Hard on the heels of a rare Roger Federer loss and apparently timed for the run-up to this year's US Open, the latest item on the David Foster Wallace watch is the cover story in tomorrow's New York Times Play magazine. In it, he extols the beauty of pure athleticism and describes, as the title of the article suggests, the occasional moments of metaphysical transcendence that occur while watching Roger Federer play tennis. DFW refers to this experience as having a "Federer Moment" such as occurred during one particular point in the fourth set of last year's US Open:

...given Agassi’s position and world-class quickness, Federer had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of "The Matrix." I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.

Anyone who watches sports has seen moments like this. Some of us who participate in sports have experienced first-hand moments that are roughly analogous--utterly physical moments, unencumbered an uninhibited by any mental processing other than sheer emotional joy and awe. These are rare moments, but they are one of the chief reasons that we watch and play sports.

There's a lot more in this article, including a brief history of the development of tennis in the modern era (Lendl was the first true power-baseliner, not Borg or Conners), the weirdness of Wimbledon (whose image is relentlessly burnished to the point of losing its sheen), the superiority of watching live tennis ("TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love"). But mostly Wallace tries to explain the beauty and power of Federer and his play. "Tries" to explain because there is at least some aspect of his play that can't be described by words.