Spain's mesomorphic and totally martial Rafael Nadal is the man's man for you – he of the unsleeved biceps and Kabuki self-exhortations. Plus Nadal is also Federer's nemesis and the big surprise of this year's Wimbledon, since he's a clay-court specialist and no one expected him to make it past the first few rounds here. … Federer has so far lost only four matches all year, but they've all been to Nadal. Still, most of these matches have been on slow clay, Nadal's best surface. Grass is Federer's best. He sets up Nadal as Nemesis, the figure of Satan, a demonic, bellicose presence, a warring contrast to the figure of love, the prince of peace: Federer. Nadal is an outsider to the sacred grass of Wimbledon, specializing in baked clay courts. The metaphysical explanation is that Roger Federer is one of those rare, preternatural athletes who appear to be exempt, at least in part, from certain physical laws. …And Federer is of this type – a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. …[H]e looks like what he may well (I think) be: a creature whose body is both flesh and, somehow, light. This thing about the ball cooperatively hanging there, slowing down, as if susceptible to the Swiss's will – there's real metaphysical truth here. …Your experience, in play, will not be that you possess phenomenal reflexes and speed; rather, it will seem to you that the tennis ball is quite large and slow-moving, and that you always have plenty of time to hit it. … …Roger Federer is showing that the speed and strength of today's pro game are merely its skeleton, not its flesh. He has, figuratively and literally, re-embodied men's tennis… DFW imagines Federer as a gnostic Christ, the avatar of God on earth, a Neo-like savior with the ability to transcend the constraints of the material world, to return living flesh to the dead. When God Died DFW committed suicide by hanging himself in September 2008. It is no coincidence that 2008 was a disastrous year for Federer. Federer failed to defend his Australian Open title, losing in the semifinals to Novak Djokovic, ending his record streak of 10 consecutive Grand Slam finals. It marked the first time Federer failed to reach a Grand Slam final since the 2005 French Open and the first time he lost to anyone other than Nadal in a major since the 2005 Australian Open. He revealed that he had been diagnosed with mono. He lost in the first round to Andy Murray at the Barclays Dubai Tennis Championships, the first time Federer had lost in the first round of a tournament in four years. In April, Federer lost to Mardy Fish in the Pacific Life Open, despite Mardy only serving at 34%. He then lost to Andy fucking Roddick in the Sony Ericsson Open quarterfinals. His weakness on clay became aggravated: At the Masters Series Monte Carlo, Federer lost to Nadal, making 44 unforced errors and giving up a 4-0 lead in the second set. At the Rome Masters, Federer lost in the quarter-finals to Radek Štěpánek. Federer also failed to defend his title at the Masters Series Hamburg, losing to Nadal in the final. At the French Open, Federer was defeated in straight sets by Nadal in the final 6-1, 6-3, 6-0, the second-most-lopsided men's final in French Open history and Federer's heaviest loss in a Grand Slam match. And then, at the crowning event of tennis worship, Wimbledon, Federer's year unraveled completely: Federer once again played World No. 2 Nadal in the final. A victory for Federer would have meant his sixth consecutive Wimbledon singles title, breaking Borg's modern era men's record and equaling the all-time record held since 1886 by William Renshaw. Federer saved two championship points in the fourth set tiebreak but eventually lost the match 6-4, 6-4, 6-7(5), 6-7(8), 9-7. The rain-delayed match ended in near darkness after 4 hours, 48 minutes of play, making it the longest (in terms of elapsed time) men's final in Wimbledon recorded history. It concluded 7 hours, 15 minutes after its scheduled start. The defeat also ended Federer's 65 match winning streak on grass. John McEnroe described the match as "The greatest match I've ever seen."1 Federer limped on, withdrawing early from Masters Series Rogers Cup and Western & Southern Financial Group Masters. Chosen to represent Switzerland in the Olympics, Federer lost in the quarter-finals to James Blake for the first time in their nine match history. Following the Olympics, Federer officially lost his World No. 1 ranking to Nadal after a record 237 consecutive weeks. Federer would win the US Open on September 13th, but it was likely too late for redemption. God's immanence on Earth had been retracted, the age of miracles was over. DFW was found hung the next day.

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