Parnet asks if he thinks tennis has changed a lot since his youth, and Deleuze says of course, like in all sports, there are milieus of variation, and here one gets back to the topic of style. Deleuze finds quite interesting the question of positions <attitudes> of the body. There is a variation of positions of the body over spaces of greater or lesser length, and one would have to categorize the variables in the history of sports. Deleuze sees several: variables of tactics: in football, tactics have changed enormously since his childhood. There are position variables for the body’s posture: there was moment, says Deleuze, when he was very interested in the shotput, not to do it himself, but the build of the shotputter evolved at one point with extreme rapidity. It became a question of force: how, with really strong shotputters, to gain back speed, and how, with builders geared for speed, to gain back force? Deleuze found this question very interesting. He says that the sociologist Marcel Mauss introduced all sorts of studies on the positions of bodies in different civilizations, but sports is a domain of the variation of positions, something quite fundamental.

In tennis, even before the war, Deleuze recalls, the positions were not the same, and something that interests him greatly, again related to style, is the topic of champions that are true creators. Deleuze says that there are two kinds of champion, that do not have the same value for him, the creators and the non-creators. The non-creators are those who maintain a pre-existing style and unequaled strength, for example Lendl. Deleuze does not consider Lendl to be fundamentally a creator in tennis. But then there are the great creators, even on very simple levels, those who invent new “moves” <coups> and introduce new tactics. And after them come flooding in all sorts of followers, but the great stylists are inventors, something one certainly finds in all sports.  (L’Abecedaire de Giles Deleuze)

I’m very moved by this response by Giles Deleuze, which is not just a great way to look at athletics but other creative fields, like art and music, as well.  Currently, I’m writing a long piece on soccer (referred to, her on out, as ‘football’)  player Lionel Messi, in particular because of personal experience of overcoming a similar growth hormone problem, and this type of distinction, between creator and non-creator, seems especially fitting, illuminating.

Messi is often compared to Cristiano Ronaldo, a virtuouso Portuguese footballer whose chiseled features and arsenal of tricks, are certainly the opposite of the instinctual fervor that with Lionel plays and emanates from—not to say that Ronaldo is not passionately or libidinally invested in football but his arrogant and insouciant poise is the categorical opposite of an individual like Messi, who is light years more describable as “demure” and “unrehearsed.”  And this is certainly the appeal of Ronaldo as an entertainment figure and as a football idol: he is of an ability that is only achieved by the spontaneous marriage of superior athletic birthright and mastery of the soccer ball