the unhappy face theory.

television tends to level everybody out and make everyone seem kind of blandly good-looking, but at montreal it turns out that a lot of the pros and stars are interesting-or even downright funny-looking. jim courier, former number one but now waning and seeded tenth here, looks like howdy doody in a hat on tv but here turns out to be a very big boy -- the “guide média” lists him at 175 pounds, but he’s way more than that, with big smooth muscles and the gait and expression of a mafia enforcer. michael chang, twenty-three and number five in the world, sort of looks like two different people stitched crudely together: a normal upper body perched atop hugely muscular and totally hairless legs. he has a mushroom-shaped head, inky-black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as i’ve seen outside a graduate creative-writing program.*

*emphasis added. this is part of a paragraph from DFW's 1995 esquire essay the string theory about pro tennis. it's a remarkable read, with more than 40 footnotes. (even other parts of this same paragraph have other, unique worth, such as wallace remarking that pete sampras is mostly teeth and eyebrows in person with unbelievably hairy legs and forearms from which he postulates a high likelihood of back hair for sampras, which makes everyone feel better. 

wallace describes agassi's superlative game beautifully and at length before asiding that he hates agassi**, and that watching him dominate his way through a match is beautiful but doesn't make me like him any better; it's more like it chills me, as if i'm watching the devil play.

**buried in the reams of contextually vital footnotes is one about how brooke shields, so beautiful on paper, is entirely nonsexual in person, such that he can readily imagine roughing up the suspect with her picture in hand, but who in the live 3d he deems unfuckable.***

***i'll stop with the spoiling. it's really interesting. if you haven't read it you should.