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Comment by staminade | Hacker News Reader

I really recommend reading any of David Foster Wallace's essays about tennis. The book "String Theory" collects all his writing on the subject. He was a lifelong fan of the sport, but also a nationally ranked junior player and he's able to provide exceptional insight in the insane dedication (as well as talent) needed to reach even the lowest rungs of the competitive tennis world, and what a grind the tour can be for lower ranked professionals.

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There’s a really fun YouTube series where a virtually no name ex-NBA player challenges top amateurs to 1 on 1. It’s not even close. Brian Scalabrine is his name and his famous quote is “I’m way closer to Lebron than you are to me.”

The dedication to become a top .0001% athlete is absolutely nuts and beyond that is uncomprehendable.

https://www.basketballnetwork.net/old-school/when-brian-scal...

Yeah that series is great. And you can tell sometimes he'll play against someone who has a good move or something that works for about 12 seconds before he adjusts/remembers how to deal with it.

Math >> comprehension.

0.0001% is one in a million. Or within top 7000 rank out of 7 billion humans globally. Or about 0.001% or one in a 100k out of the 700-1000 million in 20-30 age group.

There are about 70000 pro athletes in the world. So only 1 in a 10000 or 0.01% to be a pro athlete when you are in the age group.

Takes less than a year of recreational devotion for a smart healthy person to get into top 1% globally. getting into 0.01% is obviously more competitive and requires you to give up other things.

I believe the origin of Scalabrines channel was from people who absolutely grilled his performance while he was pro. He came out and said "If you think I suck so much, come 1v1 me." He then promptly stomped his detractors on the court

Here's a fantastic piece by him talking about how amazing Federer was when he first came up: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fed...

As well as Open by Andre Agasi. One of the greatest autobiographies.

The essay that the book takes its title from is particularly relevant to this discussion and freely available online: https://www.esquire.com/sports/a5151/the-string-theory-david...

(As an aside, I'm surprised to see this in Esquire, do they still publish writing like this or was it a very different magazine "back in the day"?)

Can’t comment on the current state of Esquire, but it certainly was “legit” in the past. I’ll take this opportunity to promote the classic Esquire piece “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has...

Just to add, they have a really great archive site: https://classic.esquire.com/

And the person in charge of Esquire Classic has a site of good long-form journalism that predates the internet.

http://www.thestacksreader.com

I felt slightly unhinged when I instinctively control F'd for "infinite" upon seeing this headline for no particular reason, glad to find this comment.

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