A new book’s search for the elusive codes that separate tennis’s GOATs from its ghosts.

Illustration by Noah Hickey/The Dispatch (Photos via Getty Images).

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In 1992, David Foster Wallace published “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart” in the Philadelphia Inquirer, marking an early foray into the tennis psychoanalysis that would become ubiquitous in the novelist’s later writing. The essay is a pan of teen tennis sensation Tracy Austin’s memoir, Beyond Center Court: My Story, which Wallace calls “breathtakingly insipid.”