BONUS - Tennis Re-Lived: Alice Marble

38:42It's so, so complicated, isn't it, the relationship between Teach Tennant and Alice Marble and who Teach was as a coach. It strikes right to the heart of means justifying ends and agency of adults and sort of institutionalization and internalization of methods and beliefs, as you've talked about there. Like it just strikes right to the heart of so many complicated and fuzzy and difficult topics, which is still so, so relevant to player coach dynamics today. yeah I I feel conflicted every time I try to talk and or write about it about that relationship because it's undeniable that there were

39:49um exploitative coercive and I think it would be I think it would be reasonable to say abusive dynamics at play in that relationship um which would kind of intensify in the latter stages of their relationship but were kind of present from the start and I feel like it's really important to acknowledge that and be truthful about that um in some ways I'd love to be able to write about a a relationship between them that was more purely kind of nurturing but that wasn't the that wasn't the kind of reality that was there and it's difficult to see how that reality really could be there given how much had to be invested by someone how much kind of time and energy and specifically money had to be invested in Alice Marble with her ridiculous grips and her total lack of kind of family like wealth to fall back on you know so much had to be put in and Tennant was someone who didn't have a lot to fall back on you know so that investment from her really she was putting all her a lot of her eggs in Alice Marble's basket quite early and then that in itself becomes a fascinating question like why what was it that kind of drew her to drew her to Alice Marble I think certainly at first she saw herself in this young woman who whose family could not financially support her um who had learned to play on these kind of public rec courts in golden gate park and who was often kind of frowned on and yeah i think that there was i don't i don't think it's too fanciful to suggest that there was something going on there that Tennant both wanted wanted greatness for Marble but also wanted to act to vicariously experience something that she'd never got to have and I mean with all of that with all of that coming in you know how could the relationship not be very complicated it's very messy yeah and I'm quite sure that's a dynamic which is incredibly common and prevalent in coaching.

42:32And two things can be true. And yeah, it just makes it incredibly complicated. And in terms of, you know, ends justifying means, undeniably Alice Marble made massive progress as a tennis player under Teach Tennant. The great Bill Tilden happened upon one of their training sessions at the California Tennis Club. and his impressions were quoted in The Examiner. Never have I seen such speed with ease of motion in a woman player, he said. Not only as she strokes the ball, but as she covers the court as well. It's a tremendous factor and something that neither Mrs Moody or Miss Jacobs have, at least to this degree.

43:16But here is someone who seems to have the speed and freedom of motion of a Longlen and it's all backed up by great mechanics as well. No players in the world have all these qualities, but as I live and breathe, this girl certainly has. When she meets any of the others in a little while, the results will be inevitable. And in the end, they were. It wasn't instantaneous, but her progress could be judged by her results at the biggest tournaments that she played. the US Nationals, what we now know as the US Open. She made the third round there in 1932 and the quarterfinals in 1933. Her ranking improved from number seven at the end of 1932 to number three at the end of 1933.

44:07But there was a troubling moment in the middle of that 1933 season. Alice Marble was playing at the Maidstone Invitational event in New York and the event was It was elevated in importance because it went some way to determining who played in the US matches at the Whiteman Cup. Very, very prestigious team event at the time. And Marble had planned to only play singles at the Whiteman Cup. Sorry, had only planned to play singles at this Maidstone Invitational. but Julian Mirrick, who was the chairman of the event, informed her that she had to play doubles as well, partnering with Helen Wills Moody.

44:54Here's Madeleine Blase again. She said that he, Julian Mirrick, made it clear that her preferences carried no weight. His sway in tennis circles and his social prominence far outstripped the power of a teenager from California with a promising but uneven record. she had no right to interfere with his judgment. And besides, besides all of that, it was supposed to be an honour to play with Helen Mills Moody. She was a great champion. She'd won 180 straight matches and eight Wimbledon singles titles. But Alice Marble and Helen Moody, they had, well, at best, no relationship. And Moody generally was said to be quite cold towards Alice Marble and towards most people.

45:49In fact, she had a bit of a reputation at the time. So all of that was going on. And you had the heat. We're talking serious, serious heat. Temperatures rising to well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. And Alice Marble progressed to the latter stages of the event in both the singles and the doubles. and remember she hadn't planned to play both. And it meant that she had to play semifinals and finals of both competitions on the same day. Now, she'd already started to feel ill the day before. She said, my cockiness had long since evaporated, baked out of me by a relentless sun that was reaching its zenith and growing hotter by the minute.

46:34How did New Yorkers stand this humility? That is definitely something I've said before in the month of August. How did New Yorkers stand this humidity? The pounding in my temples reverberated through my body, echoing painfully in my joints and turning my stomach into a queasy knot. Now, in total, Marble played four matches, totaling 11 sets and 108 games. And she lost both finals, the singles and the doubles, largely, frankly, because of exhaustion. By the end of the day, Marble had apparently lost 12 pounds in weight. Davis Walsh, the international news service sports editor, heaped scorn on the officials who forced Marble to play through inhumane conditions.

47:24Is it sport? He wrote. The night of the competition. After it all, back at home, Alice fainted. fainted. Now from that moment onwards there was a general sense of unease about Alice Marble's health. She was often plagued with sudden fatigue and unexplained aches in her muscles and joints and it all came to a head at Roland Garros in 1934 during her first ever international competition. As soon as she arrived in Paris she apparently looked sickly and pale with her muscles aching again. Now taking part in a France-USA competition which coincided with Roland Garros, Marble suddenly crumpled in a faint, according to Helen Jacobs in her book Gallery of Champions.

48:13That was midway through the opening set of her singles match. She blacked out and only regained consciousness at the hospital. Here's Madeleine Blaise again. The photo of Alice Marble in a heap on the red courts at Roland Garros, slack-muscled, enervated to the point of immobility, watched over by two men in suits while her opponent attempted to deliver aid to her prone body, went around the world. Alice feared something worse than sunstroke was responsible for her, for the pain in her back and chest. I felt as if I'd been speared, she said. Now the diagnosis kept escalating in seriousness, started off as sunstroke, became anebia, gallbladder problems were speculated about, pleurisy, but most dire of all tuberculosis, which likely spelled the end of her entire tennis career.

49:09And after six weeks in France, she was bundled into a wheelchair to board the Aquitania and headed to New York on a voyage that lasted a week. In Causing Danger, Marble recalled that when Tennant met her off the boat back from Europe, it was the first time she'd ever seen Tennant cry. More characteristic was the furious argument that Tennant immediately had with the USLTA representative, who had come to demand that Marble account for her expenses abroad. Tennant also threw Julian Mirrick out of Marble's hotel room after he called her a bad investment and refused to pay her medical bills. I mean, I will just pause and point out that Julian Mirrick is in the tennis hall of fame and Eleanor Tennant is not.

50:03Marble was utterly devastated when the US LTA's medical specialist examined the x-rays of her lungs and proclaimed that she would never play tennis again. She went back to her family home to rest, but she only lasted a few weeks there before she wrote to Tennant, either begging for her help or asking for advice, depending on which version you're reading. Tennant, who was currently supporting her mother in hospital and her invalid sister Gwen at home, responded. She agreed to pay for Marble to be treated at the Pottinger Sanatorium outside Beverly Hills, doubling her teaching load to pay Marble's medical bills, which came to around$6 ,000 a month in today's money, and getting up at 5am every day to come and visit her.

50:51But Marble hated the sanatorium, which focused on enforced rest and insisted on feeding her up, which was a fairly common treatment regime for TB at the time. Marble wasn't even allowed to get out of bed except to go to the bathroom. Worse, her initial six-week stay at the sanatorium kept getting extended and extended. Marble felt that she was watching her body die from the enforced inactivity. When Marble turned 21, Tennant arranged for a mariachi band to come and play in her room while Marble blew out her candles. Marble cried. In Marble's version, after six months, she demanded that Tennant let her leave the sanatorium.

51:34In Tennant's version, After six months, Tennant decided it was time for Marble to leave. Either way, Tennant took Marble home to her own apartment. In courting danger, Marble wrote, I was ready to accept her help on any terms. Teach was my only hope. As Marble began slowly to exercise again, Teach arranged for her to consult doctor after doctor until they found one who confirmed that Marble did not have TB, but rather severe pleurisy and secondary anemia. Once her blood count reached 75 and she had lost 15 pounds, she would be able to play tennis again. Revitalised, Marble followed a strict diet and a programme of gradually increasing exercise.

52:20She was also tempted back to the tennis courts by the film star Carol Lombard. Lombard persuaded Marble to come and watch her own lessons with Tennant, incentivising her by gifting her a tiny dog named Jackie to help her pick up balls. Eventually, Marble was given the all-clear to play tennis again for the first time since that disastrous role on Garros. In Tennant's version, it was just the two of them. In Marble's, it was she and Louise Macy playing doubles against Tennant and Lombard. Tennant said that she would never forget the smell of oranges ripening in the sun on the day that she realised that Alice Marble was going to be able to play tennis again.

53:01Marble wrote, I still wonder what kept each going. What did she see in me that no one else saw? She believed in me more than I believed in myself. Spain's biography never really explains why Tennant did what she did for Marble. If her original decision to take on the teenager had made some kind of financial sense, the thousands and thousands of dollars she sunk into Marble's treatment and recovery made none. Maybe Tennant, like many children who grew up in unhappy homes, was most comfortable sinking herself into the task of trying to rescue somebody else. Maybe, in these years that saw her lose her mother to old age and her brother to suicide, she needed somebody she could help.

53:46Maybe she couldn't bear the thought of admitting defeat to the gatekeepers of the USLTA. Whatever her reasons, Tennant did provide an astonishing degree of care and support to Marble at the lowest point in her life. She also cemented a relationship of obligation and dependence in which Marble was consistently reminded that she could never pay back everything that she owed. Yeah, there is so much at play here at all times between these two, isn't there? And in the sort of society that they inhabit generally, I mean, it's just, it's so complicated. Um, Marble made the first tentative steps of her return in 1935, playing mostly in California with the East Coast tennis establishment in the form of Julian Mirrick again, intervening and preventing her from playing in the East.

54:42It really is a divide, isn't it? Unless she was evaluated by a doctor in New York. I mean, they just don't trust anybody in California, basically, on the East Coast, do they? this evaluation would take place at a time that would mean missing the qualifying tournaments that would have led to the chance to play in the east teach called it shameful and the press acted just as puzzled with one outlet calling it the strange case of alice marble this pattern continued in 1936 marble continued to prove herself winning a tournament in palm springs by beating two of the nation's top ten players and frequently, at teachers' requests, playing against men, but continued to suffer setbacks from the tennis establishment.

55:29The first came when she was left out of the Whiteman Cup team with the committee men saying they would like to see how she could stand up under a season's play before sending her across the sea. Later in the year, she received a telegram for the USLTA saying that they remained unconvinced of her health. and in light of these misgivings, she would not be allowed in any of the Eastern tournaments prior to the US National Championships. Once again, a committee of five men, including Mirrick, had reached the verdict. Teach was apoplectic. Eventually, it was agreed that Marble would prove her worth by playing qualifying matches against men, with several members of the committee who had objected to Alice's inclusion agreeing to watch and offer their judgement.

56:18Madeleine Blaise wrote,

56:33Marble impressed and was given the go-ahead to play at Forest Hills. Because of course she would impress, because she's bloody Alice Marble, and who are they? She won the tournament, beating top-seeded Helen Jacobs 4-6-6-3-6-2 in the final. Madeleine Blase wrote Teach sealed the victory with two comments when she rushed over to give her protégé an embrace I'm so proud of you, she said adding a delicious aside Was Mirrick's face red? At the end of 1936 the USLTA named Marble as number one in women's tennis in the United States knocking Helen Jacobs from the perch she'd held the four previous years.

57:19It was a controversial decision, given that Jacobs had won Wimbledon, but the editor of American Lawn Tennis, Stephen Wallace Merrihew, felt that the USLTA's decision was justified, because there must be some reward for winning the national championship. In 1937, Marble travelled to England for the first time and made the pilgrimage that every tennis player dreams about, to Wimbledon. She performed pretty well, reaching the semifinals and the singles. But on the way there, I was watching a documentary earlier, which showed her on the boat, saying that basically she's got to win it all. And that was the goal.

58:00And the British press, well, they had fun with the headline, Alice in Blunderland, after her 8-6-6-2 defeat to Yaya Jendrowska. naturally I wanted to win on my first attempt Marble said but after all I did no worse than many others who have attempted this feat but Marble's Wimbledon didn't end there as Matt was saying earlier she was always in the other tournaments she was always in the doubles and she won the mixed title with the legendary Don Budge who was thrilled to partner Marble if you are lucky enough to have a partner with the abilities of someone like Alice Marble Budge said just consider yourself blessed and don't worry about a thing Madeline Blaze wrote if Budge owned Wimbledon that year and he did win the triple crown then Marble owned the fashion front with the Associated Press reporting the American champion scored something of a personal triumph with her trim shorts and white jockey's cap Wimbledon had never seen anything like it before Following a shock defeat in the quarterfinals of the US National Championships in 1937, Marble reached the semifinals at Wimbledon again in 1938.

59:17But after that, she began to dominate the sport. Yeah, we're going to focus in now on a little bit of that dominance. And by the way, I do love all the old photos of Alice Marble in her hat. It really does stand out at the time and marks her out. It was a real trademark of hers to be wearing that hat on court. Did you know that she lined her hat with cabbage leaves? no she used to after after her kind of illness and recovery she a doctor had told her that she could do this and she used to line the inside of her hat with cabbage leaves to keep her cool on court and one time i can't remember what tournament it was but there was definitely an account of playing at some tournament in england and her hat falling off and all of the cabbage leaves coming tumbling tumbling out which apparently the spectators loved people were also absolutely obsessed with her shorts and the fact the fact that she wore shorts and how good she looked in them was a significant as it makes up for a significant proportion of the press coverage of Alice Marble I would say is it a known thing that cabbage leaves have a cooling effect Is this a stone I've left unturned in my attempts to stay cool at slams?

1:00:51Yeah, forget your fancy fan. There was a legendary baseball player who did it, and I can't remember if it was Babe Ruth or... God, who was the other one? Hannah, I've been faffing around with neck fans. Yeah, I mean... When the answer was there all along. Yeah, I mean, I imagine if they'd had neck fans, they wouldn't have been stuffing cabbage leaves in their hats. But I assume nobody's ever tried both. So I reckon, Catherine, at the US Open to come, that could be good content. Yep. Noted. So that takes us to the 1938 US National Championships. And Marvel regained the title that she'd won first in 1936.

1:01:41but it was a very dramatic event after winning her quarterfinal a massive hurricane interrupted play for an entire week it's a very famous well-known deadly hurricane in the in the new england and new york uh regions and yeah over 600 people were killed thousands of homes and farms were destroyed and the tournament itself could only resume once the turf had recovered from the damage. Kind of extraordinary that they actually finished the event. You sort of wouldn't have been surprised if they'd just stopped. But they did get back underway and Marble saved match points in her semi-final victory over Sarah Palfrey before a comfortable 6-love, 6-3 victory in Nancy Wynn, which lasted only 29 minutes in the final, the opening set of which apparently only lasted seven minutes, which really, really did make me laugh when I read that.

1:02:47Marble also won the doubles and the mixed doubles for her first triple crown at a major event, and that is a feat that she would go on to repeat at her next two US National Championships in 1939 and 1940 and at Wimbledon in 1939. And it's that Wimbledon win, which we're just going to focus on here because, of course, the Wimbledon Library has some excellent press clippings from that victory. The writer Gordon Lowe at the time, writing in the sphere, sort of said of Marble's win at Wimbledon 1939, Miss Marble went through six rounds of the championships losing only 21 games, a feat only beaten by Suzanne Longlin.

1:03:36Miss Marble lost only two games in the semifinal and final, a feat unchallenged in the history of the game. And then I realised that Iga Svontek did that last year. But obviously we don't talk about the final. She won all three events, a feat only equaled by Longlin among the women. Where does Miss Marble stand in the line of great players. I love it when I come across press clippings and they were having all the sorts of same conversations that we have now. Someone wins. Where do they rank? How do we... What does it mean? They were talking about what does it mean? And Gordon Lowe says, Miss Lottie Dodd, who won the title five times, considers Miss Marble the greatest of them all.

1:04:22Her rivals are obviously Longlen, Mrs. Helen Wills Moody, and Mrs. Lambert Chambers. Of these, I put Longlen still the greatest and Miss Marble because of her amazing versatility and being an amazing singles and doubles player second. In the semi-final then, she beat Mrs. Sperling of Denmark, 6-love, 6-love in 19 minutes. And a newspaper report at the time said that Miss Marble's lightning victory was astonishing. Mrs. Sperling could only win nine points in the first set and five in the second. The American, with sweeping drives of tremendous pace and power to the far corners of the court, scarcely met a counter from a player reputed to be one of the stoutest and fleetest retrievers in the game.

1:05:15Mrs. Sperling was rendered completely helpless against the storm of drives and volleys that were rained on her. she was never allowed to get into her stride so you know we're really hearing about a player here in her prime and everything has has has come together and she's just absolutely dominant and the same is true in the final where she beats britain's k stammers a lot of the press clippings as you can imagine we're very excited about k stammers getting to the wimbledon final and she seems lovely, Kay Stammers. She said afterwards, she was too good, I'm afraid. She played beautifully. She made no mistakes.

1:06:00Even if I hit the ball well, it did not make any difference. And Teach told Marble after winning Wimbledon for the first time that Marble had been simply wonderful. And Teach said, if you never play another match in your life, I'll still be a happy woman. um i found this little report from the times tennis correspondent at the time writing about uh the final who just did a good job i thought of describing the dominance that that marble had in this final uh the correspondent wrote there is little point in saying that miss stammers did not play quite so well as she had done in the semi-finals she was never allowed to she was pinned on the defensive most of the time by the very length and pace of Miss Marble's driving, to say nothing of the drop shots and volleys or the kicking serve high up on the backhand that was often opening up the court with the first move.

1:07:02Technically, Miss Stammer's undercut backhand strokes, vastly improved as they are in their control, could not live in such a storm. The key to the whole match was Miss Marble's unflinching defence in the backhand corner as a parry to Miss Stammers' best stroke, the cross drive of a left-hander. Harder and longer, the ball came back. Miss Marble covered the court so quickly that she could reach almost any shot in a stride or two, and it only needed Miss Stammers to lose length to have her mercilessly storming the net. Then her The use of the stop volley as of the drop shot showed how relatively slow Stammers was in moving forward.

1:07:45Miss Marble's control over every stroke in the game has never been so serene. So really, you know, painting a picture of this all court player that Alice Marble was. And when you when you read a lot about Alice Marble and you read people's comments on her game and when they say that she played like a man, it's often that element of the game that they're really referring to the fact that she was willing to really come forward and and play at the net i think a lot more than than the women of of the time were um and i i said that case dam has sounded sounded lovely she wrote a column in the in the sunday chronicle on the match and she said i want to salute miss alice marble the finest woman tennis player in the world to quote the words of my coach dan maskell who after alice had beaten me 6-2 6-love on the center court on saturday said she is the best since long then you did all you could and stammers went on to say one of alice's secrets is her wonderful confidence sort of contrasted there with the way her confidence was was talked about earlier by by the man stammers said she will rise to her feet after a dinner party and with complete and charming nonchalance will sing a song.

1:09:09She has more poise than any other girl I have ever met. To begin with, I think we were both a trifle nervous. I know I was. I pulled myself together and started playing quite well, but all the time I had the feeling that I was up against a superior force. I did not have a chance to find my touch. Alice was so very good twice i have played against mrs wills moody but compared with alice of 1939 she was easy her game is so much more varied she has every shot and makes them so easily yet with such power so that's you know one of one of marble's opponents at the time just heaping heaping praise on her um of course marble had the doubles and the mixed doubles finals to play they took place on the same day this is back in the era where the where the men's final had had already been played the women's final was after the men's final um bobby riggs had had been part of that men's final and apparently it was it was really bad not a good final this of course the the Wimbledon that Gottfried Von Cram should have should have been part of and should have won but but wasn't playing so the men's the men's final wasn't wasn't particularly loved by by the fans of this Wimbledon Bobby Riggs was in it and he was Alice Marble's mixed doubles partner and Marble was apparently quite frustrated by him as a partner despite their general dominance over the field there was this feeling that he wasn't there was this feeling that he wasn't taking it very seriously He was a bit of a joker, Bobby Riggs.

1:10:49And he had, however, placed a bet on him and Alice Marvel winning the mixed doubles. And that sort of seemed to galvanise him on the final day when he realised that he might be able to win something more from this. And he did take the final seriously and they won it 9-7-6-1. uh marble sang two songs at the champions ball uh you know we know she was she was a singer and they they always wanted her to perform on these occasions and and she chose the songs stardust uh which apparently came up in the crown a in season five of the crown apparently that that song gets performed that looks up on youtube and the whole comments are just filled with people saying oh i'm here from from the crown um she sang stardust and she sang this can't be love um so after that she headed home and uh madeline blaise writes alice and teach headed back to the united states on july the 19th 1939 leaving from southampton she told the british press that she'd had a marvellous time, inspiring at least one headline to feature the inevitable pun, marvellous, and that she would be back again next summer.

1:12:14Most certainly I will be coming back, Marble said. I always enjoy my trips to England and I'm looking forward to next Wimbledon. But she would never play at Wimbledon again. Due to the Second World War, Wimbledon was not held again until 1946 by which point marble had turned professional and there is this this big hanging sense of what if about alice marble's career you know how much more could she have achieved in in the amateur game if if she if she had the chance to enter the tournaments and and she hadn't turned professional but but we will never know she was the dominant player at at the time of the outset of the second world war um for a bit she kept playing in the united states states she she won the triple crown as i said again at forest hills back to back years 1939 and 1940 and she was named the outstanding woman athlete by the associated press in both of those years and um the great bud collins said that marble's amateur career finished by purring uninterruptedly victorious, leaving intact a 22 tournament and a 111 match winning streak across singles, doubles and mixed doubles.

1:13:40So many brilliant cameos from other tennis relived characters. Collins, Tinling. It's just so great. I love it. So yeah, on the 12th of November 19th, 1940, Alice Marble announced that she was turning pro. Now, her autobiography framed that decision as largely the result of pressure from Teach Tennant, who wanted Marble to leverage her post-Wimbledon celebrity into financial rewards, essentially wanted her to make hay while the sun was shining. That autobiography depicts Marble telling Teach what's left for me. There may not even be a national tournament next year. I'm a champion. Let's make the most of it.

1:14:33The New York Times wrote that Marble was one of only three women alongside Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Longland who had ever been big box office. That's a very Patrick Moratoglu quote, isn't it?

1:14:49Weintraub quotes Colonel John Kilpatrick, the president of Madison Square Garden, saying that Marble could revive what he called the dying game of pro tennis. She has beauty and grace and a, ah, what's it called? Oomph these days. That's very Greg Ruzetsky. He's got what I call it, isn't it?

1:15:14She'd pack them in, he said. She could make$50 ,000 as easily as she could hold a tennis racket. Ultimately, it was a$25 ,000 check which Alice Marble initially got for turning pro. She signed a contract with Wilson for an exhibition tour alongside Don Budge, Bill Tilden and Mary Hardwick. And at the press conference to announce the tour, Marble said, I'm genuinely thrilled and excited about going to work. For the first time, I will have the time and money to do the things I've wanted to do. One of my chief ambitions in life is to be a concert singer. And I also want to do something in radio. She was already making frequent appearance in vaudeville shows and at nightclubs.

1:16:01She started appearing regularly on the radio doing sports punditry. But this pro tour, which kicked off with a match at Madison Square Garden, watched by 12 ,000 fans. It didn't leave Alice Marble much time or energy for much of anything, much of any of those pursuits, which is what she was so eager to do more and more of. Marble, Hardwick, Tilden and Budge played at 61 stops over four months on a canvas court, which would be rolled up after each match and taken to the next location. That's very Champions Tour, that, isn't it, David? of the 61 matches, Hardwick, Mary Hardwick, won just three. Marvel had said she wanted to do things other than tennis, and despite that hectic schedule, she did.

1:16:54She was recruited to President Roosevelt's National Fitness Council as Assistant Director of Civilian Defence in charge of Physical Fitness for Women. That is a long acronym that I haven't bothered to work out, but wow. Together with her deputy, Mary Kay Brown, or Brownie, the three-time US Open champion and longtime friend and mentor, and a longtime friend and mentor, Marble went on a four-month tour of the country giving a speech entitled, Civilians Bit, Stay Fit, which directly linked national security to the physical fitness of its civilian population. Her rhetoric intensified after Pearl Harbor, which of course was when the USA entered into World War II.

1:17:41Women who came staggering on high heels into the various volunteer services, women who want to help but are underweight and tired and hysterical are a drag in the wheels of defence. They must get 10 % stronger before their willingness to do their share in this crisis can be of value, she said. It's hard not to read some projection into this as Marble herself had been turned down from every volunteer service that she had tried to join on the basis of her brush with TB. In a post Pearl Harbor world, however, it became much more important to get women into the factories than it was trying to show them that fitness could be fun.

1:18:22Marble resigned her post and was left at a loose end. She'd sacrificed her amateur status to turn pro, but now the USA was at war. there weren't going to be any more money-making exhibition tours. She hadn't succeeded in becoming a singer or in carving out a permanent job in radio. She'd volunteered as much as she could for war-adjacent work, telling the AP that this is an important age for women. For the first time, we're in a man's war and doing a man's work. I'm happy and grateful to be part of it. But she didn't really have a job contributing to the war effort, not like Brownie, who was volunteering with the Red Cross, or Helen Jacobs, who was working with the US Navy Intelligence.

1:19:08She said, I wanted to do something important, something to serve my country like Helen Jacobs. Instead, I was writing comic books. Now that somewhat disparaging reference is to her involvement with the launch of Wonder Woman The iconic superhero got her own comic book in 1942 and Marble, meeting publisher Max Gaines at a cocktail party had suggested that it should include illustrated stories of real life Wonder Women alongside the heroine's adventures Marble was hired on the spot as associate editor and the first issue of Wonder Woman included her name on the masthead she researched and scripted biographies of inspirational female figures including Florence Nightingale, Edith Cavill, Joan of Arc, Susan B.

1:20:04Anthony Helen Keller and Lucretia Mott who were included in 19 of the first 20 issues of Wonder Woman before the segment Wonder Women of History was replaced by Marriage a la Mode.

1:20:22In August 1943, Marble got back to touring, but not for money. She paired with Mary Hardwick for a USO tour of the WAC, the Women's Army Corps camps, which we'd see them play a singles match against each other before pairing with a member of the WAC for a doubles match. Again, it's feeling very Champions Tour pro-am. This turned into a near constant tour of military bases, hospitals and camps where Marble and Hardwick would lay down their canvas court. We played on the rolling decks of ships, on baked earth courts and in a variety of gyms, armories and concert huts. This was an incredibly physically gruelling endeavour with Marble and Hardwick typically travelling all morning before having lunch with officers, playing tennis in the afternoons and then spending the evening dancing with officers and GIs The tour was originally only in the USA but was extended to bases in Panama and Guatemala During this trip, the jeep which was transporting Marble between bases crashed and she was lucky to escape with only minor injuries In September 1944, Marble and Hardwick played a significant mixed doubles match at the Cosmopolitan Club in Harlem, which saw the two white women partner two pioneering black players, Robert Ryland, then a private in the army, but who would go on to become known as the first black tennis pro and a coach and mentor to Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters, among others.

1:21:55and Dr. Reginald Weir, sometimes called the Black Bill Tilden, who'd go on to become the first black man to play at the US Open. Marble told the Harlem crowd that tennis may be understood by all races and that when we can respect a fellow, regardless of who he is or where he comes from, for his ability and fineness, then that is something in anybody's language. One of the people present that day was Althea Gibson. Porting Danger, which was published posthumously in 1990 and written with freelance travel writer Dale Leatherman, tells two big stories about Alice Marble during the Second World War.

1:22:40The first is a tragic wartime romance, and the second is a spy thriller straight out of the imagination of Alfred Hitchcock, or at least his non-union equivalent. Both are incredible stories which would place Marble's life in a new light, if they're true. Let's tackle the romance first, because this is at least a story that there is evidence Marble told multiple times outside of the pages of Courting Danger, although the details do shift with each telling. In Courting Danger, Marble tells the story of how she met a handsome army captain named Joseph Crowley while singing and playing table tennis to entertain GIs at the famous Stage Door Canteen in New York.

1:23:22They fell in love and married in secret aboard a ship in New York Harbour, Marble defying Tennant's disapproval to do so. Marble got pregnant but suffered a miscarriage after a car accident and was devastated when Crowley died in the skies above Germany in 1944, so devastated that she attempted suicide with a bottle of sleeping pills, rescued in the nick of time by Tennant and Brownie. It's a really tragic story. Marble finally finding love and finally finding a way to envisage a future for herself as a wife and a mother outside of her tennis stardom. And there is some corroboration in a United Press story from 1944 which reported that Marble was engaged to an army captain named Joe.

1:24:09However, Marble's biographer Robert Weintraub has been unable to find any evidence of a man named Joseph Crowley No record of his service or his death in the war Nor any evidence that a marriage licence was ever issued for Marble in New York between 1940 and 1945 He does find documentary footage of Marble from 1986 where she holds up a framed photograph of herself dancing with an army officer who she identifies as Joe Crowley Weintraub very tentatively identifies the man in the photo as a Captain Jack Crane although Crane did not die in the war He also says that the fact that Marble kept a photograph of herself with this man for 40 years makes it hard to believe that there was no relationship at all I'm not sure I buy that but with the current evidence it's impossible to be certain what happened It's more interesting to wonder why Marble might have told this story both at the time and throughout subsequent decades.

1:25:11During the Second World War, an engagement or marriage to a man serving overseas, especially one who was engaged in intelligence work which meant that his identity had to be concealed, would have provided unimpeachable camouflage for anything in Marble's personal life which she might have not wanted anyone to find out about. That could have included her relationship with William DuPont, who she met in 1940. DuPont was the head of an extremely wealthy family who had made their money in banking and munitions and he was extremely taken with Marble. In Marble's telling, she refused numerous proposals of marriage from DuPont and Courting Danger is a bit coy about the extent of their relationship.

1:25:52But Weintraub quotes Rita Mae Brown, the legendary feminist writer best known for her autobiographical novel Ruby Fruit Jungle, who became friends with Marble near the end of her life, as telling him bluntly that Marble was kept for years by DuPont, accepting his money in exchange for sex and arranging her schedule to accommodate his. DuPont married another tennis player, Margaret Osborne, in 1947, but Marble received financial support from DuPont and subsequently his estate for the rest of her life. More potentially explosive than her relationship with DuPont was Marble's sexuality. While Courting Danger only reveals one romantic relationship with a woman, a brief but intense affair with a woman named Margarita Tika Madrigal, it's notable that all of the emotionally intimate and long-lasting relationships of Marble's life were with women.

1:26:48Even in the last years of her life, she wrote to Rita Mae Brown that Brown had changed her life from the neck up and the waist down. Moreover, just being a female athlete especially one whose muscular and imposing physique and supposedly masculine style of play were constantly commented on by the media exposed Marble to speculation and even suspicion around her sexuality and Marble was certainly aware of the potential consequences In Courting Danger, she writes feelingly about the way that Bill Tilden was treated contemptuously by his fellow players and like a criminal by society in general He talked to me only once about his homosexuality, trying to find the words to express his torture.

1:27:33He didn't need to. It was written all over his face. Marble also writes about the women who would come to see her clandestinely during her tour of WAC camps with Hardwick. I frequently had late-night visits from women whose interest in me went beyond tennis. It was courageous and foolhardy for them to admit they were lesbians, but they did. I knew their loneliness only too well. I know you didn't choose to feel the way you do, I told a young woman who confided in me. It just happens, and only a person who has experienced it knows that love is blind. It can't tell the difference between the sexes.

1:28:14If you happen to fall in love with a man, the world gushes its approval. If you fall in love with a woman, you're treated like a monster. Don't ever think that you are or be ashamed. There are many people who feel as you do and you can find happiness. So it's not difficult to see why Marble might have exaggerated or invented a wartime romance to protect herself from speculation around her sexuality. As for why she kept telling the story, there's a part of me that wonders whether it became a way for her to express other more ambiguous but equally devastating losses that she suffered during those years.

1:28:53The sense of finding love, happiness, a future, only to have it snatched away by impersonal global forces, mapped pretty neatly onto the way in which Marble's tennis career, first as an amateur then a professional, had been taken away from her by the outbreak of the Second World War. Years in which she subsequently struggled profoundly to find a place for herself and felt useless or unwanted. Or it might have been easier for Marble to explain what she might have seen as her failure to find or form an intimate long-term domestic partnership with someone by focusing on this tragic romanticised loss rather than grappling with truths that were more complicated and messy.

1:29:34Complicated and messy also sums up the way that Marble's relationship with Eleanor Tennant ended, an ending which also took place during these years. Marble and Tennant shared the money she earned as a professional 50-50 as Marble attempted to pay back the enormous sums she owed Tennant but she never would. While Marble based herself in New York, Tennant spent at least part of the year in California going back to coaching. Courting danger describes a period of worsening alcoholism for Tennant which often led to outbursts of verbal abuse and even threats of suicide a classic tool of coercive control.

1:30:11Ultimately, Tennant left Marble and returned to California full-time, leaving Marble living alone for the first time in her adult life. As described in Courting Danger, Marble approached Tennant for a hug as she left, but Tennant shoved her hard in the chest, pushing her over. It was the end of a relationship which had grown increasingly codependent and abusive, but it was also the end of the longest and closest relationship either woman would ever have outside their families. The body of Courting Danger ends with the breakup of the relationship, as if Marble's story had ended with it, relegating her remaining 45 years of life to an epilogue.

1:30:51Before that, however, Courting Danger tells a second and far wilder story about Marble's wartime experiences. Briefly, Marble narrates being recruited by US Army intelligence to spy on a former lover she calls Hans Steinmetz, a Swiss banker suspected of hiding Nazi funds. Marble was given espionage training and sent to Geneva under cover of playing exhibition matches, where she reconnected with Steinmetz, ultimately infiltrating his chateau, stealing the key to the safe hidden in a wine cellar, photographing documents proving Steinmetz was hiding Nazi assets, and escaping via a car chase through the mountains, only to be double-crossed and shot in the back by one of her American handlers.

1:31:41Marble was rescued and woke up in hospital where she was able to make up for the loss of the photographs she'd shot because of her photographic memory of the documents and ultimately returned to the USA after being told she could never tell anybody about what had happened. all of this sounds so much the stuff of spy thrillers that it probably won't be a surprise although it might be a disappointment to learn that it's almost certainly not true it's impossible to prove that something didn't happen but it didn't happen subsequent marble I don't believe you, Hannah. I don't believe you. I know it's tragic.

1:32:25Subsequent marble biographers have gone pretty deep on this story. But to summarise, there is no record of marble being in Switzerland, which, given the fact that her whole cover was supposedly provided by her international stardom in a series of highly publicised exhibitions, it's pretty damning evidence against this story. her movements during this period on american soil are quite well documented and there's not really any window of time where she could have been on a spy mission and or recovering from a gunshot wound it was it's the gunshot wound isn't it she she just took it a step too far yeah just yeah yeah it was the car chase and and the shooting yeah if she just if she could have got away with it.

1:33:11If you'd run out that final double crossing, you know, if it was just, you know, and then I fled to the chateau with the photographs of the secret Nazi ledger in the safe in the wine cellar, I think she probably would have been okay. Absolutely, yeah. Wineshop also tries and fails to identify any real life person who could have been Hans Steinmetz. Courting Danger's ghost writer Dale Leatherman declined to go into detail about which parts of the story came directly from Marble but Weintraub quotes her as insisting that Alice signed off on all of it Weintraub also sought out the input of Rita Mae Brown who worked with Marble on a script for a never made TV movie of Courting Danger and became close with Marble in her final years Brown told Weintraub that she believed Marble's target it was actually an Austrian Nazi and said that she had seen scars on Marble's back which could have been from a gunshot wound.

1:34:13It's so hard to know what exactly to make of all of this. Dale Leather and Rita Mae Brown and Alice Marble all had a powerful financial incentive to make a story as melodramatic and thrilling and action-packed as possible. That doesn't mean there might not have been a kernel of truth to it, although nobody has so far found anything in the available historical evidence that resembles that kernel. Marble is an unreliable narrator of her own life, but she was also someone who suffered a lot of trauma, which the context within which she lived made it almost impossible to talk about other than encoded or fictionalised ways.

1:34:58Maybe part of what fuelled this story was partly her sense that the extraordinary achievements and adventures of her life had been forgotten By the time the Second World War was over, the world had largely moved on from Alice Marble She played a second pro tour in 1945, but even then it was mainly capitalising on nostalgia Weinshub reports that Marble's game was still impressive enough that if she had been eligible to play at the upcoming US Open she would have been one of the favourites. But she wasn't eligible. And alongside Tilden and Budge on the pro tour, she had already come to seem like a figure from bygone days.

1:35:36It's not a coincidence that biographers of Alice Marble have heavily played up the angle of Marble's spy adventures, even while thoroughly debunking them. This is how you get people to talk about Alice Marble and to kind of care about the things that she did is by leaning into the hook of these kind of fictionalised spy exploits. I will say that it feels like that's changing now where people are interested, people now are kind of mainly seem quite interested in the ways that she kind of supported Althea Gibson and was part of kind of the desegregation of Tannis. But up until recently, you know, nobody was that keen on getting into the Alice Marble story unless it was to sort of capitalize on the thrill of the thought that she might have been a spy while also debunking her claims to being a spy.

1:36:52Hannah, there have to be some advantages to living in a post-truth world. And mine is that I choose to believe that Alice Marble was a US spy and that Stein, what was he called? Stein, the chap that was proven, Steinmetz. Steinmetz. Steinmetz was real and there was a car chase and there was a chateau and it's all true. and at the very least we need that uh tv movie of courting danger to be to be made absolutely there's a script kicking around in a drawer somewhere isn't there i mean the very i mean but a tv movie about alice marble written by rita may brown like what an incredible right i don't i don't care if it's true i want that story but you know unsurprisingly i think the the reason the tv movie never got made was that no one could prove any of this stuff but you know one thing that occurred to me just then which i haven't really thought about before is that that story also there's a sense of her kind of there's a sense of a kind of like a sexual relationship which is in some way kind of exploitative where almost like u.s intelligence are exploiting her to get to Steinmetz.

1:38:13And I just, I wonder how much that's a refracted version of the ways in which, through her relationship with kind of William DuPont, the ways in which she was, to some extent, having to kind of trade on her sexuality in order to live, because it was so difficult for her to earn money, earn money through through playing tennis yeah

1:38:44yeah the the thing that that comes across to me when you're when you're telling the story and and the there's the big question mark over whether it's true or not and the reasons why she might you know make it up or at least elaborate and and make it sound more dramatic than it was I still can't get over the fact that her life was incredible. There's so much to her story already. You don't even need to do this in order to, to me at least, be the most fascinating part of tennis history and just life generally. And I mean, you know, we're going to go on to talk now about her role in Althea Gibson's story, which in itself is, I mean, this is the moment that I remember thinking, we need to do a show about Alice Marble.

1:39:34I realize, you know, coming into doing tennis radio generally, there are so many gaps in my historical knowledge of tennis, and Alice Marble was another of them. And I only discovered that when hearing about her role in Althea Gibson's story. And if we go back in time to 1950, Gibson was, you know, she was good enough to be playing at the U.S. Nationals, which became known as the U.S. Open at Forest Hills. But she was turned down flat by the USLTA, hiding behind technicalities, as many organisations did in the era. And they reasoned that Gibson just hadn't accrued the requisite number of matches on grass.

1:40:17Well, Alice Marble, who'd been Althea's childhood hero, she wasn't having that. She stepped in and as Weintraub wrote, Marble did what she did best at this stage in her life. She put pen to paper and unleashed a broadside in the form of her column. In the July 1950 issue of American Lawn Tennis, Marble published her famous column in support of Althea Gibson titled A Vital Issue. The periodical, which was seen as the bible of the sport at the time, prefaced the piece with a caveat. Miss Marble's column this month deals with an issue of such importance to the game that we felt its rightful position was on a page specifically devoted to opinion.

1:41:07At times we may disagree with opinions, but in this case, American Lawn Tennis wishes to go on record as wholeheartedly supporting the sentiments and opinions expressed by Miss Marble in the following editorial. Marble's column read, I think it's time we faced a few facts. If tennis is a sport for ladies and gentlemen, it's also time we acted a little more like gentle people and less like sanctimonious hypocrites. If there is anything left in the name of sportsmanship, it's more than time to display what it means to us. If Althea Gibson represents a challenge to the present crop of women players, it's only fair that they should meet the challenge on the courts.

1:41:54Not the inner sanctum of the committee, where a different kind of game is played. If she has refused a chance to succeed or to fail, then there is an ineradicable mark against a game to which I have devoted my life, and I would be bitterly ashamed. She is not being judged by the yardstick of ability, but by the fact that her pigmentation is somewhat different. The entrance of Negroes into national tennis is as inevitable as it has been proven to be in baseball, in football or in boxing. There is no denying so much talent. Eventually the tennis world will rise up en masse to protest the injustices perpetrated by our policy makers.

1:42:41Eventually, why not now? I've never met Miss Gibson, but to me, she's a fellow human being to whom equal privileges ought to be extended. Speaking for myself, I will be glad to help Althea in any way I can. If I can improve her game or merely give her the benefits of my experiences, as I have done many other young players, I'll do that. If I can give her an iota more confidence by rooting my heart out from the gallery, she can take my word for it, I'll be there. Here's Weintraub on the impact of Marble's letter. The gambit worked, he wrote. The USLTA got Althea Gibson playing a trial tournament at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club in South Orange in New Jersey, and she did well enough to convince the USLTA to include her in the Nationals.

1:43:32And on 28th August 1950, she became the first African-American of either sex to compete in the Nationals. She won her first round 6-2, 6-2. Alice wrote a follow-up column published in November titled An Open Letter to Althea Gibson, in which she said of Althea, You were blessed with more natural ability than any woman on the courts today. You're a bold player and you have that rare spark. Writer Bruce Schoenfeld noted that Marble's letter changed the history of the sport. In a small way, it also changed the course of American history. Perhaps blacks would ultimately play in the US championships, just as they eventually integrated the NBA, Augusta and the Senate.

1:44:20But without Marble, it certainly wouldn't have happened in 1950. I wonder how much of that was kind of fuelled by how many hoops she had to jump through in order to convince Julian Mirrick and Hizzilk of her right to play. Just the extent of kind of gatekeeping that could be the gatekeeping that was enabled by the kind of amateur system. Absolutely, yeah. Marble got back in touch with Tennant when Tennant started working with teenage prodigy Maureen Connolly. and Tennant asked Marble to work with Connolly on her serve. Marble wrote, I spent several weeks in La Jolla with Maureen, who was willful, cocky, and difficult to teach.

1:45:14I had a San Diego pitcher teach her how to throw a curveball so she would have a slice, and then I refined her serve. I was glad when the work was over, but satisfied when I saw the change in Maureen's game. Marble and Tennant also worked as technical advisors, with Marble also playing a small role, for the Catherine Hepburn Spencer Tracy film Pat and Mike in 1952. Marble worked as a doctor's receptionist for eight years before returning to tennis coaching and teaching full-time, which is what she did until a few years before her death in 1990 from a second bout of liver cancer. Marble coached Darlene Hart, the US Open champion in 1960 and 1961, and Billie Jean King, working with her on weekday afternoons and all day on Sunday.

1:46:02Marble writes that she was concerned about Billie Jean King's weight and Billie Jean was all serve and volley with no groundstrokes to speak of, but she loved tennis. And at 15, she was remarkably earnest at improving her skills. She had champion written all over her. I'm really struck there by the kind of reminiscent way that people talked about Alice Marble when she was young with saying that she was carrying too much weight and that she didn't have any ground strokes but she wanted it Marble coached Billie Jean King for about eight months before Marble became ill with pneumonia and pleurisy when I called to tell her I was ill she showed no concern for me, only for her missed lessons when her parents called to apologize for her i told them to find a new coach but marble does note that when billy jing king won wimbledon for the first time she acknowledged marble marble afterwards the role that marble had played in her career marble and tenet were rival coaches for a while and corresponded until tenet died which marble says in courting danger happened in 1963 but actually happened in 1974 so So just one final kind of bizarre factual inconsistency, which probably reflects a deeper emotional truth that we will never quite fully understand.

1:47:33The unreliable narrator of it all just is a fascinating extra element to this particular story. And I'm not sure we've ever... And Matt, I'm not sure you've ever really had that before. No, I think, I mean, it puts me in mind of Ted Tinling and the phone call from Hitler and that story. I think that's probably the one that jumps out from the Tennis Free Live canon. canon you know the sort of oh i'm desperate for it to be true but but is it true genre of story but no we've certainly never had had one like this and it's quite it's quite interesting to me that there are two um biographies of alice marble written quite recently you know the weintraub book and the and the madeline blaze book are both fairly fairly recent and i don't know maybe I'd have thought that the whole unreliable narrator thing would make embarking on a biography like that really daunting, but actually maybe it also makes it all the more fascinating and appealing for a biographer, you know, because as Hannah's talked so well about, you know, there's the whole not only what happened and what Marble said, but why she felt the need to fabricate and embellish and yeah it she is truly truly fascinating um and that pretty much brings us brings us to the end and i just i just wanted to finish with um some of the final words from weintraub's book actually because i found them quite touching um the the one of the other things i knew about for alice marble was that the courts in San Francisco are named after her.

1:49:33She has some courts there named after her. And Weintraub took a visit to those courts for his book, and he wrote, The Alice Marble Tennis Courts sit in a part of San Francisco that is eye-catching even by the standards of that knockout of a city. The courts are just a block away from a tourist landmark, the fabled steep vertical snake of Lombard Street. I push past the line of people snapping Instagram-ready shots on their phones and work my way up to a set of stairs on a block closed to traffic. Suddenly, the half-hidden jewel of this park in the sky appears. Partially obscured by shrubbery, the words Alice Marble Tennis Courts are stenciled into the stone that sits just past the last step.

1:50:23Otherwise, there's no mention of this eponymous star. It's a fitting blend of public bravado and guarded intimacy that perfectly captures the court's namesake. It's free to play on the courts here. There's a practice wall and plenty of benches that provide exquisite views. On the day I visit, the adjacent basketball court is getting more use than the tennis courts. I ask a few of the players if they know who Alice Marble was. They do not. as Rita May Brown put it you only live once and that woman lived the fact that her career on the court has been mostly forgotten is the nature of sport there's always another player another event to crowd out the achievements of yesteryear the debate about some of her stories and the ultimate sources and truths that they came from likely will never be fully resolved but the fullness of her time on the planet, whether or not you count those disputed days in Switzerland in the service of the war effort, or the ultimate choices and intimate experience she had in private, should be better remembered, celebrated even.

1:51:36So to Alice, angels keep. That was the phrase given to her by Jessie Marble, her mother, who used that instead of goodbye. Alice always bade farewell to friends and lovers with those words. Rita May Brown, to whom Alice gifted a silver goblet inscribed with the words angels keep, mentioned to me that late in Alice's life, the two of them got out on the court to hit some balls once more. She had cancer and was in her 70s, Rita May said, but the ground strokes were still magic.

1:52:16And she died in Palm Springs, didn't she? Which is fitting, given when we're recording this. Indian Wells just got underway. The 13th of December 1990, she died. And yeah, she hasn't been, you know, well that that little story about the courts in San Francisco she's not totally forgotten but you have to go you have to know what you're looking for to find her I think in the in the history of the sport and I'm very glad we did and I'm sure she'll come up again over and over and over she's going to continue to be a recurring character, I hope. In some ways, in some ways, isn't all of tennis history just the marble extended cinematic universe?

1:53:12Yeah, absolutely. Very well put, Hannah. And thank you so much for your, I mean, absolutely incredible work on this show and telling this story. yeah you've really enriched the whole process yeah thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about her you know it was yeah the reason that I had all of this kind of material was just I found her so interesting and I found her story so kind of moving in so many different ways and yeah like I say it turned out I had so many Alice Knopfler thoughts and feelings I desperately wanted to share so I really appreciate being able to do that This was Hannah's off-cut material, folks This was the unused material from research for a Teach Tenant project which is absolutely wild So yeah, it would have been tragic if it had gone to waste So, yeah, hopefully this feels like a good home for all of that work.

1:54:23And, yeah, I've really, really enjoyed it. Thank you. And thank you, Matt. Thank you to the Wimbledon Library. Always. Yes, all of this made possible by the Wimbledon Library. It must be said. What a dream team. Hannah, Matt and the Wimbledon Library. Yeah, and Hannah and Matt bumping into one another at the Wimbledon Library is one of my very favourite things. We mostly talked about traitors. It wasn't my most productive trip to the Wimbledon Library, but it was one of the most fun ones. Again, I had a lot of thoughts and feelings about the finale of Celebrity Street. God, yeah, you were so angry with Alan Carr.

1:55:10Still am, still am. Every time I see him on TV, I switch it off.

1:55:20Right, Alan Carr, a fitting place to end today's edition of Tennis Relived. It really has been a joy. Hannah, thank you once again. Folks, if you're not on the barge, get on the barge. That's where you'll find Hannah every day and all sorts of other fun and interesting people that are talking about tennis and sharing their thoughts and feelings. so yeah it's all there for friends of the tennis podcast so check it out if you haven't already and thank you very much for being a friend of the pod and for making shows like this possible we'll be back with more bonus content especially for you very soon indeed but for now thank you for listening and goodbye