Austin Meakim’s Reviews > A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments > Status Update

But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him tobecome a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be. It’s allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under wilting scrutiny and pressure.

The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque.

Whether or not he ends up in the top ten and a name anybody will know, Michael Joyce will remain a figure of enduring and paradoxical fascination for me.

“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 know what to do out there.” Maybe it’s good to let these be his last quoted words.

His most revealing sexual comment is 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 a question, thinks the confidence is partly a matter of temperament and partly a function of hard work:

Then again, I tended to idealize and distort him, I know, because of how I felt about what he could do on the court.

He has a tight and long-standing group of friends back home in LA, but one senses that most of his personal connections have been made via tennis. He’s dated some. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s a virgin. It seems staggering and impossible, but my sense is he might be.

Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial paperback sort that one reads on planes. In other words, he really has no interests outside tennis.

Michael Joyce in close-up person, like eating supper or riding in a courtesy car, looksslighter and younger than he does on-court. From close up he looks his age, which to me isbasically a fetus. He’s about 5′9′′ and 160; he’s muscular but quietly so, without much definition.

An “inside-out” player like Jim Courier, on the other hand, can hit winners only at obtuse angles, from the center out... One of the things that makes Agassi so good is that he’s capable of hitting winners from anywhere on the court—he has no geometric restriction. Joyce, too, according to Sam, can hit a winner at any angle. He just doesn’t do it quite as well as Agassi, or as often.