Michael Joyce was lying in a hospital bed recovering from a blood clot in his right calf when he received a text message at 3 a.m. that author David Foster Wallace had hung himself at his Claremont, Calif., home at the age of 46. Wallace, a former ranked junior tennis player from Illinois and considered one of America’s premier literary figures, and Joyce, a Southern Californian who has served as Maria Sharapova’s coach for the past five years, had spent three weeks together in the summer of 1995. What came out of that time was String Theory, an essay that was originally supposed to appear in Details Magazine but was picked up by Esquire in the spring of 1996, right before Wallace’s 1,079 page novel "Infinite Jest" was published, sky rocketing him to fame.

Joyce says he didn’t really like "String Theory" — which delves into the life of Joyce who was then trying to qualify for the 1995 Canadian Open in Montreal — when it first came out but has since grown to appreciate the work. He remained friendly with Wallace over the years and says he still can’t get through a week without two or three people coming up to him and commenting on what a great work "String Theory" is.

In tennis circles, the piece became an instant classic for its simplicity ("I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding") and descriptions ("A lot of professional tennis players look like lifeguards — with that kind of extreme tan that looks like it’s penetrated to the subdermal layer and will be retained to the grave"). Joyce spoke with Tennis Week exclusively earlier in the week about Wallace’s untimely death and the time the two spent together.

Tennis Week: Where were you when you heard the news?

Michael Joyce: I got a text at 3 in the morning. I was in the hospital and hadn’t slept for like three days. One of my good friends Barry Buss is a huge fan of his so I remember calling him right away and he told me what happened. I was up. I was in so much pain and I wasn’t sleeping. I was on so many painkillers and I remember thinking: Am I dreaming this? So I called him up and he told me and I was pretty shocked. I hadn’t been in contact with him in a long time but I had heard that he had moved to L.A. and was teaching at one of the schools (creative writing at Pomona College) but I hadn’t spoken to him in six of seven years.

Tennis Week: What kind of contact did you have with him?

Michael Joyce: I’m actually surprised because he was such a fan of tennis that he didn’t call or come around more often. I just feel like he never really wanted to intrude much. He never really wanted to bother me much when we were spending those three weeks together. The rest of my career we never really kept too much in touch. Last time I spoke to him I was still playing so that was like seven or eight years ago. It might have been right after I hurt my wrist. He might have called because he heard I was hurt and he was calling to see how I was doing. But I don’t really remember too much. I do remember a lot about the three weeks we spent together.

Tennis Week: What do you remember about your first meeting with him? 

Michael Joyce: In 1995 I had done well at Wimbledon, reaching the fourth round and breaking into the top 100 for the first time, right around No. 80 in the world.
When Montreal came around I had to play the qualifying and I remember I was playing in the second round against a guy named Julian Knowle, who’s turned into a pretty good doubles player. I remember we were playing at night and there were like 10 people watching and I remember seeing my coach (Sam Aparicio) and this guy sitting there and he had on this kind of thing that Agassi used to wear, like a 'do rag or something. He was dressed in leg warmers. He almost looked like a bum kind of. There were no more than like 10 people in the stands because the match was at night. Back then you had to play two matches a day on Saturday of qualifying. So I won the match pretty easily and he came up to me but didn’t say anything. The next day I won the final round of qualifying against Mark Knowles and he came up and congratulated me and basically said something about Details Magazine wanting to run a story on an American who wasn't one of the top Americans but someone that the general public could identify with and would I be interested in doing it. He said it wouldn’t take much of my time and he wouldn’t need many interviews. I told him I was fine with it.

Tennis Week: What kind of access was he granted to you?

Michael Joyce: I remember wanting to get him a player's guest credential but he didn’t want one. He went in the cars with me a lot. He went into all my press conferences. I ended up beating (Greg) Rusedski the first round which is kind of funny because that was the first tournament that he played after switching citizenship so it ended up turning out to be a pretty big match. After that he had to leave for a few days so we talked on the phone a little bit and then I went to L.A. I beat (Jim) Courier in L.A. and then got to the quarters there and then I went to New Haven and he was there for that. I remember him saying we should go to a really nice restaurant because the magazine was picking it up.

Tennis Week: What was he like?

Michael Joyce: I just remember he had kind of a dark sense of humor. I remember he was very soft spoken and he didn’t really press me for much information. He really just observed everything and I never felt like he was really around that much. He ended up actually spending more time with my coach since he kind of respected the fact that I was playing and concentrating on what I needed to do which kind of made it easier to work with him. A couple of weeks later he called me and was very upset that Details had decided not to run the article. They had decided that after he had finished the whole thing that his writing was too good for their audience. He was really upset about it. I didn’t think much about it. I was doing pretty good and was getting some publicity for beating Courier. When you’re young you don’t care much about those things so it didn’t bother me. It was eight or nine months later that he called me and actually asked me if he could submit it to another publication. I had actually kind of forgotten about it. But he said he had worked really hard on it and had put a lot of time into it. I thought that was pretty cool because he could have obviously done that on his own. I said that was fine and that he could do whatever he wanted to do. I remember doing really well at Indian Wells and Key Biscayne, losing in the quarters there, I think, and then like the next day I got a call from my agent saying that Esquire had picked up the story and wanted to do a photo shoot. 

Tennis Week: What did you think of the story when you first saw it?

Michael Joyce: The funny thing is that when the article came out I kind of just ran through it and didn’t think much of it. I was at a tournament at the Queens Club and some of the girls there and the driver were making fun of me because in the article he put somewhere that he thought I might still be a virgin or something. He never really interviewed me. Most of his stuff was a complete observation. I remember when I originally read the article I didn’t really know what to think of it because I was still pretty young and his writing was almost over my head a little bit. 

Tennis Week: Did you like it?

Michael Joyce: To be honest I never even liked the article much just for the simple fact that I could never really understand it. When somebody is talking about you in a vocabulary that you really don’t understand it’s hard to … I don’t know. I never really liked it or disliked it. I guess I just never really understood why so many people liked it. I’ve had people to this day, at every tournament I’m at, come up to me and comment on that article at least two or three times in a week wherever I am in the world. They come up and say that is the greatest tennis article they’ve ever read. 

Tennis Week: Have you since gone back and read it?

Michael Joyce: I think now that I’ve read the longer version in the book ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again") and now that I’m older and a little more mature I’ve grown to like his writing more and have taken a different look at it. I gained a little more appreciation of it. Just the past few days as I’ve looked online at some of the thing he’s written I could see what a genius he really was. He was way before his time. Partly what made him the genius writer that he was the way he picked up little things that I did or said that I don’t even remember. Just listening and taking in the things that a normal person would never even know. I remember not even reading the whole thing when it came out. People were giving me such a hard time about the virgin thing, I mean joking with me about it, that I was thinking why would I say that? But as I got older I’ve seen that he was actually not really saying it but just comparing that you have to give up something to be good at something. But at the time it was such a whirlwind for me that I didn’t appreciate it as much as I did when I got older. When I read the book about five years ago I was like, "Wow, this is pretty impressive."

Tennis Week: Did you know he was a ranked junior player?

Michael Joyce: He mentioned that to me. He was really a student of the game. I remember asking him once to hit with me and he was like, "No way you’re getting me out there. You’d wipe me off the court." To be honest, at the time I couldn’t image him being a tennis player. He was smoking all the time and it didn’t look he took care of himself. I remember him telling me he was like a pusher and a grinder and that he liked the way I played and Chang played because it was the more of the style he played unlike a Sampras. He said he was a baseliner and a grinder and I know he loved the way Agassi played and he liked the way I played obviously. 

Tennis Week: What are some of the things you can take from the article now?

Michael Joyce: I think one of the big points of the article was that the difference between an Agassi compared to me was so minute but then to compare me to an average player like him was like night and day. Just how one person can do it better than the other. It probably drove him nuts because if try and analyze those things you can never figure it out. Like I played Sampras twice and it was close and it would come down to a point or two here or there but every time it wasn’t like I choked. It was that he would come up with an amazing shot. So you wonder how does someone do that. You can’t really teach that and that was probably the thing that he saw that the average person watching the sport doesn’t really see. Or they’ll talk about the top players because that’s who they see but even the guys that are playing the futures circuit are really good. I mean, they’ve given up their whole life for this sport. There is not that much difference between a guy ranked No. 400 and a guy ranked No. 10 in the world. 

Tennis Week: Did you read "Infinite Jest"?

Michael Joyce: He told me he was working on a book but I had no idea what it was and I remember him teasing me that I would never read it because it was too long. I looked at it and I thought no chance. 

Tennis Week: Were you ever aware that he battled depression?

Michael Joyce: No. I had no idea. I read somewhere that he had been battling depression for like 20 years. I really liked him. I got along with him well. He was definitely different than the average person. Not in a bad way. The thing that I liked about him, especially at the time, was that he was almost invisible. And that’s how he wanted to be. I mean he didn’t want to bother me at all and he made that clear from the beginning. He actually even said to me a couple of times that if I had lost because of what he was doing that he would feel terrible. I remember him really giving me my space and he was very soft spoken. The tournament at New Haven I barely remember him even being around. But that’s how he worked and that’s how he was. He wrote about Chang. He wrote about Agassi. He wrote about MaliVai Washington strictly on observation. A lot of people can do that I’m sure but the way he put things was pretty amazing. A lot of people probably think the same things but they don’t know how to put them into words.

Tennis Week: He once wrote that "…tennis is the most beautiful sport there is and the most demanding." What do you think about that statement?

Michael Joyce: That’s how I always felt. Other sports like basketball you have teammates you can count on. To be good at tennis you have to play for years and be mentally strong. There are so many things that go into it. Boxing you may see two or three fights a year but tennis you’re playing week after week. I think his appreciation for the sport and just the fact that he was around it for those couple of weeks, I don’t think the average person has any idea what these professionals go through. I don’t think the public has any idea what it takes to get to that level. I think that’s why this article touched so many people. It probably touched more of the general viewing public than the hardcore tennis fan. He really loved tennis so much, there is no doubt about that. It’s probably why he didn't write about it more. He probably loved it so much he may have wanted to sit back and just enjoy it.

Tennis Week: Any last thoughts?

Michael Joyce: I just think he’ll be really missed. Everything that’s written on him my name seems to come up. It’s amazing, really. To me it’s really incredible how many people have tried to contact me about this. To think back now at the time we spent together it’s almost surreal.

Some Memorable Tennis Writing by David Foster Wallace

"I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding....Basketball comes close, but it's a team sport and lacks tennis's primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close — at least at the lighter weight divisions — but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful — a level of abstraction and formality (i.e., "play") is necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).
David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory," from Esquire.

"One answer to why public interest in men's tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thugishness about the power-baseline style that's become dominant on the tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime...he's amazingly absent of finesse, with movements that look more like a heavy-metal musician's than an athlete's...what a top PBer (power baseliner) really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It's awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty."
David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory," from Esquire.

"John McEnroe...was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived — the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a blue polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad."
David Foster Wallace, "The String Theory," from Esquire.

"The game I spent so much of my youth perfecting, would not work against these guys [the pros]. Mine was a defensive game, a strategy Martin Amis once described as ‘craven retrieval.' My general approach was simply to keep hitting the ball back to the opponent until the kid screwed up."
David Foster Wallace, on his style of play

"There's a peculiar mix of stodgy self-satisfaction and relentless self-promotion and branding. It's a bit like the sort of authority figure whose office wall has every last plaque, diploma, and award he's ever gotten, and every time you come into the office you're forced to look at the wall and say something to indicate that you're impressed."
David Foster Wallace, on Wimbledon

On Nadal:
"He has a way of always cutting his eyes warily side to side as he walks the baseline, like a convict waiting to be shanked."

On Federer:
"Federer is of this type — a type that one could call genius, or mutant, or avatar. He is never hurried or off-balance. The approaching ball hangs, for him, a split-second longer than it ought to. His movements are lithe rather than athletic. Like Ali, Jordan, Maradona and Gretzky, he seems both less and more substantial than the men he faces."

On Chang:
"He has a mushroomed-shaped head, inky black hair, and an expression of deep and intractable unhappiness, as unhappy a face as I have seen outside a graduate creative writing program."

Tennis Week contributing writer Steve Pratt covered tennis for the Los Angeles Times. He is based in California.