Real tennis was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game's technicians revered, but in fact the opposite -- not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty. That tennis was not more reducible to delimited factors or probability curves than chess or boxing, the two games of which it's a hybrid. [...] locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. [...] it was a matter not of reduction at all, but -- perversely -- of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth -- each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game of the boundaries of self.
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, p81-82
Trans-statistical Aesthetics of Serious Tennis
