Sudden Death

The Next World

The German historian and cultural critic Heiner Gillmeister believes he has discovered the oldest play-by-play account of tennis as we know it. An ur — ball game that predates everything: Italian calcio, English cricket, what in French is called jeu de paume and in Spanish pelota.

The first recorded tennis match in human history took place in hell and was a doubles match. It was played by four demons, using the soul of a French seminarist by the name of Pierre. In time, Pierre became abbot of the monastery of Marienstatt as Petrus I, and found fame. His story was preserved because Caesarius of Heisterbach recorded it in a volume called Dialogus miraculorum.

As the story tells it, Pierre the Idiot — as the first tennis player of all time seems to have been known in his youth — made a Faustian stumble. He had a terrible memory and was incapable of concentrating on anything, so to pass his exams at seminary he accepted a gift from Satan. It was a stone that contained all the knowledge of man, and all one had to do to possess that knowledge was squeeze it in one’s fist.

Brother Pierre did what any of us might have done in his place, and he got top marks in his exams without having to study. But one day he fell into something that we would now identify as a comatose state — which in his time was simply death. As he told it later, a foursome of demons extracted his soul from his body, feeling free to play tennis with it since the Idiot had unwittingly accepted the deal when he squeezed the stone.

The four demons, like four ordinary friends, made their way back to hell with the object they had borrowed from the world of the living and played a tennis match with their metaphysical ball. Pierre remained conscious and felt the satanic serves and returns in his flesh. According to his testimony, the match was particularly torturous because — as everyone knows — demons have steel fingernails and never trim them.

The fact that the first written account of a tennis game describes an eschatological battle recounted from the perspective of someone called Petrus I, pope of an alternative church of condemned men and killers, a church of ball and racket, is one of the little bones that history occasionally throws us.

In the second part of Don Quixote, Altisidora has a vision, in which she sees devils playing with rackets of fire, using books “full of wind and stuffing” as balls. Unlike Don Quixote, these books are in no condition to survive a second round. After the first volley “there wasn’t one ball that could withstand another or was in any condition to be served again, and so books old and new came in quick succession.”

In hell, souls are balls and bad books are balls. Demons play with them.