Category: Podcast

The next pick for the Tennis Abstract book club is Álvaro Enrigue’s 2013 novel Sudden Death. Enrigue is Mexican, and he writes in Spanish. An English translation was published in 2017.

How could you not want to read this?

Sudden Death begins with a brutal tennis match that could decide the fate of the world. The bawdy Italian painter Caravaggio and the loutish Spanish poet Quevedo battle it out before a crowd that includes Galileo, Mary Magdalene, and a generation of popes who would throw Europe into the flames. In England, Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII behead Anne Boleyn, and her crafty executioner transforms her legendary locks into the most sought-after tennis balls of the time.

I hope you’ll read along with us! We’re tentatively aiming to discuss in late May, just before the French Open gets underway.

Comments are open, so if you have thoughts about the book you’d like to share, or topics you think we should put on the agenda for the podcast episode about the book, please leave them here.

Past book club selections / podcast episodes:

• Arthur Ashe, Days of Grace
• John Updike, Couples
• Gordon Forbes, A Handful of Summers

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!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba

This week’s guest is Julie DiCaro, author of the new book Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America, which comes out on Tuesday. I learned a lot from reading her book, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in the problems with sports media and the struggles that women face in every aspect of the sports industry.

We talk about the forces that keep sports media from holding stars, teams, and leagues accountable, and the ongoing struggle to keep athletes from brushing domestic violence and sexual assault accusations under the rug. Julie explains how Serena Williams is held to a higher standard than male and white female stars, and how she’d like to see Serena treated differently by fans, media, and fellow players.

We explore how women’s sports should be marketed and reported on, and what that might mean for the WTA as it considers a merger with the ATP. Finally, Julie tells me how it is difficult as a woman in the media to remain enthusiastic about the sports she covers, and why she thinks its important to keep doing what she does.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this week’s episode is about 60 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

Music: Everyone Has Gone Home by texasradiofish (c) copyright 2020. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial (3.0) license. Ft: spinningmerkaba

The next pick for the Tennis Abstract podcast book club will be Days of Grace, Arthur Ashe’s 1993 memoir.

I trust that readers are familiar with Ashe–if you’re not, now’s a good time to learn more about one of the most important figures in tennis history, the first Black superstar in the men’s game, and a three-time major winner. He wrote several books, and this one was the last, which he was editing until two days before his death at age 49.

Arthur himself should be recommendation enough to convince you that his memoir is worth reading, but if you want to scope it out a bit, here are the Los Angeles Times and New York Times reviews from 1993.

Carl and I are tentatively planning on talking about the book on the podcast in about a month, so if you’d like to read along with us and a deadline would help, let’s aim for April 14th.

I’ll leave comments open on this post, so if you have thoughts about the book you’d like to share, or topics you think we should put on the agenda for the podcast episode about the book, please leave them here.

Past book club selections / podcast episodes:

• John Updike, Couples
• Gordon Forbes, A Handful of Summers