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By Giri Nathan
[vc_empty_space height="15px"]A friend’s dad once told me about a trick he’d learned from a good tennis player, maybe even a semiprofessional one. The tennis player had faced an opponent who showed up wearing a shirt that said “Eat Beer.” What did that mean? Nothing. That was the point. There was nothing there to decipher. It was only meant to make you wonder why that verb would be paired with that noun, and why they would ever be put on a T-shirt. It was meant to introduce that second of puzzlement, which would be a second that you weren’t puzzling out how to beat him at tennis, which would be an advantage. Sometimes I think of Daniil Medvedev as the living embodiment of that T-shirt. Strangeness inheres in his game. He hits shots strange enough to make me think, “Why?” and I have to think that the opponent, for all his ferocious focus, is permitting himself a second of “Why?” too, right there on the court, and that’s a second gone to waste.