As a teenager, David Foster Wallace was a regionally ranked junior tennis player, though by his own estimation, he was “pretty untalented.” When it came to writing about the sport, however, he was a virtuoso.

In 1996, Wallace profiled Michael Joyce, who was then ranked 79th, for Esquire. “You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something,” he wrote. “At anything. I have tried to imagine; it’s hard.”

A decade later, Wallace aimed even higher and wrote about “the best tennis player currently alive. Maybe the best ever”—Roger Federer. For Wallace, Federer was the apotheosis of tennis. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty,” he wrote. “The relation is roughly that of courage to war.”

And when it comes to tennis battles, few have been better than the rivalry between Federer and Rafael Nadal, whom Cynthia Gorney profiled for The New York Times Magazine and prophetically described the toll the sport had taken on his body: “The image of Nadal in poetic self-immolation, the glorious athlete pushing himself resolutely toward his own undoing, is so mesmerizing and distressing that I’ve heard it raised by spectators and coaches and by former competitors who now run the tournaments Rafa enters.”

Few tennis players put their blood, sweat and cheers into the game as Jimmy Connors, the only man to win the U.S. Open on three surfaces. In his 1978 profile for Sports Illustrated, Frank Deford described a player raised by women to conquer men. Venus Williams, by contrast, was trained by her father to conquer women. (Except, perhaps, her sister Serena.) But as Sara Corbett wrote in her 2003 profile, Venus is a gentle tennis warrior: “Off the court, Williams has a gentle demeanor —a low-voiced calm that's leavened by youthful mirth. She speaks primly —''Oh, shivers!'' she exclaims when she has messed something up—and often she will collapse into giggles before she has finished a thought.”

In the end though, tennis is defined by the word that also exemplifies perfection in it—love. And in “The Most Beautiful Game,” novelist Geoff Dyer explained what he called “the lovely covenant of tennis.” Dyer wrote: “Despite the huge gulf between them and us, everything that happens to the top players during a Grand Slam match is replicated by an average player in a park.”