Episode 105 of the Tennis Abstract Podcast, with Carl Bialik of the Thirty Love podcast, takes on the third pick of our book club, Arthur Ashe’s 1993 memoir, Days of Grace.
The book gives us a chance to get inside the mind of one of the most important figures in tennis history. He was the first African American man to rise to the top of the tennis world, played a leading role in the professionalization of the sport, spoke out against apartheid South Africa, captained the U.S. Davis Cup team through the turbulent Connors-McEnroe era, and ultimately used his battle with AIDS as an opportunity to educate the public and raise money to fight the disease.
Carl and I consider whether he is sufficiently remembered in tennis today, whether his game was as mercurial as he claimed, how he compares to Billie Jean King, and whether we should chill out about the latest round of changes to the Davis Cup.
Next up in the book club is Alvaro Enrigue’s novel, Sudden Death. I’ll post a bit more about that later this week.
Thanks for listening!
(Note: this week’s episode is about 64 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)
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Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba
