Talking ‘The Cruelest Game’ with Matt Futterman

0:10Hello and welcome to the Tennis Podcast, a very special tennis podcast today in a very special place, which if you're watching us on YouTube, you can probably already see. You find us in the Wimbledon Library, the actual Wimbledon Library. We've been granted special access for this show today because it felt like the most fitting place to talk to a man about a book. That man is Matt Futterman or Matthew Futterman. Do we have to call you Matthew now? No, just call me Matt, please. It was a mistake I made years ago when you had to decide what your byline was. and I thought Matthew sounded more grown up and nobody calls me Matthew except my mother when she's mad at me.

0:53Okay. I had the same. I rebranded to Catherine on my first day working with David and I've had to commit to it ever since. So I understand the struggle. So Matt Futterman, the book is The Cruelest Game, Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis. It's coming out next week, Tuesday the 4th of August but available for pre-order now. Yes, pre-orders. Like the most important thing in book publishing these days apparently is pre-orders. Most people that are promoting a book have hundreds of copies of the book that they're carrying around with them. They're telling everybody when the book's coming out, you're the most modest promoter of a book that I've ever known.

1:33So well, this is your chance, Matt. This is my chance. I'll lift it up. Hold up the book. Several years of blood, sweat and tears right here. we we're biased I'm particularly biased because I was asked by you and incredibly flattered by it to to read the audio for the book so I've read it twice now it was a it was a great process getting to do that these two have also read it and I think what struck me and I think all of us I don't want to put words in your mouth but we've talked about it but I think what struck us all was that we live and breathe tennis our whole lives. You know, Matt spends half his life here in the Wimbledon Library reading all about the history of the game.

2:19And yet we all learned a lot from this book about the game and how it is at this moment as a sort of snapshot of professional tennis right now. And I think that was your intention, right, when writing this book? Yeah, that was completely my intention. Well, thank you. Thank you for the kind words about it. And thank you for reading the audio. That's a really hard job that I was not up for. And you seem like the best person to do it. And so all of your listeners, if they, all of your listeners who tune in every week to, you know, hear your tones can now hear them for, I think, 13 hours and 52 minutes of Catherine Whitaker.

3:02Wow. So order the audio. That is so much. You'll get Catherine Whitaker in your ear balls for 13 hours. It's so much, and yet it's also, it was four solid days in the studio, plus a day of sort of pickups and retakes and so on. So I'm like, hmm, only 13 hours. There you go. Right. With me, it would have been 40. The rest was outtakes and mistakes. But no, I loved doing it, actually. I'd never done anything like that before, and it was a great process. So thank you. Anyway. But yes, that was my intention. I mean, what I really wanted to do was I really wanted to explain to people what it was like to be a professional tennis player these days.

3:42I haven't been a professional tennis player. The only thing I know about professional tennis players is what people tell me about that. So this was just sort of a deeply reported deep dive into the behind-the-scenes world and torture. That is professional tennis in the mid-2020s. And, you know, if it was only going to be sort of describing great matches and stuff like that, I really didn't know why people would buy it. Because they could just watch those things on television. Chances are they have watched those things on television. So I wanted to sort of go far beyond the matches, even far beyond sort of the moments before the matches and the match days.

4:32but really get into childhoods and practice courts and psychology sessions that people go through and all those kinds of things. And it took a while to convince people to trust me to do that, but eventually they did. And this is the product of that. And Catherine said it's this wonderful snapshot of modern tennis. Can you take us to the kind of spark for you of when you thought, right, I want to write this book and how it's all going to come together? So I've been a sports writer for 26 years at this point. I basically covered just about every sport there is. I've been to, you know, I've done five World Cups and eight or nine Olympics and covered the NFL and the NBA, every American sport there is.

5:29And when and I was I was covering tennis for many years during that part where I was sort of a general sports writer. And then in 2020, I became pretty much a full time sports writer. And I was completely blown away immediately by, I'm going to overstate this a little bit, but how miserable tennis players were. It seemed like they were all being driven mad. And that sort of culminated in 2022 with Naomi Osaka and all of the struggle that she was having. Here she's making like$50 million a year. And she's one of the world's biggest celebrities. And she's not happy. She kind of hates her job. And that was something I thought was kind of strange.

6:21Because you just don't, I just don't think you see that nearly as much in team sports. People in team sports are pretty happy. Even individual sports like golf. I mean, I think golfers can be tortured by the game in some sense. But, you know, the 70th golfer on the money list is making several million dollars, is sort of practicing, you know, going for long walks in parks, you know, on any given Tuesday. It's brutal. I mean, like, it's, you know, I'm being glib there. They have a caddy next to them. and there was something about the loneliness of the existence of a tennis player who's traveling around the world, living in hotel rooms, has this sort of entourage of staff, paid friends, things like that.

7:19And this is the only thing they've done since they're like six or eight years old. This has been their sole focus. And it's all riding on that. And I wanted to sort of explore that. That seemed incredibly rich. And so I was thinking I wanted to write another book, and it seemed like that was a unique experience. And this was a unique moment in the sport because what you had was you had these players who had figured it out, seemingly, mainly Djokovic, Federer, and Nadal, and also Andy Murray, and Serena. They had done everything. They had won it all. They'd had some rough times, but basically they seemed to have figured it out.

8:03They knew some kind of what I would refer to as like the secret codes of balancing the sport, their endeavors, happiness. And then you had this new crop of players that was trying to acquire those codes or figure out if there were codes. And they seemed completely baffled as to how this group of players had done this, not effortlessly, but had survived and thrived for what was then like 15 years on the tour. and it seemed like a critical moment. So I wanted to write about like, you know, critical players at a critical time in a sport that was just really having a moment in the popular culture and was seemingly getting more popular.

8:50People were talking about it more, coming at it from all sorts of avenues, whether it was, you know, fashion, celebrity, TikTok, all kinds of social media. so um it seemed like a good moment for a way to sort of pull back the lens and um you know take away the curtains and say what it's really like to be a professional tennis player and to and to pursue not just be the professional tennis player but to have pursued this like i said to the exclusion of everything else for like 20 years with basically no safety net there's a there's a theory i've heard that like the first line of a movie and the last line of a movie kind of tell you everything about it and i feel like your first and last lines in this book really do that like the first lines why does this game drive everyone mad what does it take to survive and thrive i did so many takes of those those lines like every different type of incident like getting the intonation on that film at that moment at that moment you must have thought okay this is going to be a long yeah i think the director is thinking oh boy and and and then the last line he didn't quite know how to play this because no one ever does kind of speaks to what you're saying there about like even i think you're referring to djokovic there like even djokovic has has moments when maybe he's not figured it out and you you can't you can't beat the game is kind of right that line specifically refers to like the the final act of a tennis player and exiting the stage which you know pretty much no one really does gracefully and you know I mean we're even and everyone's tortured by it I mean as we speak you know here at Wimbledon in the Wimbledon library like you know we're I think about two hours away from hearing Serena Williams explain why she's come back, why she wants to fight this battle again.

10:57And, you know, not risk everything, but risk some level of embarrassment, you know, or some level of...

11:10dignity is the wrong word exposure exposure right yeah get yourself you know put yourself back in that situation um you saw it within Andy Murray a couple years ago um where you know I think all of us I could not understand what he was doing on a tennis court um and couldn't pull away. I mean, even Federer, he had to, you know, he had to blow out his knee and really, like, risk his future leisure time, you know, instead of, you know, knocking off a couple years back when it would have been a lot safer. And, you know, Nadal limped off the court. So it's really hard and I think um you know what is Djokovic gonna do I think he doesn't know uh he's a little lost um and you know we'll just have to see yeah the the impression I got immediately upon reading just the first few pages of the book is the experience I'd had 12 months earlier when I discovered hard courts by John Feinstein the late great writer who wrote well over 20 books himself across basketball and NFL and golf.

12:27And he did one book, really, that everybody remembers on tennis. And he told the story of the 1990 tennis season. And he did it through the eyes and lives of several significant and some less significant names within the sport of tennis. And I had known about that book for a long time, but I picked it up, I'm sad to say, because he passed away. last year sadly and shockingly and suddenly and I wanted to experience this book I'd heard about and I read it and I just loved it so much I felt like I was living an era that I just didn't quite remember as a tennis fan because it was just before my time so I kind of discovered some of the history in this different way and when I read just a few pages of your book I suddenly felt like I'm holding a 2026 version of Hardcourts, or at least that's what I'm in for as a reader.

13:31And I then asked, I told you about that, and you seemed quite happy about that. Yeah, that was the goal. Look, I read Hardcourts a long time ago. You know, I mean, John wrote a book called A Season on the Brink, which might be his most famous book, which I think was his first book where he spent a year with Bobby Knight, who was the University of Indiana basketball coach and really a terrible person. But a legendary coach, but really tortured his players and could be incredibly nasty. I'm sure he had some good qualities too. but it's a very famous book but anyway yes Hard Quartz I read a while ago and yeah that was the goal was to write a version of Hard Quartz for the 2020s but I will say and this is not sort of a criticism of John but I do think I do think I wanted to approach my book with a lot of empathy

14:49because, you know, whatever you think of professional tennis players, whether they're struggling mentally or if you think they're spoiled, if you think they want too much money, I would argue they come by that honestly. You know, they have had the craziest childhoods and upbringing and almost none of them go to regular school anymore. So they're not really socialized. A lot of them come from these families. Most of them come from families, except for the ones who are incredibly wealthy, where everything has been invested on them. And it is such a bizarre existence that I think it's really sort of hard to judge them by sort of the standards of like a quote-unquote normal person.

15:47So I wanted to really get at that and get at the obsessive nature of their pursuit because it's all they've known and it's, I think, at the heart of all of their behavior. Yeah, and one of the things that struck me reading Hardcourts is how irritated John was by Andre Agassi, a sort of young, 1990, flashy, everybody had an opinion about him, but John clearly found him irritating and difficult and obnoxious, quite honestly. and he couldn't hide that you know that was how he felt about him and he knew what he was good for in terms of the game but it is it is interesting isn't it we've had this experience of of the players making their stand against the grand slams recently and it's it is quite difficult to distance yourself and not end up having an opinion of them or of this or of the grand slams or of the situation and I do, I feel what you're saying, that you try to take your opinion out of it.

16:58Yeah, definitely. I mean, and you mentioned Andre and, you know, I mean, I don't, it's hard to pick out, like, your favorite chapters of the book, but certainly, like, one of my favorite things that has ever happened to me in my career is getting stuck in New York rush hour traffic in the back of an SUV with Andre two years ago when he was sort of just coming back into the public eye in tennis. And I mean, he's about my age. I think he's six months younger than me. But But, you know, he was sort of the first tennis player that was like right, you know, that I would have killed to be Andre Agassi.

17:52And then I read Open and I thought like, oh, my God. So, you know, in hard courts, yeah, like he's annoyed with Agassi. Was that a shock to you when you read Open to discover that he kind of hated his life? um it was I think it was a shock to every I think it was a shock to everybody um and I mean I think Open is just I mean I certainly think it's the best sports book ever written uh and I mean I just think it's one of the great books ever written and um it's so raw and so honest and shortly after it came out I was doing an interview with him and I remember saying to him you know talking about his dad and how he was raised and stuff like that.

18:38And I said to him, and I think this is in the book as well, I said, but let me just play devil's advocate here. It kind of worked, right? Like, it turned you into the best tennis player in the world. And he just sort of looked at me and he said, he's like, yeah, it also turned me into a drug addict. And there was a moment, it was one of those moments as a reporter, to be like okay how's this how's what am i going to say to like what's the next thing i say in this conversation um i found that moment particularly arresting i mean obviously it's a mic drop thing to say but it's also in such stark contrast with with what most tennis players i mean let's say i mean also applies outside of tennis but let's take tennis players here you know most of them you ask a lot of the players that you speak to do you think it was all worth it and everybody else says yeah right they say look where I am of course it's worth it and that's one of those you know it's like saying everything happens for a reason isn't it like you don't have the counterfactual of what life might have been like how happy you might have been if you'd just done something completely different or still pursued tennis but in a in a way that required less sacrifice or hardship or pressure or whatever and you know it's like saying i don't regret that thing that i actually do regret because if i hadn't done the thing that i regret i wouldn't be where i am now well like imagine where you could be now if you haven't done that thing but like it's what you need to tell yourself right right well there's but there's two questions and in one scene in the book I asked the both of them to Zhang Kim Wen who you know told me this horrible story about what her father did to her when she was young which was I think she was you know six seven six years old and brings her for a you know tryout with a coach two hours away from where they lived in a small town in China and it wasn't actually a try out he lies to her and you know she thinks she's trying to impress him but the coach has already agreed to take her on and after take her on residentially yeah yeah and and at the end of the hitting session the father says okay so you're good you passed you're gonna stay here and i'm go home and just abandon.

21:18I mean, it's child abandonment, basically. And, you know, I mean, she has struggled with that and did for years and cried all the time through her childhood. And so I asked her, was it worth it? And she was like, well, I guess if that's where I'm here now. And then I said, would you do it again? And she said, no. Would you do it again, even knowing where you were going to get? And she said, no. And, you know, I think that tells you just how painful it was. Here she is, you know, like one of the most popular athletes in China worth tens of millions of dollars. And, you know, would you do it again?

21:59Like, absolutely not. And, like, that's a, yeah, that sort of, and that was a conversation early on when I was reporting this. And that sort of frames a lot of different things about the sacrifice that is required. And all of them go through that at some point. They're saying no to a lot of things. And it's funny. I once asked Emma Raducano if she regretted it at all not going to college. college. And she was like, no, I've got a bunch of friends at those American colleges living in dorms and yeah, I think I'm good with this life. And all I was thinking was like, you know, you would have thrived at college.

22:51Like she's so smart. She's well socialized. She went to regular school. Like she would have done really well with a couple of years of college. So anyway, like you said, like, well, of course I'm going to do this again. Like, I don't regret decisions I've made because look what it's got me. But I don't know, it's hard to, I think it's hard for even some of these players to really sort of like see the benefits of that, even when they're going through the tough times. I think that particular area, I mean, obviously it's a thread that a theme that runs throughout the book but i think your perspective of having covered so many other sports is particularly critical here in the way that you're able to write this book and and the way you write everything really because and we'll we're guilty of this to an extent i think although we try not to the sport is so institutionalized isn't it there's such a feeling of well this is just how it has to be right but like you've seen all these other sports and I okay tennis is perhaps unique in how demanding it is but it shouldn't have to be this way to achieve success I know there are potentially the odd exceptions maybe Yannick Sinner is one sort of a well-adjusted world number one who had a relatively relatively normal childhood although he's still I don't know maybe normal but relatively normal not objectively normal but I do think there is just a feeling in tennis and certainly with tennis parents that want their children to succeed that think well this is just how it has to be this is the price it seems like maybe you know it seems like maybe it is just because I would think of it.

24:49I think it's, tennis is just different in some ways. I think it's almost like playing violin. And, you know, all those violin prodigies, they start when they're six years old too. And they don't do anything else. It doesn't have to be that way. I think you're right. But there are exceptions. Are there going to be more exceptions? Probably not that many. I mean, right now Ben Shelton is probably the biggest exception, but his father was a professional tennis player. So he went to regular school, was a terrible junior. I mean, he doesn't know, and I haven't looked it up, but he swears his junior ranking was never above the hundreds.

25:38All he wanted to do was just play for his father at the University of Florida. Like, that was the goal because he wasn't good enough to think anything else. He was playing football until he was in eighth grade. And then his sister, who was playing junior tennis, she got to miss school every Friday and sometimes Monday if she was doing well in the tournament. He didn't really like school that much. And so he thought that would be a pretty good deal. And so he started playing more tennis. And so he's, you know, the number four seed here and number five in the world. So I guess that shows you that it can be done a different way.

26:17All you have to do is be, you know, six foot five and have a parent who was a professional player. So you've got really good genes and, you know, be blessed with this crazy athleticism that he's blessed with. But even Ben Shelton, like, you know, you've watched Ben Shelton play Carlos Alcaraz. And here you have one player who didn't play seriously until he was 14 years old, and another who was playing seriously when he was five, and his family owns a tennis club. So how many millions of balls, additionally, has Carlos Alcaraz hit than Ben Sheldon? I don't know, 10 million? talking about hours and hours and hours on the tennis court and so maybe that's the difference between number five and number one that there's a certain level of tennis in Carlos Alcaraz's hands that there just isn't going to be in Ben Shelton's and there might be people listening thinking well hang on Carlos Alcaraz seems pretty happy and well adjusted and okay his family are you know his dad in particular and his brother are very involved but like it seems in a fairly healthy way but he is an example in you illustrate this really well in the book of a tennis family that had limited resources this is an expensive sport you know producing a champion is particularly expensive where they had to pick one they had to pick one of their kids to bet the family bet the house on, right?

28:00And he was the chosen one from a very young age. And that's not a healthy childhood to have, even if everything else going on is healthy, just that situation is unhealthy. And there are examples in the book of where, well, Amanda Rynissimova is the best one, I think, where originally the chips were on her older sister. And then Amanda has a go one day, and she's very clearly better. So they switch, the family switches where they're putting the house. And that's, I mean, that's a crazy position for a child to be in, right? Even if they think they're choosing it and they love it and... Yeah, every parent, it's funny, every tennis parent says the exact same thing, which is oh you know he or she you know you couldn't get them off the court whether you know whether it was 90 degrees or you know whether it was raining they would cry when they got off the court and you know i just think it's bullshit you know i just i just don't believe it i mean maybe it was true sometimes but i do think that there's lots of times well it might have been But if you've raised your child to believe that you as a parent who's who is their world and whose approval they're seeking the whole time, if you've raised them to believe that what will please you as their parent is them wanting to stay on the on the court rain or shine 12 hours a day, then that's how they're programmed.

29:39Right. Right. Well, like Andre says, it wasn't. You know, he he's watched a lot of tennis parents over the years. And he said, it's not about just being cool when your kid loses and being nice and supportive. It's also about not being, you know, ebullient when the child wins. Yeah. Because the message that you're giving at that point and the message he received, which is like, that's love, you know. And so the only way I get that and the only way I make you that happy is if I win. So even if you're being sweet and buying me an ice cream cone after a loss, it's still not the other thing. And so he said the best thing that can happen is to basically just have no reaction at all, whether your child wins or loses.

30:40Sit on your hands, smile, and that's it, which is impossible, right? It's so interesting. It's completely impossible. So anyway, but that's, yeah, that's my car. That's my hour and a half in an SUV with Andre and explaining to me the physics of the forehand and all of these people coming to his court in Las Vegas, you know, and asking him for the secrets because he is kind of a wizard. And the problem is that just very few people have his gifts and have his hands and his reflexes. So he can explain it. And I think Novak does this too. I mean, having dinner with Novak at the U.S. Open, he's basically explaining to me how to do it.

31:36And he doesn't care. And you haven't become a Grand Sam champion since then. There's obviously more to it. And he's done this with all these other players. He's given all these clues to Holger Ruhn and Mensik and Yannick Sinner. He's an incredible resource for them. And he doesn't care because it's one thing to have the instruction manual, but it's another thing to be good enough to put the instruction manual into effect. and that dinner with Djokovic that SUV journey with Agassi like that there's such unique moments that you're only going to get in this book and this book is filled with them where like your access really shows people behind the curtain in a way that they're just not going to get elsewhere and well hopefully that's one of the things I loved about it so much and I again listening to you i thought was so interesting when that that came to mind for you a moment i think we were all out of the us open a few years ago where everyone went up and you went down matt at uh arthur ash stadium with the coco semi-final with the climate protester can you tell us about that because i think that sort of really is a good example of the sort of journalism that that is a thread throughout this book.

33:03Yeah, that was sort of a bit of a light bulb moment about how I wanted to approach the book because I did write about 150 pages, maybe a little more, and ended up throwing them out because I just thought they were bad. They were bad and they weren't, they didn't have any kind of exclusivity and like I said before, it seemed like stuff that people had seen on TV and I thought like, okay, so what can I write about that hasn't been on TV. And I thought of that night at the U.S. Open in the semifinals in 2023 when there was the climate protest in the middle of Coco's match with Mukula. And when that climate protest happened and they got shuttled off the court, I've been to the U.S.

33:50Open for years. I know that stadium pretty well. And I wanted to go down to the referee in the tournament director's office to see what was going on. I figured there'd be other people there, and there weren't. And so I was sort of wandering down to the hallways, and I'm walking one way and Coco's walking the other way, and she sees me, and she kind of has this weird look on her, this kind of grin on her face, and she says, it's the climate protestors, isn't it? And I was like, yeah, I think so. and she here she's in like the biggest match of her life at that point at the US Open which is basically a Coco Gauff party every year at this point and I don't know she seemed so light even in that moment and I think she was actually kind of proud because she thought it was going to happen she thought there was going to be some kind of protest and they could have done another match, but I think she was pretty happy that they had chosen her match because this was going to be the highest profile match.

35:01So she was kind of like, she just kind of nodded like, awesome. She did not, obviously she would not have chosen to have this semifinal where she was cruising be interrupted. But yeah, and then she went and got a snack and then came out and just like, you know, I'm going to the gym for a little bit and getting on the bike, going to stay loose. And shortly thereafter, like, Carolina Mukovo walked down through the hallway. And, I mean, she looked miserable. She looked like she was, you know, on her way to a root canal. And it was just like such a stark contrast between two people, one was just as loose as you could possibly be in the middle of a night where the lights were shining the brightest, and the other one was just struggling with it clearly and certainly was going to be struggling with this interruption.

35:58So, yeah, that was a moment of like, okay, so how many more of those moments did I have, and how many more can I get? And so that's what I was going for over the last couple of years, to try and get that level of intimacy. Is that the right word? It's kind of creepy. I didn't mean intimacy, but like, you know. But yeah, the sort of private moments, whether it's on like a private court in the San Fernando Valley with Naomi Osaka where she's practicing or having some long conversations at Indian Wells with Jason Stacey. you know, sort of right at the moment where they're trying to turn Sabalenka into the world number one and, you know, move her past all of her struggles.

36:54And, you know, sort of like all these moments like that that I tried to populate the book with. And there's such a premium on those these days because how rare is it to get the word, I mean, I prefer the word intimacy to access, which is what is sort of common parlance, isn't it? but loitering how rare is it to get access to a tennis player i mean access is getting harder and hard to come by anyway but access where you don't have an agent and a communications manager and various other entourage members you know omelette chef sat in the corner like that's that's so rare you know back in the day i mean it was probably diminishing even at the time that hard courts was written but you know hear richard evans on our relived shows talking about how he used to just be hanging out with Wimbledon champions and going to the Wimbledon ball with Althea Gibson and that kind of thing.

37:45I mean, maybe that crossed a line. I don't know. But it is such a different world now. You just don't. It's extremely rare, that kind of access to tennis players. Well, the money changed everything. tennis players. I mean, it used to be that it used to be that the wealth gap between journalists and professional athletes was not that large. Professional athletes didn't make very much money in the 1960s. In tennis, they only made under the table money or they weren't allowed to be professional. It depends how you define it. And once the money came into the sport, which came with the TV and the exposure and these tennis players became you know like you know i refer to bjorn borg as like the first beetle um that sort of changed everything and i think that's when things started to move away because you know now they were now they weren't necessarily like driving to the tournament they were having drivers and people taking them along and they they could afford i mean i mean And Borg himself told me that, like, he thinks he would have lasted a lot longer on the tour in 2025 than he did in the late 70s.

39:06Because he was like, I was just so lonely. But if I had a big team around me, it would have been a lot easier. I'm not sure. He's like, I had, yeah. He's like, you know, sometimes my wife would be with me. And, you know, I had my coach. He's like, but that was it. and there just wasn't much of a life to it. So yeah, I don't love the term access but I also, I guess you hear a lot of complaints about access these days and I guess I just sort of take it as a challenge to just sort of be a better reporter, be a better journalist, figure it out, figure out a way and that's what you have to do. um if it was easy everybody would do it do you in the process of your reporting for the athletic and also for for this book do you have you ever do you ever get nervous going into some of these situations where you're going to cross paths with people outside of an organized setting because i i do a bit of this you know and and sometimes i have to really pluck up the courage to go and not be shy and not be feeling that i'm going to be rude by interrupting somebody or crossing paths with them and stopping them and asking them something when they're going about their day i just wonder whether that ever requires any well generally i don't think i do that that much and i think it's one of the reasons why why whether it's players or agents why people talk to me which is I mean a long time ago I had a mentor in journalism and you know one of his big pieces of advice was don't be a dork you know like you know don't interrupt people when they're eating like don't pick your spots I mean I rarely I will even now especially if it's like an early round match and for instance the French Open when Tiafoe lost at 1 in the morning in that brutal 5 set match I withdrew my requests because like I just you know, I wasn't necessarily writing off the match.

41:38I didn't want to make him like trudge over depressed to tell me why he had lost at 1.30 in the morning, like one of the lowest points in his life. And I do think something like if you're doing that, that may make me come across as like, you know, a bad reporter in some way. But I think it pays off down the road when, And, you know, you're not a jerk. You're not, you know, when you're being polite, you know, I do think that can go a long way. And, you know, I do think I'm a pretty fair reporter. I don't go out of my way to be mean. I think I'm pretty honest. I tell it like it is. But, and I give, I always give people an opportunity to explain themselves, many opportunities to explain themselves if something has gone the wrong way.

42:32but I'm not a jerk about it for the most part. Maybe some people have a different opinion, but I try really hard. And, you know, there's different ways, and there's different values to certain access. I mean, some tennis players are not great about talking about themselves, and I learned that very quickly. Like, I could work very hard to get certain interviews with certain players and would get them. And you didn't really get very good material. So you have to talk to a coach or a trainer or a parent or a sibling. I remember when you introduced the world and us to Victoria Mboka at last year's French Open, really, I saw her match.