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Dynastic - The INCREDIBLE history behind Wimbledon · The Chuck ToddCast

0:00
Speaker 1: Well, if you thought you knew Wimbledon like we did,
0:02
Speaker 1: you are going to be amazed when you hear how
0:04
Speaker 1: this tournament used to be nothing like it looks like today.
0:09
Speaker 2: We're going to tell you the entire story right now
0:11
Speaker 2: on Dynastic.
0:13
Speaker 1: You know, Wimbledon is a dynasty.
0:16
Speaker 2: It's not a team, it's not a player, it's not
0:19
Speaker 2: an owner, it's not a strategy, but it is the
0:22
Speaker 2: tournament itself.
0:23
Speaker 1: And the argument that we're essentially making to you guys,
0:26
Speaker 1: the audience out there with Jay and I believe here,
0:28
Speaker 1: is that. Look, it's not quite true to say Wimbledon
0:33
Speaker 1: invented in every version of tennis. People had been hitting
0:37
Speaker 1: balls over things for centuries, but Wimbledon gave modern tennis
0:42
Speaker 1: its shape, its actual size of the court, the mythology,
0:45
Speaker 1: the dress code, the rituals, the stage, its identity. If
0:50
Speaker 1: tennis exists without Wimbledon, I don't know what it is.
0:54
Speaker 1: It's just a different sport it frankly, J it might
0:56
Speaker 1: just be squashed.
0:58
Speaker 2: And it's not so much that Wimbledon is tennis exclusively,
1:02
Speaker 2: but to so many people tennis is Wimbledon. Right. Growing
1:07
Speaker 2: up in the Czech Republic, Martine and Avratiloba, who will
1:10
Speaker 2: be talking about a lot later on. The only tennis
1:13
Speaker 2: that was available for her to watch in her own
1:15
Speaker 2: country was Wimbledon. In the nineteen eighty movie Bon Boy,
1:21
Speaker 2: Charlie Brown and Don't come Back, Snoopy and Woodstock they
1:24
Speaker 2: go to London. What do they do? They play tennis
1:27
Speaker 2: at Wimbledon. I don't know how Snoopy got court time there,
1:30
Speaker 2: but you know he had it like that. But that's
1:32
Speaker 2: what you do. You go to women, you think of
1:34
Speaker 2: love Upy was wearing his all whites.
1:36
Speaker 1: Ja that did helpen you know.
1:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, Woodstock was not conforming though he was still in
1:41
Speaker 2: the yellow. But it's funny though, speaking of Woodstock, like
1:45
Speaker 2: a lot to a lot of people, tennis became you know,
1:48
Speaker 2: Wimbledon is like Woodstock, right in terms of the festival,
1:52
Speaker 2: the celebration of this art form.
1:54
Speaker 1: Look, I have it in my own household. My wife said,
1:56
Speaker 1: what of her bucket list events of those great sporting events,
1:59
Speaker 1: the one it's on the top of her list. She's
2:01
Speaker 1: not a huge tennis fan. It's to go to Wimbledon.
2:04
Speaker 2: And you know what's interesting is that we'll talk about
2:06
Speaker 2: this too. Wimbledon. It really is a place, right, I
2:10
Speaker 2: mean them an actual place of the tournament, right is
2:14
Speaker 2: the championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet
2:18
Speaker 2: Club in Wimbledon. But it's it's Wimbledon, for for better
2:23
Speaker 2: or for worse, and that's what's becoming. What's interesting to
2:26
Speaker 2: me too, is that you think of all the great
2:27
Speaker 2: sporting events they have the article they have the it's
2:30
Speaker 2: the the World Cup, the Olympics, the super Bowl. Wimbledon
2:34
Speaker 2: is just Wimbledon. The Wimbledon would sound strange.
2:38
Speaker 1: And it is one word, one word, and you know
2:41
Speaker 1: exactly what you're talking about. You know what's sports you're
2:44
Speaker 1: talking about. You know what and immediately it evokes a
2:47
Speaker 1: lot of things. If you're an American, it evokes breakfast
2:51
Speaker 1: at Wimbledon, the most unique americanization of a European event
2:57
Speaker 1: that you can come up with, I mean, the ultimate
2:59
Speaker 1: and and yet one could argue the great it was
3:02
Speaker 1: one of the greatest reinventions in Wimbledon history.
3:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you know, the television and just a culmination.
3:10
Speaker 2: I think one of the themes we'll be talking about
3:12
Speaker 2: is just the timing, how everything came together to really
3:16
Speaker 2: make Wimbledon what it was especially for US gen xers,
3:21
Speaker 2: Chuck that we really came of age. I think at
3:25
Speaker 2: the peak time of Wimbledon.
3:27
Speaker 1: Well think about it. You know, you and I are
3:29
Speaker 1: in our mid fifties. The very first time that Wimbledon
3:33
Speaker 1: was televised live, a Wimbledon final was televised live in
3:37
Speaker 1: the United States was nineteen seventy nine. I was seven,
3:42
Speaker 1: and I remember it distinctly because my parents woke me
3:44
Speaker 1: up to make sure we watched Breakfast at Wimbledon, because
3:49
Speaker 1: you know, in the three TV channel era, it was
3:51
Speaker 1: a thing that year.
3:53
Speaker 2: Do you have that memory. I don't remember the first one.
3:56
Speaker 2: It's funny because to me, Wimbledon just as I started
4:00
Speaker 2: getting into sports and Wimbledon had a arrived. Breakfast at
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Speaker 2: Wimbledon was a thing, but it just it was a thing,
4:07
Speaker 2: and then I'm very quickly had a desire to go.
4:11
Speaker 2: I never wanted to be a full time tennis writer,
4:13
Speaker 2: but I knew I wanted to get into being a
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Speaker 2: sports writer or a sports columnist, and I did have
4:18
Speaker 2: Wimbledon on my bucket. I can't think of anyone involved
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Speaker 2: in sports in any way, fan, journalists, whatever, who doesn't
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Speaker 2: have Wimbledon on their bucket list, and I was fortunate
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Speaker 2: enough to get to cover it twice in nineteen ninety
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Speaker 2: five and in two thousand.
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Speaker 1: And in the American sports calendar. Look, I, you know,
4:35
Speaker 1: this is one of those you know what ifs. But
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Speaker 1: if wimbledand's not in July, is it as important to Americans?
4:42
Speaker 1: You know, it happens to fill a kind of an
4:44
Speaker 1: empty space on the sports calendar. Although as you and
4:46
Speaker 1: I were discussing the other day, the July calendar has
4:50
Speaker 1: gotten The month of July has gotten better for the
4:52
Speaker 1: sports world over the years. If you're NBA free agency
4:55
Speaker 1: fanatic or you love the British Open. But for the
4:59
Speaker 1: most part, art, what really helped Wimbledon's success here in
5:03
Speaker 1: the United States was, you know, no other major sport
5:06
Speaker 1: was really out even even Baseball would be in its
5:08
Speaker 1: All Star break during right, the Fortnite of Wimbledon not a.
5:12
Speaker 2: Whole lot of competition. And you mentioned Fortnite, and that,
5:16
Speaker 2: to me, that's part of the power of Wimbledon. It
5:18
Speaker 2: affected the lexicon, right, we feel like we only use
5:22
Speaker 2: Fortnite in conjunction with Wimbled, the same as we only
5:24
Speaker 2: use score when we're referencing Beginning's Burger Tress right fortnite.
5:28
Speaker 2: For those not familiar, it means a two week stretch.
5:30
Speaker 2: The psych score means a twenty year period. So yeah,
5:34
Speaker 2: it helps affect the lingo the way we use terminology.
5:41
Speaker 2: How many people think of love. There's a rapt lyric
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Speaker 2: much love like Wimbledon, Right, love is in the score, right.
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Speaker 1: The h If you really want to know, By the way,
5:52
Speaker 1: the origin story of love is is f It's from
5:56
Speaker 1: the French word for egg, and it was originally like
6:00
Speaker 1: zero aloof right, goose egg and it just sort of
6:03
Speaker 1: got americanized. Yeah, among the sort of fun facts that
6:08
Speaker 1: as as you guys know, and hopefully you've been following
6:11
Speaker 1: us on Dynastic, Jay and I love to impress each
6:14
Speaker 1: other with the weird facts that we come up with
6:16
Speaker 1: during our research, and that is one.
6:17
Speaker 2: Of my favorites. Trivial matters I did the old Yeah,
6:22
Speaker 2: underscored the work. I'm from eggs though bagel. Now we
6:26
Speaker 2: talk about you know, ye six love they got bageled,
6:30
Speaker 2: but I didn't know that recently it was it was
6:32
Speaker 2: an egg.
6:33
Speaker 1: Well, and I can argue goose eggs right, al those
6:35
Speaker 1: you know, same same type of thing you know it's
6:38
Speaker 1: a zero. And what I love originally is that it
6:40
Speaker 1: was supposed to be fifteen thirty forty five like a clock.
6:44
Speaker 1: That that's where the scoring came from. And eventually the
6:47
Speaker 1: forty five instead of forty five. It just got shortened
6:50
Speaker 1: forty and that's how rolls off the a little bit easier.
6:54
Speaker 1: But originally the whole idea of fifteen thirty forty five,
6:58
Speaker 1: it was following the face of the So these are
7:01
Speaker 1: just the i'll call them fun facts, you can call
7:05
Speaker 1: them dumb facts that we think make this a lot
7:08
Speaker 1: of fun.
7:09
Speaker 2: I've learned a lot already. Say well there you got in.
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Speaker 1: Well let's go. All right, we're going to start. It's
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Speaker 1: nine to fifteen on a Sunday night in two thousand
7:17
Speaker 1: and eight, the end of the fortnight of Wimbledon in
7:20
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight. London, the most famous tennis court
7:23
Speaker 1: in the world, is running out of light. There's no
7:26
Speaker 1: roof yet this would be the last match without a
7:29
Speaker 1: roof on Center Court. There's no artificial bubble protecting Center
7:33
Speaker 1: Court from the potential rain delays that can always make
7:36
Speaker 1: Wimbledon a little more unique and interesting. There's no final
7:40
Speaker 1: set tiebreaker at this point, waiting to rescue everyone from
7:44
Speaker 1: what are the ancient absurdity of Wimbledon rules to end
7:47
Speaker 1: a match just two men dressed in white, standing on
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Speaker 1: chewed up grass, almost five hours of tennis and more
7:54
Speaker 1: than seven hours of real time, because Wimbledon has spent
7:56
Speaker 1: the whole day being Wimbledon. Rain de lay restart reigned,
8:00
Speaker 1: the let restart, and now the sun is almost gone.
8:04
Speaker 1: Roger Federer is on one side of the net. He's
8:07
Speaker 1: won Wimbledon five straight years. Center Court is his personal
8:11
Speaker 1: front lawn. He's elegant, he's calm, He's nearly perfect, or
8:16
Speaker 1: at least that's the mythology of Federer. Raphael Rafa Nadal
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Speaker 1: is on the other side. He's twenty two, he's left handed,
8:22
Speaker 1: he's sleeveless, he's relentless. He's beaten Federer that year in Paris.
8:27
Speaker 1: This is not Paris, This is Wimbledon. If Paris was
8:30
Speaker 1: Nadal's kingdom, Wimbledon was Federer's kingdom. And before they walked out,
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Speaker 1: they passed the photograph of Borg and McEnroe from nineteen eighty,
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Speaker 1: the match every Wimbledon final had been measured.
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Speaker 2: Against for nearly three decades, and these two men went
8:46
Speaker 2: out and replaced it. So this is the thing that
8:50
Speaker 2: people often miss. You know, Wimbled has this country club image.
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Speaker 2: The sport of tennis really in its entirety literally a
8:58
Speaker 2: country club sports. But if Wimbledon you think of the
9:00
Speaker 2: Royal box and the strawberries and cream and the private
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Speaker 2: members club all that, but the competition itself is really primitive.
9:09
Speaker 2: There's no teammates, there's no huddles, there's no clock, no
9:12
Speaker 2: coach coming out to draw up a play. Right for
9:15
Speaker 2: so long in tennis, coaching was forbidden during the match,
9:18
Speaker 2: there's no cornerman like in boxing company Mick. No one
9:22
Speaker 2: can save you. So it's one human trying to break
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Speaker 2: another human being in silence while thousands of people watch.
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Speaker 1: I know it's this elite thing, and yet in some
9:32
Speaker 1: ways it's the closest thing we have to gladiators that
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Speaker 1: go back in two thousand and eight, Wimbledon itself was
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Speaker 1: being tested. How long could this old tournament hold on
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Speaker 1: to its old ways until it got in the way.
9:43
Speaker 1: How much drama can grasp rain, silence and darkness produce?
9:49
Speaker 1: What happens when the most tradition bound tournament in sports
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Speaker 1: gives us a match that modern Wimbledon will never again
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Speaker 1: allow to happen this way because by the fifth set,
10:02
Speaker 1: officials are making contingency plans. If the light goes completely out,
10:07
Speaker 1: the championship would have to continue on Monday. And we're
10:11
Speaker 1: in the fifth set. It is set at this point.
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Speaker 1: I believe it's seven to six. No excuse me, it
10:17
Speaker 1: is eight to seven. At this point, with Nadal ahead,
10:20
Speaker 1: plans are quietly being made to prepare to suspend the
10:22
Speaker 1: match if Federer wins the next point. Imagine that the
10:27
Speaker 1: Wimbledon Men's Final, the fining match of a generation, split
10:30
Speaker 1: across two days because the tournament still belongs to the weather.
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Speaker 1: But it doesn't happen. It all serves for the title.
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Speaker 1: Federer fights, the court goes dark. Television makes it look
10:41
Speaker 1: like the lights are still on, but if you were
10:43
Speaker 1: there at center Court, you knew you could not actually
10:47
Speaker 1: see everything as well as you should. There may only
10:51
Speaker 1: be a few minutes of light left. Betterer's forehand catches
10:54
Speaker 1: the net. It all drops on his back, and Wimbledon
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Speaker 1: gets its perfect ending, the old tournament in its old form,
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Speaker 1: giving us one last masterpiece before the roof arrives. The
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Speaker 1: following year and changes yet another tradition.
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Speaker 2: Now understand how we got to that night, to Betterer
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Speaker 2: and the doll, the center core, the grass, the white clothes,
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Speaker 2: the rain, the silence, and mythology. We have to go
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Speaker 2: all the way back back before better, before the doll,
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Speaker 2: before before your macroroe, before television, before professional tennis, for
11:27
Speaker 2: tennis was even called tennis. Because the greatest tournament the
11:30
Speaker 2: history of the sport began basically because the Croquete Club
11:34
Speaker 2: needed money for a broken lawn roller.
11:37
Speaker 1: I've made up broken lawnmower. The greatest, most tradition bound
11:42
Speaker 1: tournament starts because of our broken Monmore. Look, before we
11:46
Speaker 1: get started, we want to remind you to polease follow
11:48
Speaker 1: us on social media at Dynastic Pod, follow, like and
11:53
Speaker 1: review us wherever you listen to your podcast or on
11:54
Speaker 1: your YouTube or on our YouTube channel. And from there,
12:00
Speaker 1: let's get rolling. To get started. Before we get into
12:04
Speaker 1: our long history of Wimbledon, let's open up the trophy case.
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Speaker 2: Ja. Yeah, we'll see what's inside there. The Venus rosewater dish.
12:11
Speaker 2: That's the dish the women hold up. I know that's
12:13
Speaker 2: in there. The men's trope. I don't recall the name
12:16
Speaker 2: of but we've seen so many people hold it aloft.
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Speaker 1: They have a trophy, the women's have a plate. We'll
12:22
Speaker 1: let other people decide if what kind of gender gender
12:27
Speaker 1: commentary they're saying. But we should remember Wimbledon didn't have
12:32
Speaker 1: equal pay until two thousand and seven, the last of
12:35
Speaker 1: the four major tournaments to have equal pay between men
12:37
Speaker 1: and women.
12:40
Speaker 2: So the United States, and we'll talk about how the
12:43
Speaker 2: US really came to dominate and help define Wimbledon. But
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Speaker 2: the United States has by far the most titles, accounting
12:53
Speaker 2: for singles, doubles and mixed doubles. US has accounted for
12:56
Speaker 2: eighty seven championships at the championships. Great Britains at seventy three,
13:01
Speaker 2: Australia shout out to Rod Labor, they're third and twenty seven.
13:05
Speaker 1: It feels like Rob Labor might have half of those, right.
13:10
Speaker 1: France and Germany also in double digits there at fifteen
13:14
Speaker 1: and thirteen, and then you go Switzerland, although at this
13:17
Speaker 1: point it obviously Borg and Federer have been one man
13:23
Speaker 1: machines for their country, that's for sure.
13:26
Speaker 2: And so the thirteen Wimbledon singles titles the US has
13:29
Speaker 2: won since two thousand, only one of those was won
13:33
Speaker 2: by a man. It was Pete Sampras, and the women
13:35
Speaker 2: have accounted for the other dozen.
13:39
Speaker 1: Let's do a quick little you know is this and look,
13:43
Speaker 1: we're going to do this every once in a while interlude.
13:47
Speaker 1: You have a good explanation of what's happened to men's tennis.
13:50
Speaker 1: There's a lot of theories out there. I don't I.
13:56
Speaker 2: Think part of it is that, you know, for you know,
13:59
Speaker 2: the rise of the female athlete, right, so really two
14:02
Speaker 2: maybe even three generations past past title nine, and tennis
14:09
Speaker 2: was such an early advocate in an early place for women, right.
14:12
Speaker 2: Ten Tennis had a head start on a lot of
14:14
Speaker 2: other sort sports when it came to female athletes, and so,
14:18
Speaker 2: you know, I really think that came to fruition and
14:22
Speaker 2: it's been this extended run of women like there really
14:24
Speaker 2: hasn't been a falloff for women.
14:26
Speaker 1: By the way, It's very similar actually to another arguably
14:29
Speaker 1: international sport where we've seen this. We've seen in at
14:33
Speaker 1: least for the American side, the same development, and that's soccer.
14:36
Speaker 2: Right.
14:37
Speaker 1: The American women have won the World Cup multiple times.
14:40
Speaker 1: The American men are hoping to just get to like
14:43
Speaker 1: the quarter someday, and that would be a victory it is.
14:47
Speaker 1: I feel like it's a similar you know, in some
14:49
Speaker 1: ways you could see the similar trajectory in tennis.
14:52
Speaker 2: And I think soccer is more extreme because in team
14:54
Speaker 2: sports there's just so many more options. There has been
14:56
Speaker 2: so many more options for men, you know, for out
15:00
Speaker 2: at athletes where soccer wasn't even on the radar for
15:03
Speaker 2: you know, people always say, like, can you imagine if
15:05
Speaker 2: you had like Lebron James and Steph Curry on the
15:07
Speaker 2: US men's national soccer team the basketball team, How how
15:11
Speaker 2: dominant that that team could be? Although I don't know
15:14
Speaker 2: how good is Steph Curry?
15:15
Speaker 1: Sorry, we look, we know Trinity Rodman is a great
15:17
Speaker 1: goal is a great soccer player. Imagine Dennis Rodman and
15:20
Speaker 1: goal right like right, here's mister, Like it'd a been
15:24
Speaker 1: a basic But we're digressing here. This is about Tedn's
15:27
Speaker 1: This is this isn't about soccer. By the way, the
15:30
Speaker 1: longest matches ever here and this is one and we're
15:36
Speaker 1: going to talk about a little bit. Ever, but Isner
15:37
Speaker 1: mayho twenty ten, eleven hours, five minutes, three days. The
15:42
Speaker 1: final set was seventy to sixty eight. What's interesting about
15:48
Speaker 1: this is Isner would be in another one of the
15:52
Speaker 1: other longest he may have. The two combined have played
15:56
Speaker 1: the combined two longest matches in Wimbledon history them together.
16:00
Speaker 2: That's cruel unusual. The longest final was Djokovic versus Better
16:04
Speaker 2: in twenty nineteen that went just under five hours for
16:07
Speaker 2: hours fifty seven minutes, sixty eight games, four hundred and
16:10
Speaker 2: twenty two points, thirty five ass and this was that's the.
16:14
Speaker 1: First tournament with the twelve twelve tige breaker fifth when
16:18
Speaker 1: they changed the rule for the still into a twelve
16:22
Speaker 1: twelve so or that one might have gone much longer
16:26
Speaker 1: if that most women's singles titles Martina and Avatilova at nine,
16:31
Speaker 1: six consecutive people it is. The Martina run is something
16:39
Speaker 1: that wasn't as appreciated at the moment as I think
16:43
Speaker 1: history has been kinder to her.
16:46
Speaker 2: And then well Roger Fetder with the most men's titles
16:50
Speaker 2: at wimbled in with with eight. But the fact that
16:53
Speaker 2: Martina not just that dominant run, but the extended the
16:56
Speaker 2: way she stretched it out thanks to doubles and mixed doubles.
16:59
Speaker 2: So she won her final women in championship at age
17:02
Speaker 2: forty six. That was a mixed doubles championship in three
17:06
Speaker 2: would you.
17:07
Speaker 1: Want to player right now? I think she's.
17:09
Speaker 2: Oh, no way, We've spoken the most overall titles and
17:14
Speaker 2: Avaslova shares that with Billy Jean King twenty singles, doubles
17:18
Speaker 2: and mixed doubles best for men or women, right, twenty
17:23
Speaker 2: is the standard, with Martine and Billy Jean King both
17:26
Speaker 2: sharing that number.
17:27
Speaker 1: Uh, there's an estimated one hundred and fifty thousand portions
17:32
Speaker 1: of strawberries and cream are served every year. And ja
17:35
Speaker 1: as somebody who has covered Wimbledon. In the book that
17:40
Speaker 1: I read in Strokes of Genius, the author basically admits
17:45
Speaker 1: maybe the single worst concessions there are at any major
17:48
Speaker 1: sporting event around the world are the women the Wimbledon concessions,
17:52
Speaker 1: the strawberries and cream the best they can do.
17:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I gotta say the strawberries and cream disappointing.
18:00
Speaker 2: I was so looking forward to we need to americanize
18:05
Speaker 2: my cool whip, right, and they mean like the cream
18:09
Speaker 2: that's in your coffee, right, That's what they mean by cream,
18:12
Speaker 2: which was a surprise. Literally they handed me this, I'm like,
18:15
Speaker 2: why are my strawberries in this milk?
18:17
Speaker 1: Where's the cool web.
18:18
Speaker 2: That's the cream. That's the cream. I thought it'd be croftier,
18:21
Speaker 2: right and have more heft and was ready.
18:24
Speaker 1: So the real advice is, if you're going to go
18:26
Speaker 1: to Wimbledon, buy your own can of ready whip, you know,
18:30
Speaker 1: don't do any whipits while you're there. Get your own
18:32
Speaker 1: and use out of the strawberries.
18:34
Speaker 2: I'm not sure you can get an aerosol can through
18:36
Speaker 2: through security.
18:37
Speaker 1: Over fifty two thousand tennis balls are used for every tournament.
18:42
Speaker 2: Balls please, And i gotta say, the the ball kids
18:47
Speaker 2: at Wimbledon are just in I had this specific memory
18:51
Speaker 2: of this one ball girl was there and they'd break
18:54
Speaker 2: out the can and she'd open it up and she'd
18:56
Speaker 2: line up all the cans and then she was just
18:58
Speaker 2: like a robot like lining, you know, rolling the cans
19:00
Speaker 2: down to her counterpart down to the base. To said that,
19:04
Speaker 2: like Riine and like the ball kids, that it's just
19:09
Speaker 2: they're run so efficiently. They are on such a tight string.
19:13
Speaker 2: And and so I'm so glad that they get their
19:15
Speaker 2: moment with the Royals, you know, after the championships and
19:19
Speaker 2: they all line up and they kind of form that
19:21
Speaker 2: that entryway and the Royals will stop and chat with
19:24
Speaker 2: some of the ball kids sometimes get into some very
19:26
Speaker 2: detailed conversations. But that whole ball kad operation machine like
19:31
Speaker 2: in its efficiency.
19:32
Speaker 1: Well, let's lee might as well share a little bit
19:34
Speaker 1: of the history of that. The original the first ball boys,
19:37
Speaker 1: and it was all ball boys until nineteen seventy seven.
19:40
Speaker 1: All girls don't show up to Wimbledon until nineteen seventy seven.
19:44
Speaker 1: In the twenties and thirties, they basically came from orphanages,
19:48
Speaker 1: is what. How the so at the time the most
19:51
Speaker 1: prestigious tournament in the world was being serviced by charity
19:55
Speaker 1: school children is sort of one way from Some of
19:58
Speaker 1: them were from very poor fan elies and it was
20:02
Speaker 1: not frowned upon at the time. I think today it
20:04
Speaker 1: would be not so it would look like you were
20:08
Speaker 1: taking advantage, because she would be taking advantage of child labor.
20:12
Speaker 1: Now it's a prestigious thing. You get training. They start
20:15
Speaker 1: the training for these ball boys and ball girls I
20:17
Speaker 1: think in February, and at this point there are two
20:21
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty kids picked out of over one thousand,
20:24
Speaker 1: thousands of applications.
20:27
Speaker 2: So one other last number, one hundred and fourteen million
20:32
Speaker 2: pounds not weight. That's not the weight that's put on
20:36
Speaker 2: from eating all that terrible food on hundred fourteen million
20:38
Speaker 2: pounds is in sterling, right? Is that the right term there? Jeh.
20:43
Speaker 2: That was the payout for the COVID nineteen pandemic insurance,
20:47
Speaker 2: which they had the foresight to apply for and get
20:50
Speaker 2: pandemic insurance in case the event wherever canceled or postponed
20:55
Speaker 2: due to a pandemic.
20:56
Speaker 1: How about that that it was the only major sporting
21:01
Speaker 1: event in the world that decided to have pandemic insurance.
21:07
Speaker 2: Boy did it pay off.
21:09
Speaker 1: I mean literally, you want to talk about surviving, helping
21:13
Speaker 1: them survive and thrive and obviously make the decision a
21:17
Speaker 1: little bit easier to do understandably, but that's still when
21:21
Speaker 1: you think about all of the stuff that we lost
21:24
Speaker 1: during COVID at that period, and and you know, look,
21:28
Speaker 1: they were right in the heart of it, right, there
21:30
Speaker 1: was no right the Olympics post they were They clearly
21:34
Speaker 1: didn't have pandemic insurance. That's why they went ahead and
21:37
Speaker 1: and and just bought an.
21:38
Speaker 2: Extra year and have the Olympics in twenty one. So
21:44
Speaker 2: that that brings to mind that then Wimbledon, they've been prescient. Uh,
21:50
Speaker 2: they've been able to adapt, right, and and then in fact.
21:54
Speaker 1: Let me throw this at you, is it a rich
21:56
Speaker 1: you know, because there are times when Wimbledon gets described
22:00
Speaker 1: to be overly traditionalist and rigid. Yet I think, do
22:04
Speaker 1: you agree, right, the more we they've actually been fairly adoptive,
22:09
Speaker 1: because if they hadn't, they wouldn't be relevant.
22:12
Speaker 2: And think about different it is from just from the
22:15
Speaker 2: point where we started watching it, right in the late seventies,
22:18
Speaker 2: early eighties, and how much has changed and progressed. And
22:24
Speaker 2: you know, it's funny it celebrated its one hundred and
22:26
Speaker 2: I think it was nineteen seventy seven. It's how far
22:29
Speaker 2: back it goes. So think to the eighteen seventies when
22:34
Speaker 2: it started and obviously how much has had to change
22:37
Speaker 2: since that. But we watched because of what hasn't changed. Yes, right,
22:42
Speaker 2: center court it's still you know, this version of center
22:46
Speaker 2: Court has been there for as long as we've been watching.
22:50
Speaker 2: You know, we want to see.
22:51
Speaker 1: In fact, they probably they probably spent too much money
22:55
Speaker 1: trying to retrofit a roof on Center Court rather than
22:59
Speaker 1: knocking it down and doing something new, because that's how
23:02
Speaker 1: committed they were to keeping sort of the keeping that
23:06
Speaker 1: is the most collared round in tennis.
23:08
Speaker 2: Right, you cannot alter center courts.
23:11
Speaker 1: By the way, the original center court because it did
23:14
Speaker 1: move once and we'll get into that is now.
23:16
Speaker 2: A field hockey a girls field hockey pitch at a
23:21
Speaker 2: at a local school, which is a fun little fact.
23:26
Speaker 2: So one thing they abolished that one thing that has
23:28
Speaker 2: changed is the Challenge round. It used to be the
23:31
Speaker 2: defending champion only had to play one match. You got
23:35
Speaker 2: to buy all the way.
23:38
Speaker 1: Can you imagine Yokovic would be you know how many
23:40
Speaker 1: how many titles would he have had?
23:42
Speaker 2: Right? You just extend them? And you know that that's
23:47
Speaker 2: been gone for over one hundred years now that that's
23:50
Speaker 2: again the amazing thing, now like how long it's been
23:52
Speaker 2: since So it's been one hundred and four years since they.
23:56
Speaker 1: Went forty years with the Challenge round. And was it like, oh,
24:00
Speaker 1: that's something we're only going to do for four or
24:01
Speaker 1: five years. Forty years Wimbledon had the challenge at the
24:05
Speaker 1: Challenge rap.
24:06
Speaker 2: The Open era arrived in nineteen sixty eight and now
24:09
Speaker 2: you have professionals. You actually had the greatest players. So
24:12
Speaker 2: think about there was a food stretch of time we
24:15
Speaker 2: didn't have professionals. We'll get into that later. Ladies doubles
24:18
Speaker 2: Mixed doubles became official championship events in nineteen thirty five,
24:22
Speaker 2: fifty one years after the Ladies' singles. But again, now
24:26
Speaker 2: it's coming up on one hundred years since that's been.
24:29
Speaker 2: Everything is like a century when it comes to wmbled,
24:32
Speaker 2: almost the same, yeah.
24:33
Speaker 1: Pretty much. The only major American sporting event that rivals
24:36
Speaker 1: Wimbledon in length is the Kentucky Derby. It's about the
24:39
Speaker 1: only one that's that.
24:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, anyway, and in some ways that's changed. For at
24:44
Speaker 2: least the composition, right, the distance is the same, the
24:46
Speaker 2: location is the same, church a ground, the original track
24:50
Speaker 2: is not a field hockey it's.
24:52
Speaker 1: Not a field hockey pitch anymore.
24:55
Speaker 2: But the composition of the jockeys. If you go back
24:57
Speaker 2: and look at the early days, the jockeys were all
24:59
Speaker 2: black and then you know as horse racing kind of
25:03
Speaker 2: a whole other podcast, but Latina, Yeah, you go back
25:09
Speaker 2: and look at who's up on the walls and they
25:11
Speaker 2: have a museum at Churchill Downs. That's something that that's
25:15
Speaker 2: changed a lot.
25:16
Speaker 1: See, this is why I've partnered with ja I Live
25:18
Speaker 1: bycariously through you ja for every great sporting events you have,
25:22
Speaker 1: just there is not a place you ever been.
25:25
Speaker 2: I haven't been to the Indianapolis five hundred. I haven't
25:27
Speaker 2: been at any speedway that's and that's on my list.
25:31
Speaker 2: Tie Break, introduced in nineteen seventy one, innically resisted Daily
25:37
Speaker 2: Telegraphs Lance Tingay called it that sequence of abbreviated values,
25:42
Speaker 2: but quickly accepted it as a band friendly innovation, which
25:45
Speaker 2: like that feels.
25:46
Speaker 1: Like the DH right, you know, it's like everybody complains
25:49
Speaker 1: about it.
25:49
Speaker 2: Now.
25:50
Speaker 1: No one's going back and going, God, I wish we
25:52
Speaker 1: could let pictures hit again. Nobody's going I wish these
25:55
Speaker 1: matches would never end at Wimbledon. It's more fun that way.
25:58
Speaker 1: But I don't think that's the way people fell.
26:00
Speaker 2: So one tradition that I wouldn't mind them bringing back
26:02
Speaker 2: the mandatory bowing Curtsey to the Royal box was all
26:06
Speaker 2: this stor abandoned in two thousand and three. I kind
26:08
Speaker 2: of missed that. You know, that's one of the things
26:11
Speaker 2: that made Wimbledon Wimbledon right, and it was kind of funny.
26:13
Speaker 2: The players wouldn't be sure, like where do I stop?
26:16
Speaker 2: I stop hearing Curtsey, what do I do?
26:18
Speaker 1: So here's a hot take for you.
26:20
Speaker 2: If the royal family were more popular around the world
26:23
Speaker 2: and less shall we say controversial at times, would they
26:27
Speaker 2: abandon well the royal I mean the King and they
26:33
Speaker 2: love the Queen.
26:34
Speaker 1: Now we've always loved the queen, but there's like everything
26:38
Speaker 1: else has been you know, I don't know. That's just
26:40
Speaker 1: my hot take.
26:41
Speaker 2: At least because it's a less Royals. Yes, that that tradition.
26:46
Speaker 2: I would say, bring back the roof, the retractable roof
26:50
Speaker 2: on center court open and Mahine and then the number
26:53
Speaker 2: one court roof fall in May twenty nineteen, so it's
26:56
Speaker 2: a new number one court, right. They they did change that.
27:00
Speaker 2: I kind of missed the old one that they had
27:01
Speaker 2: the tower. The cool thing about them on court they
27:04
Speaker 2: had some media seats. Actually your seat was actually below
27:08
Speaker 2: the playing surface, so your head was just kind of
27:10
Speaker 2: just barely poking above it. And to me, that was
27:13
Speaker 2: one of my favorite seats in sports. I would love
27:15
Speaker 2: to try to go out there and one thing, I
27:18
Speaker 2: would sit there, and I would I would sit right
27:21
Speaker 2: on the service line, right, I can't tell if it's
27:24
Speaker 2: in around.
27:25
Speaker 1: You know, things come in and I'm here, you're saying
27:29
Speaker 1: it's the idea that human beings were you know, couldn't
27:32
Speaker 1: say if And there's no way mister McEnroe could know
27:36
Speaker 1: for sure when he was yelling at people.
27:38
Speaker 2: Right. Fortunately for Wimbledon they realized that and that so
27:41
Speaker 2: we've had the electronic hawkeye calling technology.
27:46
Speaker 1: Okay, I was going to make one beef. It's my
27:49
Speaker 1: same beef of what we're now having baseball. Some of
27:53
Speaker 1: my favorite memories in baseball and some of my favorite
27:56
Speaker 1: memories in tennis are players yelling at umpires, and now
28:02
Speaker 1: you yell at computers.
28:04
Speaker 2: Well to our earlier point that, especially for Americans, you know,
28:08
Speaker 2: tennis is Wimbledon. Wimbledon is tennis. The most famous John
28:11
Speaker 2: McEnroe outburst of a career filled with them. You cannot
28:15
Speaker 2: be serious that said Wimbledon. I believe he trademarked that line,
28:19
Speaker 2: by the way, I mean, that's his trademark line. But
28:22
Speaker 2: where did it happen? What would it mean as much?
28:25
Speaker 2: Would it resonate through all these decades? Would it be
28:27
Speaker 2: his trademark line if it had not occurred to Wimbledon?
28:30
Speaker 1: I say not, no chance, no chance.
28:34
Speaker 2: Yellow tennis balls, well, then with that one they replaced
28:38
Speaker 2: the white ones for television purposes. I will say that
28:42
Speaker 2: when Snoopy played at Wimbledon, he used the white tennis balls.
28:48
Speaker 1: I kind of miss that. I don't I get that,
28:51
Speaker 1: you know. And I think these days, with everybody having HDTV,
28:59
Speaker 1: that the and then the need for the yellow tennis
29:03
Speaker 1: ball that TV that you needed sort of in the
29:05
Speaker 1: old standard definition days. I think is that I wonder
29:10
Speaker 1: if now in the world of HD that it wouldn't
29:13
Speaker 1: feel as television unfriendly.
29:17
Speaker 2: I like the optic yellow color gan to me, that's
29:21
Speaker 2: that's a tennis ball color? Is that optic yellow? Yellowish greenish?
29:25
Speaker 1: Now, someday somebody will explain to me the smell of
29:29
Speaker 1: the tennis ball can right, that initial smell you ever
29:32
Speaker 1: you ever popped a can right the right, you get
29:35
Speaker 1: the pop, right, you get the pop, and there's this
29:38
Speaker 1: it's it's it's like sniffing glue.
29:41
Speaker 2: I don't know, it's like some weird like you do.
29:44
Speaker 2: You're like, is this gonna like it's gonna get me
29:46
Speaker 2: high or something?
29:47
Speaker 1: What is this smell? It's the balkanized rubber, but but
29:51
Speaker 1: it's still something else.
29:52
Speaker 2: The blueprint for Wimbledon the.
29:55
Speaker 1: All England Club. You hear the phrase a lot when
29:58
Speaker 1: you're watching Wimbledon. Well, guess what it wasn't There's a
30:01
Speaker 1: reason they don't say the word tennis in it because
30:03
Speaker 1: it wasn't founded originally as a tennis club. It was
30:07
Speaker 1: founded as a croquet club. That is already kind of
30:10
Speaker 1: funny because when you try to explain Wimbledon to the
30:12
Speaker 1: modern sports fans, it's like saying the NBA Finals began
30:15
Speaker 1: as a badminton tournament.
30:18
Speaker 2: It also gets at the accident of the whole thing, right,
30:21
Speaker 2: So how many things are just a fortunate accident. And
30:24
Speaker 2: Wimbledon was not chosen. The site was not because because
30:28
Speaker 2: they thought, oh, this would be a perfect place to
30:30
Speaker 2: put up a cathedral for tennis. The club was already there,
30:33
Speaker 2: there was a meadow, there was a railway. Conveniently enough,
30:37
Speaker 2: there was enough land, and there was a sport. They
30:39
Speaker 2: needed grass because that's how tennis was played at the time,
30:42
Speaker 2: So it's that railway the accident place. I really like
30:46
Speaker 2: the fact that Wimbledon is a destination. When you take
30:49
Speaker 2: the tube train to go out to the All England Club,
30:52
Speaker 2: the train says Wimbledon on it you know, like you're
30:55
Speaker 2: going to Wimbledon destination Wimbledon, so it just kind of
30:58
Speaker 2: helps build the excitement on your journey out there.
31:00
Speaker 1: Is that the only is that the best way to
31:02
Speaker 1: go is on the is on the tube is public.
31:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can take the you know, you can. You can.
31:08
Speaker 2: It's kind of expensive from the center of town to
31:10
Speaker 2: take that, but but you're riding one of those cool
31:12
Speaker 2: black London taxi cabs, right, so that is a cool
31:15
Speaker 2: way to go. There was I think there was a
31:17
Speaker 2: media shuttle giving out there give.
31:19
Speaker 1: Us sense like where, like, you know, is it would
31:23
Speaker 1: you call it a suburb of London? Or it is
31:25
Speaker 1: part of London?
31:28
Speaker 2: It's south Was it Southwest nineteen? Is that the designation? Yeah,
31:33
Speaker 2: I think that's it. But yeah, it's it's a it's
31:37
Speaker 2: a part of London. It's it's you know, like the
31:41
Speaker 2: our own De's Moss in Paris. You know, I think
31:44
Speaker 2: it's like like a segment of London. It's it's an
31:47
Speaker 2: area neighbor it's more of a neighborhood, I would say
31:49
Speaker 2: than then, well, you know what they chuck it from
31:52
Speaker 2: journalists perspective, It gets a separate gets a separate day life.
31:57
Speaker 2: So technically, if you file from Wimbledon the day line,
32:00
Speaker 2: when I followed from the Washington Post, it was dateline Wimbledon,
32:03
Speaker 2: So I guess it's its own entity in that regard.
32:10
Speaker 1: Look, it was not even called tennis at first. It
32:13
Speaker 1: was called something called fair sticky, which just feels like
32:17
Speaker 1: a made up word. And if I even showed you
32:20
Speaker 1: how it spelled, you'd be like, what the heck is this?
32:23
Speaker 1: It got shortened just sticky, and it was kind of
32:27
Speaker 1: You're just like, what are you talking about? You know,
32:31
Speaker 1: here's a sport that now is billions of dollars global icons.
32:34
Speaker 1: The most important tournament on Earth was once marketed as
32:39
Speaker 1: a sticky tournament.
32:41
Speaker 2: It just sounds it sounds icky, not just just sticky, right,
32:47
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, it sounds like a rejected British candy.
32:50
Speaker 2: Speaking of candy in the trains, Like I always like
32:52
Speaker 2: the fact that in the tube stations they have like
32:54
Speaker 2: Cadbury machines, like right platform, so you're waiting for your train,
32:57
Speaker 2: you could get a Cadbury or something. There's the technology
33:03
Speaker 2: that that helped advance. And you know, for something that
33:06
Speaker 2: seems so ech and old, it is a story of technology, right.
33:11
Speaker 1: It doesn't happen. I mean what were where would we
33:13
Speaker 1: be without the lawnmower?
33:14
Speaker 2: Right, with class courts and now the right you know,
33:17
Speaker 2: kind of the dawn of the the industrial age. You
33:20
Speaker 2: needed all these things.
33:22
Speaker 1: Right, I mean this is you know, it's funny. Wimbledon
33:25
Speaker 1: feels you know, it feels old world, It feels like
33:29
Speaker 1: a before time. One of the things we think we
33:32
Speaker 1: love about it is that it's this we're going back
33:34
Speaker 1: to a different era. But the irony is without the
33:37
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, there is no tennis, right because you needed
33:40
Speaker 1: a lawnmower, you needed vulcanized rubber so the ball could
33:44
Speaker 1: actually bounce. That is something that doesn't get invented till
33:48
Speaker 1: mister Goodyear. You need a court that can be marked
33:51
Speaker 1: and replicated. So it really was actually a sport that
33:59
Speaker 1: the new technology of the nineteenth century allowed it to happen, you.
34:06
Speaker 2: Know, and kind of the regularity that came along with
34:09
Speaker 2: the Industrial age, right, and might say conformity too, but
34:13
Speaker 2: also the fact that you know, you did have precise
34:16
Speaker 2: measurements for the court that would be replicated everywhere. You know, baseball,
34:20
Speaker 2: which is getting started around that same time, you could
34:23
Speaker 2: have different different outfield wall distances right, and some of
34:28
Speaker 2: the walls and some of the ballparks were irregular, like
34:31
Speaker 2: maybe the diamond and the bases and the infield and
34:34
Speaker 2: the pitcher's mound to the home plate was the same,
34:36
Speaker 2: but you did have some irregularity in the outfield, whereas
34:39
Speaker 2: in tennis the entire playing surface had to be conformed
34:43
Speaker 2: to these strict measurements.
34:46
Speaker 1: So they decide they needed a new lawnmower. So they
34:51
Speaker 1: hold literally it's a fundraiser for the first championship, the
34:56
Speaker 1: first championship meeting to raise money for this lawn roller.
35:02
Speaker 1: So the first one had been donated, it wasn't working,
35:06
Speaker 1: so they were organized to pay for this lawn uh
35:09
Speaker 1: to this lawnmower. What's interesting is this originally they call
35:12
Speaker 1: it a pony roller. So before you had a mechanical lawnmower,
35:15
Speaker 1: this makes sense, you basically had a lawnmower literally pulled
35:20
Speaker 1: by horses that was trimming the grass. Very victorian.
35:24
Speaker 2: I mean, at least they didn't have goats come and
35:26
Speaker 2: chew up the grass. Right, It's it's a little more
35:29
Speaker 2: sophisticated than that.
35:35
Speaker 1: So the first champion, the first champion is won by
35:39
Speaker 1: a gentleman named Spencer Gore. H and he is a
35:43
Speaker 1: big you know, it's it's twenty two men were invited,
35:47
Speaker 1: no women were allowed. Yet, by the way, there was
35:49
Speaker 1: no photography at the first Championships. The local a local
35:53
Speaker 1: newspaper sent a sketch artist jay.
35:56
Speaker 2: Like a courtroom. Yeah.
35:58
Speaker 1: So, which, by the way, it only adds to the
36:01
Speaker 1: old world feeling, right that the first Championships we have
36:05
Speaker 1: no photographic image of it. You have to go and
36:08
Speaker 1: use it. It's a sketch chartist, which I just said.
36:11
Speaker 1: I think that's kind of charming.
36:12
Speaker 2: That's part of the romanticism though. Like when I went
36:15
Speaker 2: to women first time, I bought a poster and it
36:18
Speaker 2: was very much Victorian. I remember there's a woman in
36:20
Speaker 2: kind of a Victorian era dress. Like it was very
36:23
Speaker 2: old fashioned, you know, like I it's probably about two
36:26
Speaker 2: things I bought. One was like an overhead photo of
36:29
Speaker 2: center court. And then I bought this this poster, this
36:32
Speaker 2: artistic poster that sort of captured the Victorian era images
36:37
Speaker 2: of winm women in a painting.
36:39
Speaker 1: So the first guy that wins is this guy, Spencer Gore,
36:42
Speaker 1: and Gore is not just some guy who just wandered
36:44
Speaker 1: in he was a rackets player. And I'll give you
36:48
Speaker 1: a quick explanation. What did that mean back then rackets?
36:51
Speaker 1: So rackets is essentially the older It was an older
36:55
Speaker 1: indoor racket sport, kind of an ancestrals watch. It was
36:59
Speaker 1: an indoor Yeah, it was played in an enclosed court.
37:03
Speaker 1: There was a hard ball that moved fast, so it
37:05
Speaker 1: was very much worse squash slash racketball than anything else. More.
37:10
Speaker 1: Also played real tennis, the older indoor game from which
37:14
Speaker 1: tennis gets gets its uh gets its scoring system from.
37:19
Speaker 1: But when he played lawn tennis, this is this idea
37:22
Speaker 1: of an outdoor tennis match, right, that was what was new.
37:25
Speaker 1: When he does this lawn tennis court, he is not
37:28
Speaker 1: thinking like he's he was going to play the way
37:32
Speaker 1: Wimbledon ended up being played for so long as sort
37:34
Speaker 1: of a baseline deal. He just started to attack the
37:37
Speaker 1: net and he used the net, and in fact, he
37:40
Speaker 1: was so effective at it they quickly changed some rules
37:42
Speaker 1: because of how he won that first game. And it
37:46
Speaker 1: was just because he was playing like he was essentially,
37:49
Speaker 1: you know, a much faster version of the game than
37:52
Speaker 1: the other players understood the game to be played well.
37:55
Speaker 2: He understood the surface, right, So we saw how his
37:57
Speaker 2: serve and volliers were so effective when then years later,
38:01
Speaker 2: decades later, a century later, But he was ahead of
38:04
Speaker 2: the game in that regard. So I think it's cool
38:07
Speaker 2: that that Wimbledon, it does give tennis its court, its
38:11
Speaker 2: premier championship, this public stage, the rituals, and creates the
38:18
Speaker 2: mythology around it too.
38:20
Speaker 1: It is I mean, it is sort of funny though
38:22
Speaker 1: that again that literally, I guess you could say peach baskets.
38:29
Speaker 1: The peach baskets to basketball is the lawnmower to tennis.
38:35
Speaker 2: I'll go with that. We heard and again sometimes it's
38:40
Speaker 2: the circumstances of the place. Why is the basketball hoop
38:44
Speaker 2: ten feet to this day in fastball around the world,
38:47
Speaker 2: because well, that was basically the height of the track
38:50
Speaker 2: that ran around the indoor gym in Springfield, Massachusetts, and
38:55
Speaker 2: that the particular gym where doctor James Nasmith hung up
38:59
Speaker 2: the peach baskets be ten feet above the floor, and
39:02
Speaker 2: so that's the measurement that we have today. Some people
39:04
Speaker 2: think you should raise it to take the dunk out
39:06
Speaker 2: of the game, but I'm good with ten feet. I'm
39:08
Speaker 2: good with keeping it the way it was at the
39:10
Speaker 2: YMCA in Springfield, mass So, you know, there's some things
39:14
Speaker 2: that were particular I think to that time and place,
39:17
Speaker 2: specifically in Wimbledon, you know, and in the nineteenth century
39:22
Speaker 2: that endure to this day.
39:25
Speaker 1: I you know, I guess I go back, and it's
39:28
Speaker 1: going to be a question that we'll be recurring in
39:30
Speaker 1: here is how much you know, again I go back
39:36
Speaker 1: without Wimbledon, would tennis just be racketball or squash or
39:41
Speaker 1: it will across in this country.
39:43
Speaker 2: And if you don't think it could go away, think
39:46
Speaker 2: how popular racquetball was in the eighties. It's funny. I'm
39:48
Speaker 2: here on campus in Northwestern when our sports facility it
39:52
Speaker 2: opened in the nineteen eighties and the kind of the
39:54
Speaker 2: peak of the tennis era. So we had like or
39:57
Speaker 2: racket air bracketball area. So we had like eight racketball
39:59
Speaker 2: courts in there, which have since most of them have
40:02
Speaker 2: been repurposed for other uses. But at the time it
40:05
Speaker 2: was designed like you think of the movies like Splash,
40:07
Speaker 2: and it seemed like every major movie in the eighties
40:09
Speaker 2: there'd be like a racketball scene, right, I think there's
40:12
Speaker 2: one in like Wall Street, so like so that was
40:15
Speaker 2: a big racket sport that went away, and I did
40:19
Speaker 2: I guess the precursor right, if you're telling me tennis
40:21
Speaker 2: started as an indoor sport. So things can come and
40:23
Speaker 2: go to a wide degree. I don't know anyone who
40:26
Speaker 2: plays racketball anymore, but tennis still endures and tennis remains
40:30
Speaker 2: very popular to this day.
40:32
Speaker 1: Racketball had enough popularity that you had outdoor racketball courts, remember,
40:37
Speaker 1: like you had public parks that actually would have like
40:39
Speaker 1: those concrete that were sort of you could use it
40:41
Speaker 1: for rackeball or squash, but it was like those outdoor walls. Essentially.
40:46
Speaker 2: You wonder, Chuck, if racketball would have had a Wimbledon,
40:49
Speaker 2: if it would have had this cathedral, maybe it survived.
40:52
Speaker 2: So we definitely have to give wimbled In some credit
40:56
Speaker 2: for the creation and the popularizing of tennis. But the
40:59
Speaker 2: endurance of tennis and the reason ever went away because
41:02
Speaker 2: you had this central focal point, this Vatican, that that
41:08
Speaker 2: was a trian to the sport itself.
41:10
Speaker 1: Well, and that takes us to sort of the next
41:16
Speaker 1: chapter of how we want to cover this a little
41:18
Speaker 1: bit is sort of how did Wimbledon become an event?
41:24
Speaker 1: And it is you know and over this sort of
41:28
Speaker 1: it starts out, it starts to get a little bit
41:30
Speaker 1: of traction. Literally the very first tournament they get to
41:34
Speaker 1: charge money and there are people waiting to see it,
41:37
Speaker 1: and it slowly starts to become an event. And then
41:40
Speaker 1: it starts to who gets the best seat? And how
41:42
Speaker 1: do you make sure that the stars are there at
41:43
Speaker 1: the end, what do the players wear, what does the
41:46
Speaker 1: crowd expect? And this is sort of the next thirty
41:50
Speaker 1: years of this tournament, sort of between eighteen eighty and
41:52
Speaker 1: say nineteen twenty is sort of how the tournament goes
41:59
Speaker 1: from It's inphs infancy, I guess is the way to
42:02
Speaker 1: put it to the beginning of a spectacle.
42:07
Speaker 2: And if it's not leading the way necessarily, it's certainly
42:10
Speaker 2: keeping up with the times, right because as we get
42:13
Speaker 2: into the twenties and the thirties, sport is becoming mass entertainment.
42:17
Speaker 2: You know, is helped by radio, right, so the live
42:20
Speaker 2: broadcasts of the games, and then of course in a
42:22
Speaker 2: couple of decades after that, television is so huge to it.
42:26
Speaker 2: The Olympic movement is growing. You have Olympics in la
42:30
Speaker 2: and in Berlin, and those are big deals. The World Cup.
42:33
Speaker 2: As we record this, we're in the midst of World
42:35
Speaker 2: Cup fever here in the summer of twenty twenty six.
42:38
Speaker 2: The World Cup starts in nineteen thirty. Heavyweight boxing is
42:41
Speaker 2: pulling huge crowds in Wembley. Wembley and the FA Cup
42:46
Speaker 2: or a part of British culture. Baseball, you've got Babe
42:49
Speaker 2: Ruth and you know the nineteen twenty seven Yankees, and
42:53
Speaker 2: then mythology that the mythology of Notre Dame football Branlyn
42:57
Speaker 2: Rice and horsemen Brockling as the new Rockby all of
43:02
Speaker 2: that stuff is going on. So this is all going around.
43:05
Speaker 2: This is the sporting world at large, and Wimbledon is
43:09
Speaker 2: able to keep up with that chuck And how did
43:12
Speaker 2: they do it?
43:13
Speaker 1: Well, look early Wimblind, we talked about this before, had
43:15
Speaker 1: the strange format. One of the stranger formats in major sports,
43:20
Speaker 1: the Challenge round, although where the defending champion did not
43:24
Speaker 1: have to play through the draw. Everyone else fought through
43:27
Speaker 1: the tournament and then the survivor got to challenge the champion,
43:31
Speaker 1: so they're.
43:31
Speaker 2: Like the final boss in a video game.
43:34
Speaker 1: Remember that. And when we were a kids, it'd be
43:36
Speaker 1: like no, no, no, no, you know, yeah, I'm the guy
43:38
Speaker 1: you got to play at the end. Was it? The
43:40
Speaker 1: early NCAA basketball tournament had some form of this where
43:45
Speaker 1: you know, you certainly got a lot of it.
43:47
Speaker 2: If you were a high ranked team or defending champion,
43:50
Speaker 2: you got a lot more. You got a lot more difference. Well,
43:53
Speaker 2: I will say, just to speak to you know, you
43:55
Speaker 2: bring up dance of a tournament and just to kind
43:57
Speaker 2: of speak to the importance of wimbled and how intrinsically
44:01
Speaker 2: tied it is to the sport. So the NBA tournament
44:03
Speaker 2: March Madness has become college basketball, but it wasn't foundational
44:08
Speaker 2: to college basketball the way Wimbledon was the tennis. In fact,
44:11
Speaker 2: for decades, the an T the National Invitation Tournament was
44:15
Speaker 2: a bigger deal, and that was the winner that was
44:17
Speaker 2: really considered the national champion. So I'd say you get
44:21
Speaker 2: really till the late fifties or the sixties when the
44:24
Speaker 2: NCBA starts to take over. So another way in which
44:26
Speaker 2: Wimbledon stands apart from some of its peers on the
44:29
Speaker 2: sporting calendar, is that it's more intrinsic to the foundation
44:34
Speaker 2: of the sport than things such as the n Soblay Tournament,
44:36
Speaker 2: and the final four.
44:38
Speaker 1: Basically, and this is the argument I sort of keep
44:41
Speaker 1: leaning into is it's almost like the tournament, and it
44:47
Speaker 1: made the sport rather than the sport inventing the tournament.
44:50
Speaker 1: At the end of the day, Basketball still invented the
44:52
Speaker 1: NCAA tournament, right, Basketball was there where it's not like
44:56
Speaker 1: the tournament itself, kind of like either events or sort
44:59
Speaker 1: of game. So the challenge around lasts till nineteen twenty two.
45:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know what Wimbledon invented that it's such
45:07
Speaker 2: a huge part of the NCLA tournament. Brackets and seating, right,
45:13
Speaker 2: and the notion that you know, let's hey, let's rank
45:16
Speaker 2: the entrance into this contest.
45:19
Speaker 1: Well, and that's what's amazing because guess what they were
45:23
Speaker 1: worried about. They weren't worried about the integrity of this sport.
45:28
Speaker 1: They were worried about creating the best entertainment value for
45:33
Speaker 1: the spectators. That's why they created seating in nineteen twenty seven,
45:38
Speaker 1: because if they had not had seating when before they
45:41
Speaker 1: had seeding, the two best players might meet in the
45:43
Speaker 1: first round and then all of a sudden you end
45:45
Speaker 1: up with some weird you know, which maybe maybe sports
45:48
Speaker 1: streaks like you and I like the underdog story and
45:50
Speaker 1: you want but it sort of it would you know,
45:53
Speaker 1: imagine if the Williams sisters played in round one and
45:58
Speaker 1: you know they're and you're like, well, all right, what
46:00
Speaker 1: if they're the two best in the tournament? Well that stinks,
46:03
Speaker 1: you know, and I have to tell you that you're right, Like,
46:09
Speaker 1: it's not just what would tennis be without seating? What
46:12
Speaker 1: would the NC Double A tournament be without seating? Like
46:14
Speaker 1: it is?
46:15
Speaker 2: It is.
46:15
Speaker 1: It is an important change in just how the enter
46:20
Speaker 1: putting the entertainment into sport.
46:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's crowd management, it's it's storytelling. And it's
46:27
Speaker 2: funny because the NC Double A didn't even realize even
46:30
Speaker 2: though it had seating for a long time. It wasn't
46:33
Speaker 2: until CBS took over the broadcast package in the early
46:36
Speaker 2: eighties that they made selection Sunday a thing. You know,
46:39
Speaker 2: they decided, hey, let's let's televise the announcement of the
46:43
Speaker 2: brackets and so not just who gets in and out
46:46
Speaker 2: right and who gets snubbed, but who who gets the
46:50
Speaker 2: top seeds, and what the brackets look like, and what
46:52
Speaker 2: the regions and which regions might be tougher than others
46:56
Speaker 2: and you know what the seating looks like. So again,
46:59
Speaker 2: the Will tournament was really late to understanding the value
47:04
Speaker 2: of these things. And like the seeding of Wimbledon, and
47:07
Speaker 2: what's cool about Wimbledon which makes helps make it distinctive
47:10
Speaker 2: to this day, is that they don't necessarily adhere to
47:14
Speaker 2: the rankings, right, They'll take consideration to do their own
47:18
Speaker 2: seeding grass right, We'll do our own seating based on
47:21
Speaker 2: maybe how people have performed here Wimbledon in the past,
47:23
Speaker 2: or if this person is better on grass than that person.
47:27
Speaker 2: So you know, it's it's drama, but it's also they
47:32
Speaker 2: preserve their their own autonomy.
47:35
Speaker 1: It's how we say, look, they want the best matches
47:39
Speaker 1: on the final weekend, pure and simple, and so of
47:43
Speaker 1: course they're going to take that into account. And that
47:46
Speaker 1: to me is you know, look, that is one thing
47:49
Speaker 1: as quote as old and traditional as Wimbledon was in
47:52
Speaker 1: some ways, I mean talk about they're further ahead of
47:56
Speaker 1: college football. It took college football over a one hundred
47:59
Speaker 1: years to figure out how to get it. That's teams
48:01
Speaker 1: to play.
48:02
Speaker 2: Them right, you know, and and how and how to
48:04
Speaker 2: figure out the seeds right and thening with with with
48:08
Speaker 2: how you rank and write it. It's funny though, going
48:12
Speaker 2: back to the seeds and Wimbledon. So in ninety five
48:14
Speaker 2: the tournament, it just so happened that the top four
48:17
Speaker 2: seeds made the semifinals in both the men's and the
48:21
Speaker 2: women's brackets, and the Wimbledonians were very proud of themselves.
48:27
Speaker 2: The All England Club, they had the self congratulatory a
48:31
Speaker 2: perfect cracket for them. It was their version of a
48:34
Speaker 2: perfect bracket. You know, they got it right right out
48:36
Speaker 2: top four seeds. Actually, though, it's funny because I think
48:39
Speaker 2: I don't think the top two seeds meant in the finals.
48:41
Speaker 2: I think there was an upset there in the semis.
48:43
Speaker 2: But they did have the top four, so they got
48:47
Speaker 2: their brackets right and they were they were very proud
48:49
Speaker 2: of themselves. They put out a press release. Look, and
48:52
Speaker 2: I want to before we go into the sort of
48:55
Speaker 2: the first superstars in the history of Wimbledon, I want
48:58
Speaker 2: to sort of go down this quick rabbit hole, which is.
49:01
Speaker 1: Goes to the underdog versus the the dynasty and and
49:10
Speaker 1: what is it? We always say we love a good
49:13
Speaker 1: underdog story, but like I realized, is Gore Onenovich, which
49:18
Speaker 1: is you know, he's still the most one of the
49:20
Speaker 1: most remarkable Wimbledon champions ever, comes in as a wild card,
49:23
Speaker 1: basically wins out of nowhere and never wins another major
49:25
Speaker 1: and all this stuff. And I had to be reminded
49:28
Speaker 1: of his name, right, Like is it like what is
49:32
Speaker 1: the better sports story for history's sake versus what is
49:36
Speaker 1: the better sports toy for Ja and Donde? On deadline?
49:40
Speaker 2: On deadline, give me, well, I want the big dogs
49:44
Speaker 2: there in the final fours. So to surprise how much
49:48
Speaker 2: NCAA tournament we're talking here, but it does seem to
49:51
Speaker 2: fit in parallel. So yeah, you want some upsets on
49:55
Speaker 2: the first few weekends, you know, especially when the seeding
49:57
Speaker 2: disparity is so great. You know, fifteen meeting it, it
50:00
Speaker 2: was a big deal, right, But America has shown it
50:05
Speaker 2: does not want underdogs playing in April. Right, So I
50:09
Speaker 2: always say March madness April suredness because we had it
50:12
Speaker 2: a couple of years ago with with some you know,
50:15
Speaker 2: seemingly Atlantic.
50:16
Speaker 1: Look, it was my hometown school university. Remind me made
50:20
Speaker 1: that final for it was like.
50:22
Speaker 2: San Diego State, I think was out there, right, you
50:24
Speaker 2: had you known majors, Yeah, you didn't have the blue bloods,
50:28
Speaker 2: and what happened to the ratings? They tank? Right. I'm
50:30
Speaker 2: sorry you might hate Duke, but you're gonna watch Duke, right,
50:34
Speaker 2: and you're going to watch those name brand schools. And
50:36
Speaker 2: especially in college basketball where the players turn over so much,
50:40
Speaker 2: you need that familiarity. You need to know the school
50:43
Speaker 2: and the uniform and the fight song. You need those
50:46
Speaker 2: blue bloods there. And I think the same applies for
50:49
Speaker 2: tennis too. Like you, you wanted to see Borgan McEnroe
50:52
Speaker 2: in the finals, right, You didn't want to see something
50:54
Speaker 2: some upstart there. Now it was a big deal, say
50:57
Speaker 2: when Boris Becker is a seventeen year old breaks through.
51:01
Speaker 2: But you couldn't have a new boors Backer every year.
51:03
Speaker 2: A the novelty would wear off, and B you need
51:06
Speaker 2: those name brand people there to drive the television rating, which,
51:12
Speaker 2: as we'll get into, becomes an important part of the
51:13
Speaker 2: wimbled this story.
51:15
Speaker 1: So, the first true superstar era actually is in the
51:19
Speaker 1: late is in the eighteen eighties, and it's the Renshaw twins,
51:22
Speaker 1: William and Ernest. They basically show that tennis can be athletic.
51:28
Speaker 1: They use what is then a unique thing, the overhead serve.
51:35
Speaker 1: You could just imagine that they first started with the
51:37
Speaker 1: very gentleman underhand serve right by the way, I still
51:42
Speaker 1: have visions of Michael Chang and the French Open when
51:44
Speaker 1: when he had that shoulder the underhead serve. But so
51:49
Speaker 1: they turned what had been basically a very genteel baseline game,
51:53
Speaker 1: almost more like Madminton going across right into something that
51:57
Speaker 1: was faster and more explosive, frankly more spectator friendly.
52:04
Speaker 2: But at least then with the equipment, you can still
52:06
Speaker 2: have long rallies. So it's interesting to think of the changes.
52:10
Speaker 2: So by the nineties, you've got modern equipment, right, like
52:15
Speaker 2: raphite tennis rackets and the stringers tight. It's not literally
52:18
Speaker 2: like catgut for the strings, right, You got the high
52:22
Speaker 2: tension nylon strings, and so you know they're hitting the
52:26
Speaker 2: ball with so much power and force and it's coming
52:28
Speaker 2: off the racket with such high velocity that it's harder
52:30
Speaker 2: to get long rallies. So you know that we talked
52:34
Speaker 2: about the technological influence at the beginning, so it might
52:37
Speaker 2: maybe helped create the game, but there were some that
52:39
Speaker 2: would argue that the technology was taking over and ruining
52:42
Speaker 2: the game and just making it just you know, one
52:46
Speaker 2: two points and that that was it. Killing the long rallies.
52:50
Speaker 1: I've always dreamed of, like can we hand I'd like
52:54
Speaker 1: to see, like, okay, we're going to give you these
52:57
Speaker 1: rackets from the nineteen fifties to like.
53:00
Speaker 2: Old wooden rackets. Let's see I too, right right, the
53:05
Speaker 2: head is like, you know, like the sides of my head.
53:07
Speaker 2: Not these giants. They're very small, right right. Meanwhile, on
53:12
Speaker 2: the women's side, Charlotte Cooper is showing that going back
53:16
Speaker 2: to the dayteen eighties, that women's tennis is gonna have
53:18
Speaker 2: a dominant champion. Suzanne Langland turns it into celebrity too.
53:22
Speaker 2: She's got clothes, she's got charisma. Sipping brandy in between sets?
53:26
Speaker 1: How about that?
53:28
Speaker 2: All right?
53:28
Speaker 1: I mean I guess that that's a little bit of painkiller. Right,
53:30
Speaker 1: you know, you can rub some ben Gay or you
53:32
Speaker 1: take a shot of bandy.
53:33
Speaker 2: Right long before gay ray have some some brandy.
53:39
Speaker 1: The original setter court, actually where Lengland won her first title,
53:42
Speaker 1: still exists. It's the school hockey pitch I was telling
53:46
Speaker 1: you about on that front, and it means that old
53:50
Speaker 1: Wimbledon still technically exists. If you want to go find
53:53
Speaker 1: it and visit it.
53:55
Speaker 2: Now. It's over on Church Road, I believe is the address.
53:59
Speaker 2: But it does feel layered. You know, it's not just
54:03
Speaker 2: old because Wimbledon says it's old. You can find the
54:06
Speaker 2: old versions of it underneath the current versions. Right, there's echoes.
54:12
Speaker 2: You know. So the Williams sisters, they weren't the first
54:17
Speaker 2: sisters to meet in the late rounds of wimbled No.
54:19
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, it's funny with Wimbledon as sort
54:23
Speaker 1: of frankly behind the times. They were for so long
54:26
Speaker 1: when it came to equal prize money for women. A
54:31
Speaker 1: women's title was you know, the first women's tournament was
54:34
Speaker 1: in eighteen eighty four, only seven years after the men.
54:39
Speaker 1: Only ten women entered. The first women's champion and you
54:42
Speaker 1: just alluded to it Maud Watson. She beat her own
54:45
Speaker 1: sister in the final. So when we talk about Venus
54:48
Speaker 1: and Serena, and it's such a frankly definitional time for
54:54
Speaker 1: women's tennis in general in the early twenty first century,
54:57
Speaker 1: in the late nineteenth century, it is sister launching Wimbledon.
55:01
Speaker 1: How about that?
55:03
Speaker 2: Amazing? Yeah, So you know, we we we'll also have
55:09
Speaker 2: to think about what they were playing in, right, this
55:12
Speaker 2: is Victorian era, so they're playing crazy wearing hats and
55:19
Speaker 2: this is the dawn of the all white dress clothes.
55:23
Speaker 1: It is sort of and the whole idea of the
55:25
Speaker 1: clothing as sort of and you can't look, you can't
55:28
Speaker 1: talk about Wimbledon without talking about clothing, right, because it
55:32
Speaker 1: wasn't a side issue. It is arguably one of the
55:34
Speaker 1: main characters of the story of Wimbledon there with the
55:37
Speaker 1: corsets and the petticoats. It was clothing designed to preserve modesty,
55:42
Speaker 1: not to show women actually sweating. You know, there was
55:46
Speaker 1: just the sweat was going to be in the undergarment. Second,
55:49
Speaker 1: they weren't there to show off athletic athletic powers. They
55:53
Speaker 1: were there to preserve their modesty.
55:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it shows the constraints you know, the women
55:58
Speaker 2: wonder in that era, right, so you can compete, but
56:00
Speaker 2: there's still all these societal norms and social expectations in
56:04
Speaker 2: that era that you're expected to comport to.
56:06
Speaker 1: But look like everything that we're going to tell you
56:09
Speaker 1: in the story of Wimbledon, they're basically every change started
56:13
Speaker 1: with a protest, right, these little rebellions, So on the
56:16
Speaker 1: clothes front, you had a young lady at fifteen named
56:19
Speaker 1: Lottie DoD. She plays in something closer to her school
56:23
Speaker 1: uniform at the time, which meant no corset, and she
56:26
Speaker 1: wins May Sutton, rolled up her sleeves because she was hot.
56:32
Speaker 1: She showed her arms. People were aghast, I know, right,
56:36
Speaker 1: but it is exactly what allowed this to sort of change. Right,
56:41
Speaker 1: So you know, the clothing story at Wimbledon really just starts,
56:46
Speaker 1: you know, as a social expectation before it becomes a
56:50
Speaker 1: written rule. In for decades, the all white look. It
56:53
Speaker 1: was not formal code. It wasn't like there was a
56:56
Speaker 1: sign no shoes, no shirts, no service, you know, no
56:59
Speaker 1: all whites. You know you're not plaind It was just
57:02
Speaker 1: this is what you did. But of course, one of
57:05
Speaker 1: the things I've learned a lot, especially in my world
57:08
Speaker 1: of politics JAA, is that norms me are meaningless unless
57:13
Speaker 1: you actually make them laws. And Wimbledon finally decided to
57:17
Speaker 1: make it a law.
57:18
Speaker 2: Although the rule doesn't have to be written down if
57:21
Speaker 2: you understand and everyone knows, you know who this room
57:24
Speaker 2: is built for, right, And there was sort of that
57:26
Speaker 2: these expectations and these implementations that was such a big
57:30
Speaker 2: part of it.
57:31
Speaker 1: But it look for the This is another through line
57:35
Speaker 1: in the history of Wimbledon is that particularly on the
57:38
Speaker 1: women's side of the women's side of the ledger here
57:41
Speaker 1: it was constant rebellions in order to sort of equalize things.
57:47
Speaker 1: The Victorian women are in coursets and petticoats and Langland
57:51
Speaker 1: shortens the skirts. She changes how women can move. Bunny
57:54
Speaker 1: Austin wears shorts for the first time on center court.
57:57
Speaker 1: Gussie Moran shows up in nineteen forty and a fashionable
58:01
Speaker 1: outfit designed by then a huge fashion designer named Ted Tinling,
58:06
Speaker 1: and it revealed lace trimmed underwear. Think about that in
58:09
Speaker 1: nineteen forty nine. She shows up on the courts in
58:14
Speaker 1: nineteen forty nine and you can see the lace trimmed
58:18
Speaker 1: underwear and it causes a huge scandal. And it actually
58:22
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons why by nineteen sixty three
58:27
Speaker 1: they actually write down the rule and it's the phrase
58:30
Speaker 1: predominantly white. And let's just say the word predominantly does
58:35
Speaker 1: a lot of work here, because there's a lot of
58:37
Speaker 1: fights over the years that go all the way to
58:39
Speaker 1: Raphael nadal On does is what meets the definition of
58:44
Speaker 1: predominantly white in the clothes that you're wearing.
58:47
Speaker 2: And of course this is all a precursor to Anne
58:50
Speaker 2: White showing up in the mid nineteen eighties and it
58:53
Speaker 2: was white, but it was you know, this one single
58:56
Speaker 2: piece head to toe like whatever the material was, whatever was,
59:00
Speaker 2: it was tight like her the print whatever, it was
59:04
Speaker 2: super tight. You know, this all white head to toe leggings,
59:07
Speaker 2: one piece outfit that just clung to her. And yeah,
59:13
Speaker 2: it didn't like that. No, that did not go well.
59:15
Speaker 2: There was not a repeat appearance of the uh, the
59:19
Speaker 2: and white you know, super tight one leotard.
59:23
Speaker 1: The irony is that what would happen is so they
59:25
Speaker 1: write down the rule and then more players wanted to
59:27
Speaker 1: rebel and then literally this we go into the nineties
59:31
Speaker 1: now and you get Andre Agassi. He literally boycotted Wimbledon
59:34
Speaker 1: for three years because of the dress cut. And you know,
59:37
Speaker 1: look Agassy was you know, all you to do is
59:41
Speaker 1: see your canon, your canon ad campaigns to know, right,
59:45
Speaker 1: Agasy was loud, he was bright colors. You know, this
59:49
Speaker 1: was not a guy that wanted to just wear all white.
59:52
Speaker 1: So he boycotts Wimbledon and finally comes back and there's
59:56
Speaker 1: this big like tension what's he going to be wearing?
1:00:00
Speaker 1: And he shows up in a track suit and he
1:00:02
Speaker 1: unzips very slowly, sort of eats the moment up a
1:00:05
Speaker 1: little bit, and he reveals his all white outfit. He surrendered.
1:00:12
Speaker 2: Very dramatic, but he was always the showman ever the show.
1:00:15
Speaker 2: Even when he was conforming it was still making a
1:00:18
Speaker 2: show out of it. Before going too far, let's talk
1:00:21
Speaker 2: about Charlotte Cooper, who later became Charlotte Sterry. She's one
1:00:25
Speaker 2: of those champions that gets swallowed by history. She won
1:00:27
Speaker 2: Wimbledon five times. She was a dominant women's player of
1:00:31
Speaker 2: the Victorian era. Charls becomes the first Olympic gold medalist
1:00:35
Speaker 2: in women's tennis individual sport in nineteen hundred at the
1:00:38
Speaker 2: Parrots Olympics.
1:00:41
Speaker 1: So you know, had they had more Grand Slams, she
1:00:44
Speaker 1: might have been the first. She might have pre she
1:00:48
Speaker 1: might have come before stephie Grapp is the first Golden
1:00:51
Speaker 1: Slam winner with getting a gold medal in tennis as well.
1:00:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, she was that dominant and then Langland comes along
1:00:59
Speaker 2: and greatness becomes a celebrity. So we talked about Agacy
1:01:03
Speaker 2: certainly as the showman, but just that celebrity aspect of
1:01:07
Speaker 2: women's tennis.
1:01:09
Speaker 1: And that's you know, Susanne Langland. This was an interesting
1:01:12
Speaker 1: person to learn about in our research because she really
1:01:15
Speaker 1: is you can see this and this. You know, again,
1:01:17
Speaker 1: it matches the era right in the thirties. In the
1:01:20
Speaker 1: thirties and forties, you started to have more and more
1:01:22
Speaker 1: of sort of frankly, we were just becoming more enamored
1:01:27
Speaker 1: with celebrity around the world, right, And she helped create
1:01:31
Speaker 1: a celebrity fact, sort of the celebrity buzz at Wimbledon.
1:01:34
Speaker 1: She's French, so that automatically meant people assumed she was glamorous,
1:01:38
Speaker 1: so she was dominant, she was more she was sort
1:01:42
Speaker 1: of stereotypical French, right, she was dramatic, she wears clothes
1:01:46
Speaker 1: that's scandalized, right, she drank brandy at court side. Oh
1:01:50
Speaker 1: and she was pretty good at tennis as well.
1:01:53
Speaker 2: But she's also the first tennis player that feels like
1:01:55
Speaker 2: the modern sports celebrity.
1:01:57
Speaker 1: And she was good for Wimbledon because she it. Again,
1:02:01
Speaker 1: one thing Wemblon always realized is they wanted to be
1:02:04
Speaker 1: a spectacle, and boy, she turned Wimbledon and arguably sort
1:02:10
Speaker 1: of made it the society event that it is today.
1:02:15
Speaker 2: It becomes glamorous and dangerous. You always a want that
1:02:18
Speaker 2: little element of dangerous. She's not just winning, she's performing,
1:02:21
Speaker 2: she's wearing the short of skirts. She's changing how women
1:02:24
Speaker 2: move on the court. And yeah, she's drinking that brando.
1:02:29
Speaker 1: I mean, you know is did Gatorade miss the boat here?
1:02:34
Speaker 2: You know? Well, I mean think about it. You know cocaine.
1:02:37
Speaker 2: Coca Cola featured cocaine, right, it was the key element
1:02:40
Speaker 2: in Coca Cola and it was kind of originally branded
1:02:44
Speaker 2: as like an energy type drink. Right, what what Red Bull?
1:02:48
Speaker 1: Because yeah, energy, that's what I's right.
1:02:52
Speaker 2: So you know, if you can have cocaine in a
1:02:57
Speaker 2: refreshment a soft drink, you can certainly have alcohol.
1:03:03
Speaker 1: Thinking about like the fetter and they're like just it.
1:03:08
Speaker 1: And you know if you're if you're sitting there and
1:03:10
Speaker 1: you grab a shot of brandy, I just don't know
1:03:12
Speaker 1: how that's gonna work.
1:03:15
Speaker 2: Or their cocaine infused Coca Cola. I imagine it's better
1:03:19
Speaker 2: cope down on.
1:03:21
Speaker 1: Well, we should talk about the move, even though we've
1:03:25
Speaker 1: talked about it was in nineteen twenty two that Wimbledon
1:03:28
Speaker 1: moved from Worple Road to Church Road, and that is
1:03:32
Speaker 1: still where it resides. King George the Fifth opened the
1:03:36
Speaker 1: new grounds. He didn't make a speech and just sounded
1:03:39
Speaker 1: a gong gong.
1:03:40
Speaker 2: That doesn't sound very regal and dignified.
1:03:43
Speaker 3: I know, I that, I think, I mean, it feels
1:03:49
Speaker 3: very eastern, right, like that's something you might have expected
1:03:52
Speaker 3: in China or or or in the you know, in
1:03:55
Speaker 3: the in the far East, back.
1:03:57
Speaker 1: In the day and gone, you know, But that's Wimbledon, right,
1:04:02
Speaker 1: formal and weird at the same time.
1:04:06
Speaker 2: Absolutely. Yeah.
1:04:07
Speaker 1: The new center Court, by the way, is still called
1:04:10
Speaker 1: Center Court, even though on so the good news is
1:04:14
Speaker 1: Center Court got its name.
1:04:16
Speaker 2: The correct way.
1:04:17
Speaker 1: In the old Wimbledon grounds, it was literally the court
1:04:20
Speaker 1: in the center of the grounds. But it was so
1:04:23
Speaker 1: important that even though center Court right, and you've been there, right,
1:04:28
Speaker 1: it is actually at the end, at the far end
1:04:31
Speaker 1: of the grounds of Wimbledon now, but there was no
1:04:35
Speaker 1: how do you change the name?
1:04:36
Speaker 2: Maybe it's maybe since I've been there, say, it felt
1:04:39
Speaker 2: very much in the center when I was there, especially
1:04:43
Speaker 2: when I first went in. You'd go in and you
1:04:44
Speaker 2: go past the the Perry statue and it it's still,
1:04:50
Speaker 2: if not at the exact geographic center of Wimbledon. It's
1:04:55
Speaker 2: still very much is at the heart. And we'll say that.
1:05:00
Speaker 1: This next fun little development is something that I know
1:05:03
Speaker 1: you would appreciate as a sports writer because once again
1:05:06
Speaker 1: one of the great phrases in sports history was created
1:05:11
Speaker 1: by a sports writer. This is the era where tennis
1:05:14
Speaker 1: gets its most important phrase, Grand Slam, and the origin
1:05:20
Speaker 1: story of using the phrase grand Slam to describe winning
1:05:25
Speaker 1: the four major tournaments was a sports writer who was
1:05:29
Speaker 1: deciding to borrow a phrase from the card.
1:05:33
Speaker 2: Game bridge bridge, like, well, my grandmother played.
1:05:38
Speaker 1: Hey man, Yeah, I had a grandfather who forced me
1:05:42
Speaker 1: to learn bridge because he always needed a fourth So yes,
1:05:45
Speaker 1: your grandmother and me. You know, where are the two
1:05:48
Speaker 1: bridge players? You know?
1:05:49
Speaker 2: But I was great. Yeah.
1:05:51
Speaker 1: It was nineteen thirty three. Jack Crawford is trying to
1:05:55
Speaker 1: win all four majors. He didn't win. He actually didn't
1:05:59
Speaker 1: do it. The first person to do it was a
1:06:01
Speaker 1: guy named Don Budge is the first person to actually
1:06:05
Speaker 1: do the Grand Slame in nineteen thirty eight, but the
1:06:08
Speaker 1: phrase stuck in nineteen thirty three that he was trying
1:06:11
Speaker 1: to get the Grand Slam. And you know, this is
1:06:15
Speaker 1: how sports mythology gets made. And you and I were
1:06:18
Speaker 1: talking the other day about this, and you were sort
1:06:20
Speaker 1: of lamenting that, you know, this has been the norm
1:06:24
Speaker 1: for sports for one hundred years, is that it's the
1:06:26
Speaker 1: sports journalists who sort of create the iconic nicknames or
1:06:31
Speaker 1: naming conventions that stick and become fan favorites.
1:06:36
Speaker 2: Yeah. I mentioned it earlier, right, the Four Horsemen, Grandly
1:06:38
Speaker 2: Rice made maybe among the most famous nicknames bestowed, but
1:06:43
Speaker 2: all the way through the seventies as a sports writer
1:06:45
Speaker 2: in East Lansing, they came up with the nickname Magic
1:06:48
Speaker 2: for Irvin Johnson, one of the all time great nicknames.
1:06:51
Speaker 2: You know, the gas House Gang, Murderers, Row, all these
1:06:54
Speaker 2: great nicknames that were bestowed by sports writers. And we
1:06:58
Speaker 2: have fallen off and we've become derelict and that and
1:07:02
Speaker 2: that duty and that that that noble aspect of the sport.
1:07:05
Speaker 2: And I'll take some blame because it happened on my
1:07:08
Speaker 2: watch too, and I'm not going to say I'm solely responsible,
1:07:11
Speaker 2: but I didn't do enough to prevent it. I tried.
1:07:14
Speaker 2: I tried to go with the Quiet Storm for Tim
1:07:18
Speaker 2: duncan you know, borrowing from the late night radio formod nickname,
1:07:22
Speaker 2: But did he end up with one he never did,
1:07:24
Speaker 2: you know, and Timmy that was his nickname. You know.
1:07:28
Speaker 2: That's what So we like we've fallen upon like nicknames
1:07:31
Speaker 2: or abbreviations or you know, initials, right, So like Katie
1:07:35
Speaker 2: for Kevin Durant, and they tried the Slim Reaper, which
1:07:38
Speaker 2: would have been a great one, but he didn't like
1:07:39
Speaker 2: it that much. We just don't have great nicknames anywhere,
1:07:42
Speaker 2: like the Iceman for George Gervin, just an all time
1:07:45
Speaker 2: great nickname. And again we I've tried here and there,
1:07:51
Speaker 2: I couldn't get it done. But we've just collectively as
1:07:54
Speaker 2: an industry lost the ability to bestow these great nicknames.
1:07:57
Speaker 2: But I never knew until you brought it up that
1:08:00
Speaker 2: grand Slam was another in the that goes in the
1:08:03
Speaker 2: pantheon of great sports. It really does not a nickname
1:08:07
Speaker 2: because it's not specific to anyone but a moniker or terminology.
1:08:11
Speaker 1: And it is so now you hear the word grand Slam,
1:08:14
Speaker 1: it's sort of like it's one of my favorite the
1:08:17
Speaker 1: movie groundhog Day. Right, groundhog Day, The actual definition of
1:08:22
Speaker 1: groundhog Day is completely changed because of the movie. The
1:08:25
Speaker 1: actual definition of grand Slam has its origin is bridge
1:08:30
Speaker 1: and yet for ninety percent of the American public. If
1:08:34
Speaker 1: you say grand Slam, the immediately would assume one of
1:08:37
Speaker 1: three things. Clearing the home run that clears with basis
1:08:41
Speaker 1: loaded home run, or a golfer tennis turn up right now,
1:08:46
Speaker 1: I promise you. Bridge. And by the way, in case
1:08:50
Speaker 1: you're wondering what the grand Slam is in bridge, it's
1:08:51
Speaker 1: when you went out all thirteen tricks, you know, And
1:08:56
Speaker 1: again it's not four. That's the you know, everybody gets
1:09:01
Speaker 1: their thirteen cards in bridge.
1:09:04
Speaker 2: Isn't it tied to like the four positions on the
1:09:07
Speaker 2: bridge table? Something?
1:09:08
Speaker 1: Well, it was always four, right in that you won
1:09:11
Speaker 1: everybody's cards, right, You won all four positions, right, you
1:09:14
Speaker 1: won every trick type of thing. Yes, that in that sense, yes,
1:09:19
Speaker 1: So I guess you could say there's four and it's
1:09:22
Speaker 1: that is the one common denominator obviously between clearing the
1:09:26
Speaker 1: bases or winning your four golf tournaments or winning your
1:09:29
Speaker 1: fourth tennis tournaments.
1:09:31
Speaker 2: So someone I don't know if it was a sports
1:09:33
Speaker 2: writer or not, and by nineteen thirty coins the term Wimbledonia,
1:09:37
Speaker 2: which is a perfect uh you know, it's kind of
1:09:40
Speaker 2: all encompassing, right, because Wimbledon is no longer just a tournament.
1:09:43
Speaker 2: It's becomes its own little country right during the fortnight.
1:09:46
Speaker 2: It's got its own geography, Southwest nineteen dress code, class system,
1:09:52
Speaker 2: the food, its own rules, you know, the weather becomes
1:09:56
Speaker 2: a part of the story. And then Radio and team
1:10:00
Speaker 2: begin to turn to that little country into something that
1:10:02
Speaker 2: the world can visit.
1:10:05
Speaker 1: And I think that's where we're going to go to
1:10:08
Speaker 1: next because as the world as as Wimbledon becomes a
1:10:14
Speaker 1: cathedral for the world of tennis, this is when the
1:10:18
Speaker 1: players rise up and then sort of the next iteration
1:10:21
Speaker 1: of Wimbledon is sort of the players takeover, which is
1:10:25
Speaker 1: what we're going to dive into when we come back.
1:10:27
Speaker 1: So by this point, ja Wimbledon has become the cathedral.
1:10:31
Speaker 1: It has the grass, the clothes, the Royal box, the
1:10:34
Speaker 1: center court, the rituals, the sense that this is not
1:10:38
Speaker 1: just a tennis tournament, but this is a place where
1:10:41
Speaker 1: tennis itself explains what it is. This is this is
1:10:46
Speaker 1: a cathedral. But every cathedral has gates, and for a
1:10:49
Speaker 1: long time, the Wimbledon story was about who those gates
1:10:54
Speaker 1: were built for and who had to fight their way
1:10:56
Speaker 1: through the gates.
1:10:58
Speaker 2: And this is where the story gets a little complicated
1:11:01
Speaker 2: because Wimbledon is easy to romanticize, and a lot of
1:11:04
Speaker 2: the romance is real. The grass is real, and the
1:11:07
Speaker 2: history is real. The players feeling their feelings that they
1:11:11
Speaker 2: have when they're walking on the center court, that's real too.
1:11:14
Speaker 2: But old institutions don't just preserve bab they preserve the power.
1:11:18
Speaker 2: They preserve the institution, right, and so that this act,
1:11:21
Speaker 2: to me is about the players gradually forcing Wimbledon to
1:11:24
Speaker 2: become worthy of its own mythology. Professionals and the women
1:11:28
Speaker 2: and the black players, they all force it. The players'
1:11:30
Speaker 2: associations force it too. This is when Wimbledon becomes more
1:11:34
Speaker 2: than just a private club with the famous tournament. It
1:11:37
Speaker 2: becomes the world stage per tennis.
1:11:39
Speaker 1: So let's start with class, because there's, like you want
1:11:42
Speaker 1: to talk about the divides. Class was the first great
1:11:45
Speaker 1: divide here before anything else. This is Britain, right, you know,
1:11:51
Speaker 1: So class is never very far away. A gentleman by
1:11:54
Speaker 1: the name of Fred Perry wins Wimbledon three straight years
1:11:57
Speaker 1: in the nineteen thirties. He is the greatest champion in
1:12:00
Speaker 1: the UK. He's British, he is the guy. Andy Murray
1:12:04
Speaker 1: has spent seventy seven years chasing.
1:12:07
Speaker 2: Historically speaking, there's a statue of them at the All
1:12:09
Speaker 2: England Club.
1:12:10
Speaker 1: There you go. But Perry is not at the time
1:12:14
Speaker 1: the establishment's idea of their tennis champion because he's the
1:12:18
Speaker 1: son of a labor member of Parliament, the working class
1:12:23
Speaker 1: labor party of the day. He's not from the correct
1:12:26
Speaker 1: background ja.
1:12:29
Speaker 2: And that's what's so revealing because he wins the tournament,
1:12:31
Speaker 2: but he still doesn't fully belong to the club.
1:12:35
Speaker 1: In fact, so he wins the first he wins his
1:12:37
Speaker 1: first Wimbledon, and the tradition then was you got a tie,
1:12:42
Speaker 1: you got the member tie because if you won, you
1:12:45
Speaker 1: became a member. Well, he did not get the traditional
1:12:49
Speaker 1: member tie presented to him personally. It was left on
1:12:53
Speaker 1: a bench near his clothes.
1:12:55
Speaker 2: And as such a British insult.
1:12:58
Speaker 1: A quiet, polite, dismissive and devastating.
1:13:02
Speaker 2: Right. So the message is you can win here, but
1:13:05
Speaker 2: that doesn't mean you were one of us, you know.
1:13:07
Speaker 2: And that's an important distinction, because we're going to see
1:13:10
Speaker 2: it again, wimbleding. It can recognize greatness before it fully
1:13:13
Speaker 2: accepts the person who produced it.
1:13:15
Speaker 1: By the way, this happened to John mcenroll. So the tradition,
1:13:18
Speaker 1: once you win Wimbledon, you become a member. They didn't
1:13:21
Speaker 1: give him his honorary membership for a year. It was
1:13:24
Speaker 1: basically their way of saying, we didn't love your behavior.
1:13:28
Speaker 2: And well the fans didn't greet him openly too. The
1:13:30
Speaker 2: first time he steps in, Right as he stepping on
1:13:32
Speaker 2: the center court for the first champion match against Borg,
1:13:35
Speaker 2: they're booing him, you know, very unwimbled, in like Unbritish
1:13:39
Speaker 2: like response to boost someone just as he sets foot
1:13:42
Speaker 2: on the grass.
1:13:44
Speaker 1: Now, other than the pandemic in twenty twenty, the only
1:13:48
Speaker 1: other time Wimbledon did not have a tournament was you
1:13:53
Speaker 1: won't be surprised World War two where during World War Two,
1:13:57
Speaker 1: literally Center Court was bombed, so the war and the
1:14:01
Speaker 1: cathedral itself almost disappears, so there's no tournaments. From nineteen
1:14:05
Speaker 1: forty to nineteen forty five, a bomb actually falls through
1:14:09
Speaker 1: Center Court and its roof destroys about twelve hundred cints.
1:14:14
Speaker 1: Sixteen bombs all together fall on club property and the
1:14:18
Speaker 1: grounds become something else entirely. The car parks became vegetable plots, right,
1:14:23
Speaker 1: you know. It was all about doing whatever it took
1:14:25
Speaker 1: to help with the war, animals were being kept on
1:14:28
Speaker 1: the grounds, military units were drilling on the concourse.
1:14:35
Speaker 2: I mean, that's the thing with these, you know, sporting events.
1:14:37
Speaker 2: It's great expanses of land, which comes really handy during
1:14:41
Speaker 2: the war, but it has to be repurposed, right, So
1:14:43
Speaker 2: the center cord goes from a place where champions are
1:14:45
Speaker 2: crowned to its a park farm. It's a military space
1:14:50
Speaker 2: and it's also bombed out symbol of survival.
1:14:53
Speaker 1: And there's one person who holds the whole club together,
1:14:56
Speaker 1: constantly worrying about it and holds it together administrationally administrative.
1:15:00
Speaker 1: Her name is Nora Gordon Cleather. She at the time
1:15:04
Speaker 1: was the acting secretary during the war. But boy, she's
1:15:07
Speaker 1: actually an unsung hero to Wimbledon.
1:15:10
Speaker 2: Dan. That's a great reminder that institutions don't survive just
1:15:13
Speaker 2: through their own weight, right, there has to be somebody
1:15:15
Speaker 2: who does the work. And as inevitable as Wimbledon feels now,
1:15:20
Speaker 2: at that moment, it was inevitable, right. It was life
1:15:24
Speaker 2: support and it had to be sustained. And there's also
1:15:27
Speaker 2: a legacy from the warriors that becomes kind of a positive,
1:15:30
Speaker 2: charming part of the Wimbledon tradition. And that's five hundred
1:15:34
Speaker 2: men and women from the British Armed Forces will take
1:15:37
Speaker 2: fifteen days off out of they're allot at thirty per
1:15:40
Speaker 2: year and they'll volunteer as Stewart's as Wimbledon. And that's
1:15:44
Speaker 2: something that started in nineteen forty six as a way
1:15:46
Speaker 2: to reward the soldiers from World War Two now being
1:15:49
Speaker 2: rewarded by volunteering for work. But what it did do
1:15:54
Speaker 2: was it got you inside that hell of ground and
1:15:56
Speaker 2: so you got to be a part of the tournament
1:15:58
Speaker 2: and you got to be on those ground and so
1:16:01
Speaker 2: that's something that continued, but it had its origins from
1:16:03
Speaker 2: post War Britain.
1:16:05
Speaker 1: I don't think we can underscore enough how important Wimbledon
1:16:08
Speaker 1: is to the British right.
1:16:10
Speaker 2: It is.
1:16:10
Speaker 1: It is an identity for them. That is I'm trying
1:16:14
Speaker 1: to think of what the American equivalent would be. You
1:16:18
Speaker 1: thirty fifty years ago you had to set the World Series.
1:16:20
Speaker 1: I guess you'd say the Super Bowl, but it's like
1:16:23
Speaker 1: or But you know, I don't know if an iconic venue.
1:16:25
Speaker 1: I'm trying to think, is there even a venue that
1:16:27
Speaker 1: has maybe Madison Square Garden, right, that has the same part.
1:16:32
Speaker 2: Of the national identity and you know, a point of pride.
1:16:37
Speaker 2: I maybe the national golf, but it's still if you
1:16:40
Speaker 2: think about we're going to get into the master's comparison
1:16:43
Speaker 2: and a little bit. Yeah, I know, there's a two
1:16:45
Speaker 2: century fall from grace of the British Empire, right, which
1:16:50
Speaker 2: maybe could argue continued all the way through handing over
1:16:53
Speaker 2: Hong Kong.
1:16:54
Speaker 1: One could argue it's still happening now, okay, but not
1:16:58
Speaker 1: to get into that.
1:17:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but one thing that never fell off for
1:17:03
Speaker 2: the Brits was wimbled you know, and no no other tournament.
1:17:06
Speaker 2: It's not like the US Open has surpassed it. Are
1:17:08
Speaker 2: the Australian Open, you know, like like Wimbledon is still
1:17:12
Speaker 2: the monarch above all else and so for you know,
1:17:16
Speaker 2: a place that is clunging to the monarchy. Yeah, but
1:17:19
Speaker 2: not just the monarchy that that idea of, you know,
1:17:22
Speaker 2: rule Britannia. For Wimbledon to still rule over all else,
1:17:28
Speaker 2: I think matters to the national psyche. I will.
1:17:32
Speaker 1: So I got to go to rolland Garris a couple
1:17:34
Speaker 1: of years ago and I've not been to Wimbledon yet.
1:17:37
Speaker 1: I can't wait to do the comparison. Have you done both?
1:17:41
Speaker 2: I went to rolland Garross for the first time in
1:17:42
Speaker 2: a couple years, so I have to say, Roland Garros.
1:17:45
Speaker 1: Really blew me away.
1:17:46
Speaker 2: I was it.
1:17:49
Speaker 1: It feels like no other vet. It didn't feel like
1:17:51
Speaker 1: any venue that I'd been to in the United States.
1:17:53
Speaker 2: That well. Actually, my favorite part, and this is not
1:17:56
Speaker 2: the negative, like the egress when you leave, you're walking
1:17:59
Speaker 2: through this park. It's the most beautiful exit to a
1:18:02
Speaker 2: sporting venue I've ever seen. But it's funny you call
1:18:05
Speaker 2: it Rolling Garrols, but I think most of us we
1:18:07
Speaker 2: think of it as the French Open, and the venue
1:18:08
Speaker 2: is certainly Rolling Garrols, but they like the whole thing
1:18:10
Speaker 2: to be called Roman, you know. They like to say,
1:18:12
Speaker 2: like Raphael on the right, like the merchandise that I bought,
1:18:18
Speaker 2: it doesn't say French Open, it says Roland Garrows. Roland
1:18:22
Speaker 2: Garrows is you know that hasn't flown, so to speak,
1:18:25
Speaker 2: It never took off. And I say that as a
1:18:27
Speaker 2: pun because Roland Garrows was an aviator and that the
1:18:30
Speaker 2: area the ground is named after him. But again, Wimbledon
1:18:35
Speaker 2: is not actually the name of the tournament, but we
1:18:38
Speaker 2: all collectively know it as Wimbledon. The French would like
1:18:41
Speaker 2: us to call the tournament roll on garrows, but we
1:18:45
Speaker 2: all call it the French Open. So they haven't been successful.
1:18:48
Speaker 2: That's one way, So that eternal French British rivalry, that's
1:18:51
Speaker 2: one way where the the British have won that round.
1:18:54
Speaker 2: Because they want you to call it Wimbledon, they think
1:18:57
Speaker 2: of it as Wimbledon. We all call it Wimbledon. The
1:18:59
Speaker 2: French would love you to call it roll on garrows,
1:19:01
Speaker 2: but we call it the French Open. But the grounds
1:19:03
Speaker 2: are rolling garrols and it I don't know, it's not
1:19:06
Speaker 2: as overwhelming to me. It's not as impressive to me
1:19:08
Speaker 2: as Wimbledon. Wimbledon. When you walk out of the grounds,
1:19:11
Speaker 2: what struck me. It's so green everything, you know, the
1:19:15
Speaker 2: paint is green, the first for the green last is
1:19:21
Speaker 2: so green, and then the post or this, you know,
1:19:24
Speaker 2: shiny wooden post. Everything is just vibrant. Of course, by
1:19:28
Speaker 2: the end the grass gets worn down and it's this
1:19:30
Speaker 2: sort of dull round, especially right down the middle where
1:19:33
Speaker 2: most of the action is. But uh, I don't know.
1:19:37
Speaker 2: Physically Wimbledon, the site, the All England Club is more
1:19:44
Speaker 2: just on site. It's it's more impressive to me than
1:19:48
Speaker 2: the French, the French open and rolling Garrols grounds are
1:19:51
Speaker 2: very pleasant and like I said, exiting it is just
1:19:56
Speaker 2: beautiful site when you're when you're leaving. But any wimbled
1:20:00
Speaker 2: I'm sorry. Yeah, I think all right, like the Roland girls,
1:20:03
Speaker 2: you will win.
1:20:04
Speaker 1: I can't wait, I can't wait.
1:20:05
Speaker 2: All right. So if we're talking about players forcing the
1:20:08
Speaker 2: gates open, talking about gates and entrances and exosus, the
1:20:13
Speaker 2: biggest hypocrisy in tennis for decades was amateurism. Right on paper,
1:20:18
Speaker 2: amateurism sounds noble, it sounds pure. You play for the
1:20:21
Speaker 2: love of the sports, you don't play for money. But
1:20:24
Speaker 2: British there all right, Yeah, it couldn't help us slip
1:20:27
Speaker 2: into it, you know. But it's actually very classes because
1:20:30
Speaker 2: it's about protecting sports for people who can afford to
1:20:33
Speaker 2: play for love of the game. And that's not all.
1:20:35
Speaker 2: It's certainly not the working class.
1:20:37
Speaker 1: Sure, if you have money, amateurism is romantic, but if
1:20:41
Speaker 1: you need to earn a living, it's frankly a barrier.
1:20:45
Speaker 2: So tennis becomes full of what these people call shamateurism.
1:20:48
Speaker 2: It's bake amateurism. There's under the table payments, there's expenses, pay,
1:20:53
Speaker 2: there's appearance money, all these arrangements that everyone knows are happening,
1:20:56
Speaker 2: but nobody really wants to admit it. So the official
1:20:59
Speaker 2: story is still purity. But the real story is about control.
1:21:03
Speaker 1: We should talk about. Probably the most absurd example is
1:21:07
Speaker 1: Rod Blaber. Right, He's arguably the best player in the
1:21:09
Speaker 1: world at the time, the peak of his powers, and
1:21:13
Speaker 1: he gets banned from Wimbledon for five years because he
1:21:17
Speaker 1: made the decision that he wanted to make a couple
1:21:20
Speaker 1: of bucks. He turns professional. I know, how dare he?
1:21:24
Speaker 2: But what it means is that the most prestigious tournament
1:21:26
Speaker 2: in tennis in the world is conducting these tournaments without
1:21:31
Speaker 2: the best tennis player in the world. And you know,
1:21:34
Speaker 2: this is when the institutions of logic starts to clap,
1:21:36
Speaker 2: because of Wimbledon is supposed to be the ultimate test
1:21:38
Speaker 2: of tennis, but the best players can't enter it, and
1:21:41
Speaker 2: what exactly are we watching?
1:21:44
Speaker 1: This next story is one of my favorite Pauline Betts.
1:21:47
Speaker 2: This story is amazing, yeah, and it shows how absurd
1:21:51
Speaker 2: the system can get. Because she wins Wimbledon in nineteen
1:21:53
Speaker 2: forty six and the first championships after the war, and
1:21:56
Speaker 2: then she's banned from manager tennis, not because she turned
1:21:59
Speaker 2: profession and it's not because she signed a contract because
1:22:02
Speaker 2: she took money. It was because she said she was
1:22:05
Speaker 2: considering taking money. So that reminds me of us back when,
1:22:09
Speaker 2: like remember like college players would be ineligible for simply
1:22:13
Speaker 2: meeting having lunch with an agent. Yeah, you know.
1:22:15
Speaker 1: You were caught hanging out with an agent and that
1:22:19
Speaker 1: was it.
1:22:20
Speaker 2: Banned, You couldn't do. It reminds me of one of
1:22:23
Speaker 2: my apocryphal I never was able to find out who
1:22:26
Speaker 2: actually said this or if it is actually said, but this, uh,
1:22:29
Speaker 2: this basketball coach goes and officially says, can you give
1:22:33
Speaker 2: me a technical for what I think? Says? No, who
1:22:37
Speaker 2: says you're doing horsh job?
1:22:43
Speaker 1: I love that.
1:22:44
Speaker 2: That's fantastic.
1:22:46
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, I'm going to use that. I'm going to
1:22:48
Speaker 1: use that over and over. What a crick can I?
1:22:50
Speaker 1: Can I get in trouble for for what I'm thinking? Now, Well,
1:22:53
Speaker 1: I think you're a st.
1:22:58
Speaker 2: So this case, it was a thought crime, just like that,
1:23:02
Speaker 2: all in the tech and it tells you the whole
1:23:05
Speaker 2: system wasn't really about purity. It was about the governing
1:23:09
Speaker 2: bodies keeping control over the players.
1:23:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's that's a pretty you know, that's probably
1:23:14
Speaker 1: the negative legacy at tons of Wimbledon. Now, look, the
1:23:17
Speaker 1: turning point actually becomes a bit comical. So in nineteen
1:23:20
Speaker 1: sixty seven, Wimbledon realizes, hey, people want to see the
1:23:24
Speaker 1: best tennis players, so they decide to host a professional
1:23:27
Speaker 1: tournament on center court and featuring the very players who
1:23:31
Speaker 1: had been banned from the championships, Rod Labor, Ken Rosewall,
1:23:35
Speaker 1: Pancho Gonzales.
1:23:36
Speaker 2: At the time, it's kind of funny because it's the
1:23:38
Speaker 2: opposite the gusta. They hosted an amateur tournament as something
1:23:43
Speaker 2: new and different and get more exposure, but here they
1:23:46
Speaker 2: get the pros. Wimbledon puts the forbidden players on its
1:23:49
Speaker 2: own court and everyone can see clearly these guys are better.
1:23:53
Speaker 1: So the institution accidentally exposes its own hypocrisy, right.
1:23:57
Speaker 2: And sometimes that's how change happens as sports, right, because
1:24:00
Speaker 2: the people in charge of them become enlightened because the
1:24:02
Speaker 2: contradiction becomes too obvious defense, sort of like amateurism in
1:24:06
Speaker 2: college sports in this.
1:24:08
Speaker 1: Co or the Olympics, you know, right, right, you know
1:24:11
Speaker 1: it's interesting to me, right, So basically, in sixty eight
1:24:15
Speaker 1: everything opens up and they decide, okay, it's going to
1:24:18
Speaker 1: be part of the professional circuit. And it reminds me
1:24:24
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty eight and the decision of when when
1:24:27
Speaker 1: the NBA said, you know what, maybe we should have
1:24:29
Speaker 1: professionals playing in the Olympics.
1:24:32
Speaker 2: And if it's supposed to be a test of the best, right,
1:24:35
Speaker 2: you know, we saw it with hockey, right starting in
1:24:38
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety eight, Let's see the best, you know, let's
1:24:41
Speaker 2: have the Olympics truly become about the best and not
1:24:44
Speaker 2: just the amateurs. So in sixty eight, the Open Era
1:24:50
Speaker 2: begins and professionals amateurs can finally play together. Prize money
1:24:54
Speaker 2: appears in the Wimbledon program to Amazon and E and
1:24:58
Speaker 2: Labor comes back anyway, and that's the perfect response. He
1:25:01
Speaker 2: basically says, you kep me out for five years, but
1:25:04
Speaker 2: guess what, I'm still the man.
1:25:05
Speaker 1: So what do we think with Rod Labor? I mean,
1:25:07
Speaker 1: you know, you talk about like Rod Labor with having
1:25:11
Speaker 1: losing five years of Wimbledon's you know, Ted Williams, you
1:25:15
Speaker 1: know in baseball, is famously lost in Willie Mays. Both
1:25:18
Speaker 1: of them lost a couple of years with the Korean War,
1:25:21
Speaker 1: still have these all time great statistics that in baseball,
1:25:26
Speaker 1: but it's it's there's an interesting what if here in Labor.
1:25:29
Speaker 1: I mean, Labor is already one of the considered one
1:25:32
Speaker 1: of the all time greats. Imagine if he is say
1:25:35
Speaker 1: three more.
1:25:36
Speaker 2: Wimbledon championships, well, I mean then Pete Sampras would not
1:25:40
Speaker 2: have surpassed him, but these other guys would have you
1:25:42
Speaker 2: know that the big three of the Doll and Federer
1:25:45
Speaker 2: and Djokovic, you know, up in the twenties. You know,
1:25:49
Speaker 2: I don't think even back then, you just didn't have
1:25:52
Speaker 2: the sports medicine to sustain the way these guys have
1:25:56
Speaker 2: this late, and I mean they Doll kind of barely did.
1:25:59
Speaker 2: But I mean the fact Djokovic is still going and
1:26:03
Speaker 2: so I don't think he would surpassed them. But maybe
1:26:07
Speaker 2: you wonder if Sampress would have been able to get
1:26:09
Speaker 2: passed him. Because Sampress gets one past him, I think
1:26:12
Speaker 2: maybe two pasted him and then never wins again. So
1:26:17
Speaker 2: seventy three and you've got this Labor moment. Nic Pilitch
1:26:22
Speaker 2: is suspended and the ATP which is still new, the
1:26:26
Speaker 2: Men's Tour, they they support him, but Wimbledon refuses to
1:26:30
Speaker 2: Budge and you have eighty one male players withdraw. So
1:26:34
Speaker 2: now it's not just a tennis cott free. This is
1:26:36
Speaker 2: a player's association proving as power. This is a war
1:26:38
Speaker 2: within the sport.
1:26:39
Speaker 1: And if you think about it, let's put it in
1:26:41
Speaker 1: larger context. This is at the beginning of basically sports labor,
1:26:46
Speaker 1: the sports labor movements in general. Right, you had baseball
1:26:51
Speaker 1: and basketball and football all with these fledgling players associations,
1:26:55
Speaker 1: and you had this then, of course we had had
1:26:58
Speaker 1: this was the ATP. You also would later Billy Ching
1:27:00
Speaker 1: King the death, but this was you know, we talked
1:27:03
Speaker 1: about the player empowerment era of the last ten years.
1:27:06
Speaker 1: I could argue this the mid sort of sixty five
1:27:11
Speaker 1: to eighty, right in all of sports was the really
1:27:16
Speaker 1: the first player empowerment area. And it hits tennis pretty hard.
1:27:19
Speaker 2: Right, It's hitting all these sports because television is transforming
1:27:23
Speaker 2: all these sports and is infusing all these sports with
1:27:25
Speaker 2: more money, and the stakes are money sure, and it
1:27:27
Speaker 2: becomes impossible to ignore, you know, disparity. It's one thing. Yeah,
1:27:31
Speaker 2: you can put up with something when there's really not
1:27:33
Speaker 2: that much money being made and the money is pretty
1:27:35
Speaker 2: much limited to the tickets sold in the seats. But
1:27:38
Speaker 2: with this, this exponential multiplier of the finances that's coming in,
1:27:44
Speaker 2: the players aren't blying and they can see what's happening, right,
1:27:47
Speaker 2: And so.
1:27:47
Speaker 1: For the for the most part, this works Wimbledon sort of,
1:27:51
Speaker 1: you know, it starts to you know, acknowledge this, but
1:27:57
Speaker 1: it was messy. You did have a young seventeen year
1:28:00
Speaker 1: year old named Bjorn Borg who crossed the picket line
1:28:02
Speaker 1: and played, but for the most part they didn't have
1:28:05
Speaker 1: the tournament they wanted, and they realized that they essentially
1:28:11
Speaker 1: had to treat the start to treat the players, at
1:28:14
Speaker 1: least the male players as equals. And I single that
1:28:16
Speaker 1: out because it takes them a while to equalize it
1:28:19
Speaker 1: across the board exactly.
1:28:21
Speaker 2: And now let's talk about the gates in a literal sense, right,
1:28:24
Speaker 2: who was allowed to play? And that'll bring us to
1:28:28
Speaker 2: ALTHEA Gibson who grows up in Harlem, black women in Harlem,
1:28:33
Speaker 2: her family leaves the Jim Crow south, so the kind
1:28:36
Speaker 2: of the great migration northward. And anytime this comes up,
1:28:40
Speaker 2: I always have to recommend. There was the book The
1:28:42
Speaker 2: Warmth of other Sons, which does such a great job
1:28:44
Speaker 2: of chronicling that's written by Isabel Wilkerson, the guest speaker
1:28:48
Speaker 2: at the commencement North Question a few years ago, and
1:28:51
Speaker 2: the Gypson. So she kind of comes up on, you know,
1:28:57
Speaker 2: this this alternate path. Like a lot of doctors sponsor there.
1:29:01
Speaker 2: There's sort of these tournaments that are put together the
1:29:04
Speaker 2: doctors who have the money. Black doctors have the means
1:29:07
Speaker 2: to provide and put these tournaments together. So she kind
1:29:10
Speaker 2: of makes a name for herself on this circuit because
1:29:12
Speaker 2: the white tennis establishment is close to her. There's something
1:29:16
Speaker 2: called the American Tennis Association, and that's you know, sort
1:29:19
Speaker 2: of like what the negro leagues were the baseball It's
1:29:21
Speaker 2: an infrastructure that exists because black players had to build
1:29:24
Speaker 2: their own world.
1:29:25
Speaker 1: It was literally the same parallel. Yeah, like what you're
1:29:28
Speaker 1: describing a parallel, you know, I think about this imagine
1:29:32
Speaker 1: like it was women were already treated as second class.
1:29:36
Speaker 1: Now black women in the sport, right, like your your
1:29:41
Speaker 1: breaking through multiple barriers.
1:29:42
Speaker 2: Here, and that's why I you know, one of the
1:29:45
Speaker 2: most almost criminally under recognized and under honored people in
1:29:51
Speaker 2: sports is Altvia Gibson, who double the Doubt Bay before
1:29:57
Speaker 2: Arthur Ash. You know, we celebrate Arthur Ash, and rightfully
1:29:59
Speaker 2: so for becoming the first player.
1:30:01
Speaker 1: How come there's not ALTHEA. Gibson Stadium, right? Yeah, I
1:30:03
Speaker 1: don't mean that in any negative about Arthur Ash Stadium,
1:30:06
Speaker 1: but it is You're right, it's sort of I don't
1:30:09
Speaker 1: want to say she gets lost, but it's almost like
1:30:13
Speaker 1: she broke through too early before we you know, it's like, well,
1:30:17
Speaker 1: you did it before the civil rights era in some
1:30:18
Speaker 1: form or another.
1:30:19
Speaker 2: I don't.
1:30:20
Speaker 1: I don't get it, do you?
1:30:23
Speaker 2: Sexism? A lot of times, it's as simple as that word, right.
1:30:27
Speaker 2: I think the sexism of it the same as we
1:30:31
Speaker 2: don't talk about other female figures in the civil rights movement,
1:30:34
Speaker 2: you know, to this, I don't want to say over
1:30:36
Speaker 2: because we can probably never pay enough tribute to to
1:30:39
Speaker 2: Martin Luther King. But in some senses, relative to the
1:30:43
Speaker 2: work that the women put into the movement, there's an
1:30:46
Speaker 2: over indexing of Martin Luther King, right, relative to the
1:30:49
Speaker 2: work that the women put in. And I think it's
1:30:51
Speaker 2: the same with ALTHEA. Gibson when we compare it to
1:30:54
Speaker 2: a Jackie Robinson or and she's in that same time.
1:30:56
Speaker 1: You know, I was just gonna say Jackie's in forty seven.
1:31:00
Speaker 2: Break, she pushes, pushes through, wins it in fifty seven
1:31:05
Speaker 2: and fifty eight if you're looking around. So the NBA
1:31:08
Speaker 2: integrates in nineteen fifty, the NFL in nineteen forty six.
1:31:13
Speaker 1: The year before baseball. Such people as seem to forget right.
1:31:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, so I mean to be a black woman.
1:31:19
Speaker 2: But let's give Wimbledon credit, you know, for being not
1:31:24
Speaker 2: being too far behind the times. Right, Maybe they weren't
1:31:26
Speaker 2: the first, but they're not lagging way behind like say
1:31:29
Speaker 2: Augusta was, which didn't have a black player in the
1:31:31
Speaker 2: tournament until nineteen seventy five. Right, So again, Wimbledon not
1:31:36
Speaker 2: leading the way, but Wimbledon not lagging too far behind.
1:31:41
Speaker 1: So here we are, nineteen fifty seven. She wins Wimbledon
1:31:44
Speaker 1: and the Queen of England presenter the trophy. That's a
1:31:48
Speaker 1: that's a pretty big that's a visual.
1:31:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, here's a black woman from the American south by
1:31:53
Speaker 2: Way of Harlem receiving the Wimbledon trophy at Center Court
1:31:57
Speaker 2: from the Queen of England amid all the tradition laden
1:32:02
Speaker 2: that that goes on at Wimbledon. The day she wins
1:32:06
Speaker 2: Londons and an extraordinary heat wave similar to what your
1:32:09
Speaker 2: experiencing as in the summer at twenty sixth ninety six
1:32:13
Speaker 2: degrees almost unimaginable for in English summer. It's funny. I
1:32:17
Speaker 2: was I was there in two thousand, summer two thousand
1:32:20
Speaker 2: covering the British open and wimbled, and it was like
1:32:22
Speaker 2: in the high seventies, and they were freaking out, you know,
1:32:25
Speaker 2: like people were like passing out from heatstroke, sunburning. This
1:32:30
Speaker 2: is great July seventies me so ninety six you can
1:32:34
Speaker 2: just masge London when there was probably virtually no air
1:32:37
Speaker 2: conditioning at the time. But so she wasn't just carrying
1:32:40
Speaker 2: the pressure of history. She's doing in this brutal heat
1:32:42
Speaker 2: against Darlene Harrd, who had been their doubles partner. She
1:32:45
Speaker 2: went sixty three six two and then as Queen Elizabeth
1:32:50
Speaker 2: the second hands of the trophy. Gibson reportedly says, at last,
1:32:54
Speaker 2: at last, and that could have meant, could have been
1:32:56
Speaker 2: a lot of things have been interpreted in a lot
1:32:58
Speaker 2: of ways. And you know, you know, again, a full
1:33:03
Speaker 2: decade before Martin Luther King closes his fame, I have
1:33:07
Speaker 2: a dream speech with where it's free at last it's
1:33:12
Speaker 2: I mean, for all we know, she was just like
1:33:13
Speaker 2: at last, I get a drink of water after that match.
1:33:17
Speaker 2: But those words, you know, you know, as Martha King says,
1:33:20
Speaker 2: in the words of the old Negro spiritual you know
1:33:23
Speaker 2: last And again two decades later Arthur Ash. But this
1:33:30
Speaker 2: again speaks to the power of Wimbledon, because if I
1:33:34
Speaker 2: say Arthur Rash to most people, probably will come to
1:33:37
Speaker 2: mind as the first black man again, that black person,
1:33:39
Speaker 2: but black man to win a Wimbledon. Even though that
1:33:42
Speaker 2: was his third of the Grand Slam championships that he won,
1:33:45
Speaker 2: he won it.
1:33:46
Speaker 1: How important Wimbledon is. It's like you didn't really accomplish anything.
1:33:49
Speaker 1: You can win all the Australian Opens in the world,
1:33:52
Speaker 1: and if you don't win Wimbledon, you haven't done anything intense.
1:33:55
Speaker 2: And so he won one of those. He wins the
1:33:57
Speaker 2: US Open in nineteen sixty eight in a classic match
1:33:59
Speaker 2: in the first Open of the Open era, right and
1:34:03
Speaker 2: at the old side of Forest Hills and so but
1:34:08
Speaker 2: but this was kind of the thing that really put
1:34:11
Speaker 2: him on the map, i'd say, and became his calling card.
1:34:15
Speaker 2: And he's someone comes out of Richmond, Virginia, which was
1:34:19
Speaker 2: the capital of the Confederacy. Yeah, you know, it says
1:34:24
Speaker 2: a lot that his a statue of him goes up
1:34:27
Speaker 2: alongside all the Confederate generals and leaders that that they
1:34:30
Speaker 2: had up on.
1:34:31
Speaker 1: The same it's weird that it's in the same little area.
1:34:34
Speaker 2: But yes, yeah, he's he's mentored by the same doctor
1:34:38
Speaker 2: who helped out the Gibson Walt, doctor Walter Johnson. And
1:34:42
Speaker 2: he really becomes not someone who just and and I
1:34:45
Speaker 2: think this is part of the reason. And again there's
1:34:47
Speaker 2: a sexism, but also you know, the way he carries himself,
1:34:53
Speaker 2: you know, so dignified. I think Gibson was, you know,
1:34:56
Speaker 2: a little more kind of rough and tumble, kind of
1:34:58
Speaker 2: a tomboy if you will, you know. And and Arthur Ash,
1:35:03
Speaker 2: you know, really is like a dignitarian and a kind
1:35:07
Speaker 2: of a post king civil rights leader.
1:35:09
Speaker 1: Well you're describing Jackie Robinson. Yeaho, the sort of the same,
1:35:13
Speaker 1: the same sort of personality sort of ret this goes
1:35:17
Speaker 1: back to the origin story of Jackie that that you know,
1:35:20
Speaker 1: brand Tricky was trying to figure out can he can
1:35:23
Speaker 1: he handle the incoming right?
1:35:26
Speaker 2: And Arthur asked, he used modern terminology, wanted all the
1:35:30
Speaker 2: smoke right and goes beyond just fighting for tennis, you know,
1:35:33
Speaker 2: becomes adamant about no athletes should be going as apartheid
1:35:36
Speaker 2: South Africa and you know, blessing them with their talents
1:35:40
Speaker 2: or you know, artists shouldn't be performing there. He shouldn't
1:35:43
Speaker 2: do concerts there all that. He was very outspoken on that.
1:35:47
Speaker 2: And the Yearie wins Wimin so he's already thirty one,
1:35:51
Speaker 2: you know, and he beats a twenty two year old
1:35:53
Speaker 2: Jimmy Connors, who was a defending champion, youngest Drodder Lauder,
1:35:56
Speaker 2: the favorite player, and there was there was tension there
1:35:59
Speaker 2: because Connor's sued Ash before the tournament, so this was
1:36:03
Speaker 2: not just a friendly meeting.
1:36:06
Speaker 1: It's interesting to see that. And Arthur Ash decides he's
1:36:12
Speaker 1: not going to just beat Connors by playing his normal game.
1:36:16
Speaker 1: He had a different strategy to try to i think,
1:36:20
Speaker 1: wear down the young Connors.
1:36:22
Speaker 2: And it's like the tennis version of the ropodope, like
1:36:24
Speaker 2: Ali against Foreman and the Rumble in the jungle, and
1:36:28
Speaker 2: so don't give the power player power, So just give
1:36:31
Speaker 2: him junk slices, floaters, dropshots.
1:36:33
Speaker 1: You know, he where's a mask you could almost picture
1:36:36
Speaker 1: young you know, it's so funny. The most iconic Jimmy
1:36:39
Speaker 1: Connor's moment is when he's in his late thirties, right,
1:36:42
Speaker 1: but you know he was energetic at thirty seven, twenty
1:36:45
Speaker 1: two year old Connors running all over the place.
1:36:47
Speaker 2: But Ash did wear them out and unbelievable. Right, Yeah,
1:36:53
Speaker 2: one of the great thinking man performances in sports history.
1:36:56
Speaker 2: And but Dad became the first and still the only
1:36:57
Speaker 2: black man to win at Wimbledon. So Gibson's about getting
1:37:01
Speaker 2: through the gate, Ashes, about walking on the center court
1:37:04
Speaker 2: and out thinking the whole power structure. Then there's Billy
1:37:07
Speaker 2: gen King, Billy jan King.
1:37:10
Speaker 1: She is in some ways, she's the one that breaks
1:37:14
Speaker 1: the barrier for women. It's tennis really all over the world,
1:37:20
Speaker 1: the WTA, right, the original nine. You know, she's she's
1:37:28
Speaker 1: leads the women to what would eventually become an equal
1:37:33
Speaker 1: moment in tennis.
1:37:34
Speaker 2: And she's not asking the existing system to be nicer.
1:37:38
Speaker 2: She's saying, let's create a whole new system when it
1:37:40
Speaker 2: serves us. This comes back to the timing element. So
1:37:45
Speaker 2: cigarette ads get banned from TV in nineteen seventy one,
1:37:48
Speaker 2: and so Virginia Slims, which is a cigarette brand and
1:37:52
Speaker 2: marketed and sceptward women is looking for a way to
1:37:54
Speaker 2: get their product awareness out there, so they sponsor the
1:37:57
Speaker 2: women's Tour. Right, you've got this may your corporate backing
1:38:01
Speaker 2: for this fledgling tour. Of course, the slogan You've come
1:38:04
Speaker 2: a long way baby, and so uh, you know it
1:38:08
Speaker 2: matters with women because women in here's the oldest and
1:38:11
Speaker 2: the most prestigious tournament, but it's not the first to
1:38:14
Speaker 2: get equal prize money. So for women to get their money,
1:38:18
Speaker 2: you needed the back end of something like this. So
1:38:20
Speaker 2: here comes this major sponsor looking for something. They've had this,
1:38:24
Speaker 2: you know, the pre eminent way of advertising, taking away
1:38:27
Speaker 2: from them and shut off from them. And so it
1:38:29
Speaker 2: worked out pretty well for Billy jen King and the
1:38:31
Speaker 2: fledgling Women's Tour. Look it did.
1:38:34
Speaker 1: By the way I was thinking about this, you had
1:38:35
Speaker 1: you had Virginia Slims, which you know, for those of
1:38:38
Speaker 1: us at a certain age, it was an you just
1:38:40
Speaker 1: associated it with women's tendus all the time, Right, it
1:38:43
Speaker 1: was always Virginia Slims, Virginia Slims. And then you had
1:38:46
Speaker 1: the Winston Cup, remember for a NASCAR race for NASCAR. Yeah,
1:38:50
Speaker 1: because again it goes back to what you just said.
1:38:52
Speaker 1: The cigarette companies they had to find another way to
1:38:54
Speaker 1: get their logo out. They had to find another way.
1:38:57
Speaker 1: And so while they couldn't advertise, they could title spots and.
1:39:02
Speaker 2: Of course like the antithesis of sport right sports health
1:39:06
Speaker 2: and good for your cardiovascular system.
1:39:09
Speaker 1: It's really sort of of all things, like is there
1:39:12
Speaker 1: a worst thing? Although if you told me, right, wow,
1:39:16
Speaker 1: you know, I'm sure, I'm sure, Like there are guys
1:39:19
Speaker 1: that smoked the tennis tournaments that have wibbled that ever
1:39:21
Speaker 1: saw you smoke, they probably would have thrown you out
1:39:23
Speaker 1: of the facility.
1:39:26
Speaker 2: So again, the US Open got there in terms of
1:39:29
Speaker 2: equal pay in nineteen seventy three women in. It took
1:39:32
Speaker 2: until two thousand and seven. It's funny. I actually met
1:39:34
Speaker 2: Billy Jean King for the first time last year and
1:39:36
Speaker 2: I said, you know, hey, I'm just amazing in awe
1:39:40
Speaker 2: for everything that you've done. And her quick retort is
1:39:43
Speaker 2: and I'm still going. You know, she's in her eighties now,
1:39:45
Speaker 2: but it just showed you like she still had to
1:39:47
Speaker 2: keep going, like she she gets equality at the US Open,
1:39:50
Speaker 2: and it takes you know, until another what thirty plus years.
1:39:53
Speaker 1: Well, it took Venus Williams. You know, she made she
1:39:57
Speaker 1: writes this op ed in the Times of London before
1:40:00
Speaker 1: the start of the tournament, and you know in O
1:40:03
Speaker 1: seven and she makes this public plea and makes this
1:40:05
Speaker 1: case and then finally, you know, her popularity and her
1:40:11
Speaker 1: voice is what took it. So it's it is quite
1:40:17
Speaker 1: But going back to Billy Jean Ja, she's another one
1:40:20
Speaker 1: like Althea Gibson, Billy Jean King. She's getting her dues.
1:40:26
Speaker 1: I'm glad she's I've noticed. Feels like in the last
1:40:29
Speaker 1: ten years she's getting these she's getting the flowers she
1:40:35
Speaker 1: deserved at the time that we didn't. It's very similar
1:40:38
Speaker 1: to Muhammad Ali right where in the moment she was
1:40:42
Speaker 1: treated as a oh she's divide her, she's ruining sports,
1:40:46
Speaker 1: she's bringing politics, you know what I mean, all these things,
1:40:49
Speaker 1: and Muhammad Ali was treated the same way. By the
1:40:52
Speaker 1: end of their career and end of their lives, there
1:40:56
Speaker 1: you realize, my word, look what they did and look
1:40:59
Speaker 1: at the look at the dignity that they kept, you know,
1:41:03
Speaker 1: while doing it. And I feel like Billy Jean is
1:41:06
Speaker 1: getting is getting her flowers late, but at least she's
1:41:09
Speaker 1: here to get her flowers.
1:41:10
Speaker 2: And it's so great she's hearing it directly from the
1:41:13
Speaker 2: people who are benefit for Like I remember cocoa goff uh,
1:41:16
Speaker 2: you know, got one of these seven figure checks for
1:41:18
Speaker 2: I think went in the US Open, and I think
1:41:21
Speaker 2: Billy Jing King was there, but she just was just
1:41:23
Speaker 2: looking at this, you know, giant check. Literally, I'm really
1:41:27
Speaker 2: grateful for you for what you did because I got
1:41:31
Speaker 2: this this big check to deposit in my account. So
1:41:34
Speaker 2: she got to hear it directly.
1:41:35
Speaker 1: So I.
1:41:37
Speaker 2: You know, when when when she closes her eyes for
1:41:40
Speaker 2: the final time, she will she will you know, have
1:41:43
Speaker 2: a peaceful, eternal sleep knowing that you know, she got
1:41:46
Speaker 2: the full recognition for everything that that she did.
1:41:50
Speaker 1: Look for, not to give away Mount Rushmore's. But it
1:41:52
Speaker 1: like with Billy Jean King, right, that is you just
1:41:55
Speaker 1: say to yourself, it's possible she you know, in a
1:42:00
Speaker 1: if you look back over it, when women's tennis is
1:42:02
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty years old, she's still going to
1:42:04
Speaker 1: be seen as a founding mother, if you will, of
1:42:07
Speaker 1: women's tennis.
1:42:08
Speaker 2: Yeah, you just can't extract her from the sport and
1:42:12
Speaker 2: just women's sports in general, right, are beyond just tennis.
1:42:17
Speaker 2: So this Act was the story of the players making
1:42:19
Speaker 2: Wimbledon open its gates to the professionals, the black champions,
1:42:23
Speaker 2: to empowering women, to player labor, to the athletes who're
1:42:28
Speaker 2: just grateful to be allowed in, but they're strong enough
1:42:30
Speaker 2: to negotiate their terms.
1:42:32
Speaker 1: Look, and this is what makes Wimbledon dynastic, if you will.
1:42:36
Speaker 1: It protects tradition ferociously, but over and over again, the
1:42:40
Speaker 1: players force it to decide which traditions are truly sacred
1:42:43
Speaker 1: and which ones are just aid rules defending old power.
1:42:48
Speaker 1: And the fact that they can adapt too. Yeah, Yeah,
1:42:51
Speaker 1: the fact that Wimbledon can adapt is why it has
1:42:53
Speaker 1: staying power.
1:42:55
Speaker 2: And then once the gates were open, something else happened
1:42:57
Speaker 2: that really helped bring Wimbledon to the play and the
1:43:00
Speaker 2: status enjoys today, and that was Americans fell in love
1:43:04
Speaker 2: with it. We'll talk about that next.
1:43:06
Speaker 1: All right, So we're two American guys doing a Wimbledon episode.
1:43:10
Speaker 1: So at some point we're gonna have to ask the
1:43:11
Speaker 1: very selfish question, how did this tournament become ours?
1:43:16
Speaker 2: Too?
1:43:16
Speaker 1: Because yes, Wimbledon is British to its boats, the All
1:43:19
Speaker 1: England Club, the.
1:43:21
Speaker 2: Royal Box, strawberries and half and half as a JAA
1:43:26
Speaker 2: will tell you it wasn't really any whip cream.
1:43:28
Speaker 1: That cool address code that sounds like I was written
1:43:31
Speaker 1: by someone's disapproving grandfather. And yet for American sports fans
1:43:34
Speaker 1: of a certain age, Wimbledon is now, and it really
1:43:38
Speaker 1: is of a certain age. It's the age the ja
1:43:40
Speaker 1: and I are. I mean, we were kids in the
1:43:42
Speaker 1: late seventies. Wimbledon is deeply familiar and feels weirdly not American,
1:43:50
Speaker 1: but it feels like it's culturally a first cousin for sure.
1:43:55
Speaker 2: To the extent that the Beatles are American rights and
1:44:00
Speaker 2: the Rolling Stones came over here in the nineteen seventies,
1:44:02
Speaker 2: right like, eventually we absorbed all these things. Right, they're
1:44:05
Speaker 2: the British invasion. This wasn't so much as an invasion
1:44:08
Speaker 2: as it was just a reaching out and and an
1:44:12
Speaker 2: affinity for it. And I think the answer lies in
1:44:14
Speaker 2: three things. It's champions, television, and timing. So the Americans,
1:44:20
Speaker 2: Americans love winners, right, Chuck, we did. Americans were going
1:44:24
Speaker 2: over to London and winning and winning and winning, so
1:44:28
Speaker 2: he had a rooting interest. Television gave Americans and it
1:44:33
Speaker 2: gave the sport exposure in America, and gave Americans a ritual.
1:44:36
Speaker 2: And then the timing we hit it at this earlier.
1:44:40
Speaker 2: It fell at a great place, a portuitive spot on
1:44:43
Speaker 2: the American sports calendar, pretty slow period on the American
1:44:47
Speaker 2: sports counter late June and the July, and it made
1:44:52
Speaker 2: Wimbledon feel like seasonal appointment. So let's let's start with
1:44:55
Speaker 2: the players first. You know, it wasn't just the moment,
1:44:59
Speaker 2: it was, it was years, right, you got your early
1:45:01
Speaker 2: American champions like May Sutton, Bill Tilden, Hellen Wills Moody
1:45:05
Speaker 2: and Don Budge, and then post Warrior and Mariene Conley
1:45:08
Speaker 2: out there a Gibson and Billy Jeane King and in
1:45:11
Speaker 2: the open era gives American television this this incredible cast Connors, McEnroe,
1:45:18
Speaker 2: Everett Neverts, Lovos starts off as a check and becomes
1:45:22
Speaker 2: an American citizen after a defection. Ask Samprus and Agacy
1:45:27
Speaker 2: Venus and Serena, all those stars.
1:45:32
Speaker 1: And really, I mean really, since it depending on your generation,
1:45:36
Speaker 1: Wimbledon comes to you through a different American face. I mean,
1:45:40
Speaker 1: just you know, you you literally if you're in your
1:45:45
Speaker 1: sixties or seventies, you've got a player. If you're in
1:45:48
Speaker 1: your forties or fifties, you've got an American. If you're
1:45:51
Speaker 1: in your twenties or thirties, you do right.
1:45:54
Speaker 2: And the fact that you know it could it could
1:45:57
Speaker 2: switch back and forth. Right. So if the men were
1:46:00
Speaker 2: going through a low, which pretty much the twenty first
1:46:02
Speaker 2: century has been an American tennis lovel but you did
1:46:05
Speaker 2: have Venus and Serena to pick up the slack, right.
1:46:09
Speaker 2: And then you had sort of Chris Evert in the
1:46:12
Speaker 2: seventies until McEnroe becomes more prominent in the eighties, right,
1:46:17
Speaker 2: and in Samprus in the nineties. So you had this
1:46:22
Speaker 2: handoff back and forth the men and the women.
1:46:25
Speaker 1: But let's be honest, the real American marketing marketing genius
1:46:29
Speaker 1: came from a producer at NBC and unnamed producer breakfast
1:46:34
Speaker 1: at Wimbledon. NBC takes what should be a problem, the
1:46:38
Speaker 1: time difference, and turns it into a brand and an identity.
1:46:43
Speaker 1: You want to watch Center Court live, You're going to
1:46:45
Speaker 1: get up early. So NBC says, so great, that's not
1:46:47
Speaker 1: an inconvenience. Let's turn it into a ritual.
1:46:51
Speaker 2: Man, Chuck, just hearing you talk about it, I hear
1:46:53
Speaker 2: those notes in my head. This song is called World
1:46:59
Speaker 2: Champion Keith Mansfield and everyone who grew up watching Breakfast
1:47:03
Speaker 2: in Wimbledon can hummet sing along. But yeah, it was
1:47:08
Speaker 2: brilliant television branding right then, just really embracing it. They
1:47:12
Speaker 2: made the time a part of it. Like that sounds aspirational.
1:47:15
Speaker 2: Let's have breakfast in Wimbledon. If you knew how bad
1:47:17
Speaker 2: the breakfast at Wimbledon actually was, maybe you wouldn't be
1:47:20
Speaker 2: so incited to get up. But because you weren't subjected
1:47:23
Speaker 2: to that awful British food, you just got to wake
1:47:26
Speaker 2: up and roll out of bed and maybe stumble into
1:47:28
Speaker 2: the living room and turn on the TV, and then
1:47:30
Speaker 2: all these brilliant green the emeralds of Wimbledon would be
1:47:34
Speaker 2: beamed into your living room. A long time.
1:47:37
Speaker 1: I want to give you, before I know you've got
1:47:39
Speaker 1: that you love, this next story here and before you
1:47:41
Speaker 1: get to it, I want to talk about a brief
1:47:43
Speaker 1: history of what Wimbledon, what the television experience was like
1:47:48
Speaker 1: for Americans, for Wimbledon before nineteen seventy nine. You have
1:47:53
Speaker 1: this great story here and I don't want to take
1:47:56
Speaker 1: it from you, but just to give you a backstory.
1:47:59
Speaker 1: So it wasn't it was in the sixties is when,
1:48:03
Speaker 1: you know, so the BBC started televising Wimbledon, and believe
1:48:06
Speaker 1: it or not, nineteen thirty seven they even they actually
1:48:10
Speaker 1: there were so few people watching it that the makers
1:48:13
Speaker 1: of televisions advertised television sets in the program at Wimbledon
1:48:20
Speaker 1: to let people know that they could if they couldn't
1:48:22
Speaker 1: get into the gates at Wimbledon, they could go they
1:48:24
Speaker 1: could buy a television and watch it on the BBC.
1:48:27
Speaker 1: But it doesn't.
1:48:28
Speaker 2: That's interesting because that highlights the difference between America and England,
1:48:33
Speaker 2: because you know, originally, like the baseball owners saw television
1:48:37
Speaker 2: as a threat, right, and the NFL owners saw television
1:48:41
Speaker 2: as a threat that, oh my god, if people watch
1:48:43
Speaker 2: on television, they're not going to come and buy tickets
1:48:45
Speaker 2: and we're not going to make as much money. But
1:48:47
Speaker 2: TV seemed to be embraced at Wimbledon into England.
1:48:52
Speaker 1: So this won't surprise sort of American sports TV knowledgeable people.
1:48:57
Speaker 1: But the first sort of excerpts of Wimbledon were on
1:49:01
Speaker 1: The Wild World of Sports back in the sixties, and
1:49:04
Speaker 1: ABC would bring these sort of taped broadcasts. Nineteen sixty
1:49:09
Speaker 1: nine is when NBC officially gets to right the rights
1:49:13
Speaker 1: to Wimbledon. But between nineteen sixty nine and nineteen seventy eight,
1:49:17
Speaker 1: Wimbledon is all on tape delay, and it's packaged, and
1:49:21
Speaker 1: it's you know, not dissimilar to how you know this
1:49:24
Speaker 1: was for those of you of us that are younger
1:49:27
Speaker 1: than Ja and I. This was like about half the
1:49:30
Speaker 1: sports that we got to experience as kids came to
1:49:34
Speaker 1: us prepackaged or on tape delay, whether it was the
1:49:36
Speaker 1: NBA Finals, whether it was boxing, whether it was tennis,
1:49:41
Speaker 1: whether it was golf, if you were watching the British Open,
1:49:45
Speaker 1: you know everything, or.
1:49:46
Speaker 2: The elected games on college football. Yeah, yeah, I mean
1:49:49
Speaker 2: NBC was doing it with the Olympics, you know, accounting
1:49:51
Speaker 2: for these different time zones around the world, you know,
1:49:53
Speaker 2: really into the twenty first century, surprisingly until social media
1:49:57
Speaker 2: basically forced them to stick with everything.
1:50:00
Speaker 1: But this is what happened, right, which is the American
1:50:03
Speaker 1: players in the early seventies start to become the stars
1:50:07
Speaker 1: of tennis. We just told you Arthur ash wins Wimbledon
1:50:10
Speaker 1: in seventy five. Billy G King is the one of
1:50:13
Speaker 1: the dominant women's players. You have a young Chris Evert,
1:50:15
Speaker 1: you have a young Jimmy Connors, you have this up
1:50:17
Speaker 1: and coming star in John McEnroe. So there was suddenly
1:50:21
Speaker 1: NBC decided, you know what, there might be an audience
1:50:24
Speaker 1: here for live coverage. Let's give it a shot.
1:50:29
Speaker 2: And one of the problems though, was that kind of
1:50:33
Speaker 2: interesting that NBC could boss around the Olympics and change
1:50:37
Speaker 2: starting time so you might get you know, a swim
1:50:40
Speaker 2: gold medal match might start at like eight am in
1:50:43
Speaker 2: Beijing to accommodate the American TV time zones. But Wimbledon
1:50:49
Speaker 2: they weren't budgeting. Ah, they were doing their noon start
1:50:51
Speaker 2: for the championship, you know, doesn't matter what that meant
1:50:54
Speaker 2: for American TV audiences, and they didn't want to budget
1:50:58
Speaker 2: on when with their first breakfast at Wimbledon in nineteen
1:51:02
Speaker 2: seventy nine, it's the Borg going Borg versus Roscoe Tanner
1:51:06
Speaker 2: in the final, and they just wanted to do a
1:51:09
Speaker 2: little five minute intro to kind of set the stage.
1:51:11
Speaker 2: You know. NBC became really famous for those in the
1:51:14
Speaker 2: nineties with the NBA and NBC. They just wanted something similar,
1:51:18
Speaker 2: you know, just like a tone setter to build excitement
1:51:21
Speaker 2: in the match, you know, and the producer Donaldmyer pretty
1:51:24
Speaker 2: famous producer at NBC Sports.
1:51:26
Speaker 1: Donald Meyer.
1:51:27
Speaker 2: By the way, who's who Tony Corneiser loves to talk
1:51:30
Speaker 2: about all the time because it's Ollmeyer who made the
1:51:32
Speaker 2: famous quote that says, all of your problems can be
1:51:35
Speaker 2: solved with one thing money or the answer to.
1:51:39
Speaker 1: Most of your problems is money.
1:51:41
Speaker 2: Except that Wimbledon. Except the Wibbledon, right because despite all
1:51:44
Speaker 2: the money that NBC was paying for the American TV rights,
1:51:47
Speaker 2: women said no, you cannot have a five minute delay.
1:51:50
Speaker 2: And so that day though it just so happened that
1:51:55
Speaker 2: Donald Dell was an NBC commentator, but he was also
1:51:58
Speaker 2: Donald Roscoe Tanner's agent, you know, the Prosser agency represented
1:52:03
Speaker 2: you know, most of the tennis stars of the seventies.
1:52:06
Speaker 2: Also was where David Falk was working when he signed
1:52:10
Speaker 2: client Michael Jordan in nineteen eighty four. So Donald Dell
1:52:16
Speaker 2: uses he switches from commentator mode to agent mode and
1:52:20
Speaker 2: he gets his client, Roscoe Tanner, to take a bathroom
1:52:23
Speaker 2: break right before the match, or ostensibly he's taking a
1:52:27
Speaker 2: bathroom break, really goes and hides out in the back
1:52:29
Speaker 2: of the men's locker room, and so you know, it
1:52:32
Speaker 2: buys him the necessary time. Meanwhile, He's in there so
1:52:35
Speaker 2: long that there's a Wimbledon official going in there saying, oh,
1:52:38
Speaker 2: mister Tennor, where are you? Mister Tenner? We're ready for you.
1:52:41
Speaker 2: Mister Borg is ready. So having sufficiently delayed the start
1:52:46
Speaker 2: of the match FROMBC could get their little preview in
1:52:49
Speaker 2: he comes down there.
1:52:50
Speaker 1: You know, I'm not going to go down the road
1:52:53
Speaker 1: as at x NBC or the legend of donnal Meyer
1:52:56
Speaker 1: is what it is, but there's a region why you
1:52:58
Speaker 1: have the phrase the legend of Don Olmyer. These are
1:53:01
Speaker 1: the type of things that made him a legendary television executive,
1:53:05
Speaker 1: the good and the bad. Look, I'm not gonna you know,
1:53:06
Speaker 1: there's other ways that Olmyer caused some controversy later on
1:53:10
Speaker 1: down the road. We're not going to get into it here,
1:53:12
Speaker 1: but this is why there is the word legendary television
1:53:17
Speaker 1: executive applies. There's a reason, yeah to mister Olmyer.
1:53:21
Speaker 2: Well, look, there's one other person that I want to
1:53:24
Speaker 2: give a little bit of a shout out to here,
1:53:25
Speaker 2: because you know, for at least for those of us
1:53:28
Speaker 2: of a certain age.
1:53:30
Speaker 1: Breakfast Atwindeln and you woke up, it was summer. Everybody
1:53:33
Speaker 1: on the and you got to see Bud Collins wearing
1:53:36
Speaker 1: crazy looking pants that looked like they were designed by
1:53:39
Speaker 1: a kaleidoscope or something. And Bud Collins, I think is
1:53:45
Speaker 1: an incredibly important narrator here for bringing excitement. I mean
1:53:52
Speaker 1: he and I'll say this, I think John McEnroe brings
1:53:56
Speaker 1: a very similar energy to these broadcasts, but I think
1:53:59
Speaker 1: he learned it from Bud Collins. And and and this
1:54:03
Speaker 1: is what's great about Bud is that Bud was both
1:54:06
Speaker 1: a legendary sports writer from guess where the Boston Globe was, uh.
1:54:12
Speaker 1: He his career, he was both a tennis nut. He
1:54:15
Speaker 1: taught tennis even while he was an intern at the
1:54:18
Speaker 1: Boston Herald. He was like a local tennis coach for
1:54:21
Speaker 1: a little while, but he was he started tell he
1:54:24
Speaker 1: started doing tennis commentary for public television in Boston in
1:54:28
Speaker 1: the sixties. And so that's why he was one of
1:54:31
Speaker 1: the few sports journalists who also had some TV chops,
1:54:36
Speaker 1: which is why NBC hired I mean, you know, what
1:54:39
Speaker 1: Dick Vital did for for college basketball on television arguably
1:54:44
Speaker 1: is what Bud Collins did. I think, don't you.
1:54:45
Speaker 2: Thinking ask that list John Madden for the NFL and
1:54:49
Speaker 2: Don Cherry with Hockey Night in Canada. Right, these these
1:54:53
Speaker 2: people who you know, really helped elevate the sport and
1:54:57
Speaker 2: were a conduit and were enthus heiastic cheerleaders, an enthusiasm
1:55:01
Speaker 2: and I can tell you just like this was coous.
1:55:04
Speaker 2: Yeah like that that it's genuine. It's not an act.
1:55:07
Speaker 1: It wasn't addes right, Yeah.
1:55:10
Speaker 2: You know, you know Bud, Bud sat in my little
1:55:13
Speaker 2: section when I was when I covered wimbled for the
1:55:16
Speaker 2: first time, and that enthusiasm. So the day the tournament started,
1:55:22
Speaker 2: he's in there. You know, we all had phones at
1:55:24
Speaker 2: our desk and his phone would ring and he would
1:55:26
Speaker 2: pick up an answer to say.
1:55:27
Speaker 1: Wimbledon first day.
1:55:29
Speaker 2: He was just floating on a cloud because this was
1:55:32
Speaker 2: his time. So you know, Bud Collins was tennis on
1:55:36
Speaker 2: TV for American audiences, but again even for him, uh
1:55:40
Speaker 2: you know, so well versed in tennis, you could tell
1:55:43
Speaker 2: Wimbledon was it like this was Christmas for him right
1:55:47
Speaker 2: in Villa July, Wimbledon, that was it.
1:55:51
Speaker 1: And again you know and I don't, And maybe it's
1:55:54
Speaker 1: because you and I are both of our our sort
1:55:56
Speaker 1: of ink stained wretches that did television too. I mean
1:55:59
Speaker 1: what I loved to out Bud and what he did,
1:56:01
Speaker 1: and I look I I in my own way, I've.
1:56:04
Speaker 2: Always said my coverage of politics, I wanted I wanted
1:56:08
Speaker 2: people to like what we were doing, not dislike what
1:56:10
Speaker 2: we were doing.
1:56:11
Speaker 1: Bud Collins made me want to play.
1:56:13
Speaker 2: Tennis, and I had no interest in tennis. Like that's
1:56:16
Speaker 2: how enthusiastic he was about you were. He made it
1:56:19
Speaker 2: more compelling. He just did so. Bud Collins aside and
1:56:24
Speaker 2: his crazy pants, you know, his his pants were the
1:56:28
Speaker 2: equivalent of Craig Sager's jackets, you know. But it the
1:56:33
Speaker 2: broadcast was more formal and more ceremonial, so you could
1:56:38
Speaker 2: tell even through the television that there was something special
1:56:41
Speaker 2: about this place, right. And here's also where Tennis has
1:56:46
Speaker 2: his contradiction though, because the packaging is elite, as the
1:56:49
Speaker 2: access to the orlds of private club, but the competition, you know,
1:56:52
Speaker 2: it's lonely, your by yourself, and you know there's no
1:56:57
Speaker 2: running back to pick up a blitzing linebacker. You know
1:57:00
Speaker 2: that there's no teammate that you can pass off to.
1:57:02
Speaker 2: There's no teammate that can grab the rebound and pass
1:57:05
Speaker 2: ahead to you. You know, you know baseball, you get
1:57:08
Speaker 2: another at bad tomorrow. But you know, tennis is just
1:57:10
Speaker 2: you and and you know, it's funny that there was
1:57:12
Speaker 2: a mentality I had to adapt when I was there
1:57:15
Speaker 2: because I realized, you know, if you have one bad day,
1:57:18
Speaker 2: when bad outing, wimbledy, you're done your turn. It's over.
1:57:21
Speaker 2: You're going home. So I really try to adopt that
1:57:23
Speaker 2: mentality when you know, like you've got to bring it
1:57:25
Speaker 2: every day with your stories, you know, for the weeks
1:57:28
Speaker 2: you're there. You know, I was like, you got to
1:57:30
Speaker 2: bring it every day because if a tennis player, one
1:57:32
Speaker 2: of those people out there on the court doesn't do it,
1:57:35
Speaker 2: they're going home. So so I tried to be like
1:57:37
Speaker 2: a tennis player.
1:57:39
Speaker 1: Look, it is no coach. You don't even even when
1:57:43
Speaker 1: there's a time out. You know, you can make I
1:57:45
Speaker 1: guess eye contact with somebody in the crowd, right, and
1:57:48
Speaker 1: you know, maybe do Morris code right, stuff like that.
1:57:50
Speaker 1: There's there's no clock, although you know, maybe there's some expectation.
1:57:56
Speaker 1: You come back from your hydrate, your water break there
1:57:59
Speaker 1: a little bit. You don't have a teammate, you don't
1:58:01
Speaker 1: have a substitution. And now with especially that we're putting
1:58:06
Speaker 1: everything electronically, you won't even have any umpires to blame anymore, right,
1:58:10
Speaker 1: Like it is in some ways with the video reviews,
1:58:14
Speaker 1: it is there is nobody to blame but yourself.
1:58:18
Speaker 2: And I think it's that that notion, you know, that
1:58:22
Speaker 2: that that primal you know, one on one, And I
1:58:25
Speaker 2: think that's why there's such a difference between you know,
1:58:27
Speaker 2: we were verver singles. We don't really care that much
1:58:29
Speaker 2: about doubles tennis, right I ever have you know, there's
1:58:33
Speaker 2: something about that Even watching the the the blame sisters,
1:58:36
Speaker 2: you'd think, oh, that would be compelling. It's not the
1:58:39
Speaker 2: same as watching them play each other for example. Wow,
1:58:43
Speaker 2: maybe that speaks to the individualism of Americans and like
1:58:48
Speaker 2: what we keep getting let's kicked in the Ryder Cup
1:58:50
Speaker 2: because that calls for teamwork and and the Americans can't
1:58:54
Speaker 2: shift from that individual e.
1:58:55
Speaker 3: Man.
1:58:56
Speaker 1: We're we're I always say, we're all libertarian and art
1:59:00
Speaker 1: in America, right because we came here. We came here
1:59:04
Speaker 1: escaping some group, write some entity to you know, whatever
1:59:08
Speaker 1: it is. Everybody came here to strike out quote unquote
1:59:11
Speaker 1: on their own right, you know.
1:59:13
Speaker 2: And the thing about tennis is that it has that
1:59:18
Speaker 2: it has that you're you're competing against somebody. So it
1:59:21
Speaker 2: is like boxing. You're you're you're going head to head
1:59:23
Speaker 2: with someone. But but parts of it are like golf,
1:59:25
Speaker 2: where you're just it's just you competing against the contours
1:59:29
Speaker 2: of the court. Right. There is nothing preventing you from
1:59:31
Speaker 2: getting your serve in right, especially there's.
1:59:34
Speaker 1: Nobody imagine imagine, imagine if somebody could rush you while
1:59:39
Speaker 1: you were serving right right, nothing like that.
1:59:44
Speaker 2: No one in the crowd can do anything right quiet,
1:59:46
Speaker 2: please kick that. So so in that sense, it's like golf,
1:59:51
Speaker 2: right like there's nothing preventing you. There's no one preventing
1:59:55
Speaker 2: you from hitting a great drive right down the middle
1:59:57
Speaker 2: of the fairway except yourself. There's nothing preventing. But we've
2:00:00
Speaker 2: seen it, right when the service starts to get a
2:00:02
Speaker 2: little dodgy, the pressure goes up and all of a sudden,
2:00:04
Speaker 2: you can't get that first serve in, and now there's
2:00:06
Speaker 2: that pressure to get the second serve in right. So
2:00:09
Speaker 2: it's that watching someone struggle against themselves is part of
2:00:13
Speaker 2: the fascination of tennis, and I think one of the
2:00:15
Speaker 2: things that helped it play. Well, you're in America, Well.
2:00:18
Speaker 1: Let's talk about he brought up golf, and I think
2:00:21
Speaker 1: this is a good time for an aside on the Masters,
2:00:24
Speaker 1: meaning because the best American comparison to Wyndledon is the Masters.
2:00:28
Speaker 2: Right.
2:00:29
Speaker 1: If there's if there's one US boarding event that has
2:00:33
Speaker 1: that has the tradition quirks and rules and controlled imagery
2:00:38
Speaker 1: and reverence for place, it is Augusta.
2:00:42
Speaker 2: Right, absolutely, you know that. And they all kind of
2:00:45
Speaker 2: have their their yeah, their quirks or there are their traditions,
2:00:49
Speaker 2: you know. So the Masters is green jacket, and Wimbledon
2:00:52
Speaker 2: it's all white. Masters has amen corner. Wimbledon as center court.
2:00:57
Speaker 2: Masters has Pimento cheese, winn as, strawberies and cream. Master
2:01:00
Speaker 2: says no phones, no running. Also, you're not allowed to run,
2:01:04
Speaker 2: you know. Wimbledon has no visible court side advertising. Maybe
2:01:08
Speaker 2: little Rollick's logo on the score on the scoreboard, that's it.
2:01:12
Speaker 2: But yeah, there's there are certainly a lot of similarities.
2:01:15
Speaker 1: Now, look, Wimbledon does have the Royal Box, but it
2:01:17
Speaker 1: also is the queue, right. Uh, it's center court. Seats
2:01:21
Speaker 1: cost a fortune and people have the camp out overnight
2:01:24
Speaker 1: just with the chance to get in, which is similar
2:01:26
Speaker 1: to how the Masters are grounds and work. So and
2:01:30
Speaker 1: both have these similarities. They're private member clubs that created
2:01:34
Speaker 1: tournaments that became global television events.
2:01:37
Speaker 2: But with Wimbledon, it's it's elite, but it's not completely closed,
2:01:42
Speaker 2: and it's commercial eyes and it doesn't look commercial. I'd
2:01:45
Speaker 2: say that for the Masters too, right, they restrict the
2:01:48
Speaker 2: amount of commercial breaks and limit the number of sponsors,
2:01:51
Speaker 2: so it's not too gouty tacky. I would say that,
2:01:57
Speaker 2: you know, the queue is cool, this notion that you
2:02:00
Speaker 2: wait long.
2:02:01
Speaker 1: Enough, anybody can tely get it.
2:02:04
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyway. What also like though, is that you know,
2:02:09
Speaker 2: when circumstances forced things upon them, they formed a new
2:02:13
Speaker 2: tradition and became more accessible. And I'm talking about the
2:02:17
Speaker 2: people Sunday, which started in the nineties. You know, normally
2:02:21
Speaker 2: Wimbledon takes the middle Sunday off, there's no matches, no play.
2:02:25
Speaker 1: Even if there were all sorts of rain delays. They
2:02:27
Speaker 1: kept that to the point of where players were kind
2:02:31
Speaker 1: of annoyed by it.
2:02:32
Speaker 2: But recently one year some say ninety nine, some say
2:02:36
Speaker 2: ninety one. I'm tend to go with ninety one because
2:02:39
Speaker 2: I remember being a thing when I was there in
2:02:40
Speaker 2: ninety five. So there's one year that there were so
2:02:44
Speaker 2: there was so much rain. They were just hopelessly behind
2:02:47
Speaker 2: on schedules. So they broke tradition at the All England Lawn,
2:02:50
Speaker 2: Tennis and Croquette Club and they played on the middle Sunday.
2:02:54
Speaker 2: And so they hadn't sold any seats in advance, right
2:02:58
Speaker 2: because there weren't supposed to be. So they just.
2:03:00
Speaker 1: Say anybody could come first, come first, serve, have at it.
2:03:06
Speaker 2: Even in center court, right, there were no pre so
2:03:08
Speaker 2: so so if you got there early enough, you could
2:03:10
Speaker 2: get in.
2:03:10
Speaker 1: And you can do it like when the caddies got
2:03:12
Speaker 1: to swim in the pool and Caddy shack. That's exactly
2:03:15
Speaker 1: and it's exactly running it.
2:03:17
Speaker 2: But it was a huge hit and you get you
2:03:20
Speaker 2: know what you had, Chuck. You had people doing the
2:03:22
Speaker 2: wave in center court. That's fantastic. Evan help us, you know.
2:03:26
Speaker 2: But there was so much enthusiasm and rather than recoil
2:03:29
Speaker 2: in horror, you know, the people, the powers that be
2:03:32
Speaker 2: at the All England Club decided that hey, maybe we
2:03:35
Speaker 2: should make this a regular thing. So they repeated it
2:03:39
Speaker 2: in other rain shortened years and then they made a
2:03:43
Speaker 2: regular thing and so in twenty twenty two it's a
2:03:46
Speaker 2: permanent feature. That middle Sunday is the people Sunday. So
2:03:50
Speaker 2: I think that that's something pretty cool, and that's suggusting
2:03:53
Speaker 2: and it's turning a negative into a positive, saying you
2:03:56
Speaker 2: know this works, let's let's keep this going.
2:03:58
Speaker 1: Now there's this there might be some belief that somehow
2:04:01
Speaker 1: Wimbledon was anti commercial. It was never anti commercial, as
2:04:05
Speaker 1: we told you the very first tournament. They're selling tickets, right,
2:04:08
Speaker 1: This was about raising money. So the business of Wimbledon
2:04:12
Speaker 1: is fascinating because of that. It isn't. It's just it
2:04:15
Speaker 1: wasn't anti commercial.
2:04:17
Speaker 2: You could call them.
2:04:18
Speaker 1: They were just very particular about how commercialized they would get.
2:04:22
Speaker 1: So there are no visible court side advertising boards. Right,
2:04:25
Speaker 1: there's no baseline logos, there's no giant signage that assaults
2:04:28
Speaker 1: your eyes. But you do see recognizable logos. I mean, Rolex,
2:04:33
Speaker 1: is it possible to ignore Slazenger? Is there Robinson's We're
2:04:38
Speaker 1: going to get into Robinson's in a minute.
2:04:40
Speaker 2: Is there?
2:04:41
Speaker 1: Debentures are there? And of course the broadcaster brands are there.
2:04:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. In terms of that Robinsons though, you know, so
2:04:51
Speaker 2: before we had Gay Raid and we talked about the Brandy,
2:04:54
Speaker 2: but you also had Robinson's barley water, which actually is
2:04:58
Speaker 2: a real thing, like like a hydration idea, right, not
2:05:02
Speaker 2: just like a funny thing. Yeah. So the story is,
2:05:05
Speaker 2: in nineteen thirty five, the dressing room staff at the
2:05:08
Speaker 2: All England Club mixed barley water and lemon as a
2:05:10
Speaker 2: way to help the players do with hydration. And that's
2:05:15
Speaker 2: how it started.
2:05:17
Speaker 1: And it actually worked well enough that players kept wanting it.
2:05:20
Speaker 1: And you know, it seems like a quaint tradition, but
2:05:24
Speaker 1: it was actually nineteen thirties per form science. You know. Again,
2:05:29
Speaker 1: before there was gatorade, there was barley water. Doesn't sound
2:05:34
Speaker 1: very appetizing, I'll be honest, Hey, man, I've got a
2:05:37
Speaker 1: hot tack. Give me some of that barley water. You know,
2:05:41
Speaker 1: those of us thought marleywater was beer, right like you know, yeah, right,
2:05:46
Speaker 1: hops and barley exactly. So.
2:05:49
Speaker 2: You know the thing with Wimbledon, though, is it looks old,
2:05:51
Speaker 2: but it's not anti modern, right. You had radio early
2:05:54
Speaker 2: there on that early on television that there was hawkeye.
2:05:57
Speaker 2: You know, they broke down and put the retractable roof
2:06:00
Speaker 2: on center courts, subairge drainage to get the water off
2:06:05
Speaker 2: center court, global broadcasts, you know, all these elements.
2:06:10
Speaker 1: Look we told you about it earlier. So how why
2:06:13
Speaker 1: did they decide to take They take out pandemic insurance.
2:06:17
Speaker 1: They lost Wimbledon in twenty twenty, it was July. You
2:06:21
Speaker 1: guys remember the delta variance. You know, if you guys
2:06:26
Speaker 1: have all buried your COVID PTSD, you don't remember the
2:06:29
Speaker 1: delta variance. But that was peak, right, So there's no Wimblin. Well,
2:06:33
Speaker 1: the reason Wimblin took out pandemic insurance is they took
2:06:36
Speaker 1: it out after the SARS epidemic and near pandemic of
2:06:40
Speaker 1: twenty oh three and turned out to be really precient.
2:06:45
Speaker 1: You know, Wimbledon ends up with an enormous insurance payout.
2:06:49
Speaker 1: You know, it just shows you how frankly operational and
2:06:56
Speaker 1: and protective they were of the tournament.
2:06:59
Speaker 2: Yeah, dynasties become dynastic because they're thinking ahead. Right, So
2:07:05
Speaker 2: it's not an ultimate example of thinking ahead. I mean,
2:07:07
Speaker 2: they almost got caught, but they were, you know, about
2:07:10
Speaker 2: a decade and a half ahead of their time when
2:07:12
Speaker 2: they thought that, hey, if something like this comes about,
2:07:16
Speaker 2: we better be prepared, much more so than the United
2:07:19
Speaker 2: States government.
2:07:21
Speaker 1: I was just a tennis tournament in Wimbledon for two
2:07:26
Speaker 1: weeks is a little more prepared than they sold the US.
2:07:31
Speaker 2: You know, Wimbledon, you know, by thinking ahead, by taking
2:07:35
Speaker 2: all these carefully planned steps, it had become a global
2:07:37
Speaker 2: media property, it become an American television routual, a business machine,
2:07:42
Speaker 2: and it's still got a private club party feel to
2:07:45
Speaker 2: it all simultaneously.
2:07:47
Speaker 1: So once you have a stage, the money, the audience,
2:07:50
Speaker 1: the tradition, the pressure, the only thing they got to
2:07:54
Speaker 1: deliver every year is the drama. And that is what
2:07:57
Speaker 1: we're going to We could tell you all all you
2:08:00
Speaker 1: want to know about how this thing got started, but ultimately,
2:08:04
Speaker 1: Wimbledon is defined by its rivalries and matches, and we're
2:08:09
Speaker 1: going to go through some of the best of all
2:08:10
Speaker 1: time right after this. As great as the location of
2:08:14
Speaker 1: Wimbledon is, as great as the history of Wimbledon is,
2:08:17
Speaker 1: it would be nothing without the matches, without the rivalries.
2:08:22
Speaker 1: And look, let's be honest. You know, we talked about
2:08:25
Speaker 1: the birth of Wimbledon's influence on the American culture was
2:08:29
Speaker 1: thanks to television, was thanks to the late seventies, but
2:08:31
Speaker 1: it was also thanks to you know, arguably two rivalries
2:08:37
Speaker 1: that really defined Wimbledon from arguably nineteen eighty to nineteen
2:08:41
Speaker 1: eighty five. On the women's side it was Martina and Chris,
2:08:45
Speaker 1: and on the men's side it was Borg and maccrow
2:08:49
Speaker 1: with maybe an audible mention for mister.
2:08:51
Speaker 2: Connors, you know and prepare for this I read. I
2:08:54
Speaker 2: read the book epic John Macrovy on Borg and the
2:08:57
Speaker 2: Greatest Tennis Season Ever, and also listened to podcasts Biggest
2:09:00
Speaker 2: Rivalries of All Time hosts by Carrie Champion about Martina
2:09:04
Speaker 2: and Chris and one thing that kind of I thought
2:09:08
Speaker 2: about considering the four So all four of these individuals
2:09:11
Speaker 2: are born between nineteen fifty four and nineteen fifty nine,
2:09:14
Speaker 2: and it, yeah, I keep coming back to the Malcolm
2:09:19
Speaker 2: Gladwell book Outliers, which examines how much time and place
2:09:23
Speaker 2: are responsible for who we become, or who these significant
2:09:27
Speaker 2: historical figures become, and in this case, the fact that
2:09:31
Speaker 2: they were born at all. When I heard nineteen fifty
2:09:33
Speaker 2: nine and fifty six, it made me think of nineteen
2:09:36
Speaker 2: fifty eight, which is the year that Michael Jackson, Prince
2:09:39
Speaker 2: and Madonna were all born and they all kind of
2:09:41
Speaker 2: reached their peak. Michael Jackson's thriller comes out in nineteen
2:09:45
Speaker 2: Off the Wall comes out in nineteen seventy nine, Thrillers.
2:09:48
Speaker 1: And Millers eighty three or eighty four.
2:09:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then for Prince like nineteen ninety nine, I
2:09:55
Speaker 2: think is ninety two, and then eighty two, and then
2:09:58
Speaker 2: Purple Rain is eighty four, and so but I think
2:10:01
Speaker 2: it's not a coincidence. They all kind of hit that
2:10:03
Speaker 2: peak right around the time that would be the ten
2:10:06
Speaker 2: thousand hours or so that Malcolm Gladwell popularized that that's
2:10:10
Speaker 2: the amount of time for you to reach greatness in
2:10:12
Speaker 2: whatever your perceived field is right. So the fact that
2:10:16
Speaker 2: these people all are entering their primes, their peaks at
2:10:22
Speaker 2: the time that Breakfast at Wimbledon is being established by
2:10:25
Speaker 2: NBC and becoming a thing, and in particular for the women,
2:10:30
Speaker 2: especially Chris Evert comes along right after Billy Jean King
2:10:34
Speaker 2: has opened the door, and she's perfectly positioned to walk
2:10:38
Speaker 2: through that door as this. You know, she was modeled
2:10:42
Speaker 2: as the all American girl.
2:10:44
Speaker 1: And look, let's not dance around this, right, Billy Jean.
2:10:49
Speaker 1: You can't help but wonder how much that Billy Jean
2:10:52
Speaker 1: King's sexuality at the time limited her popularity.
2:10:56
Speaker 2: Right, although you know, at first she was you know,
2:10:59
Speaker 2: she was out until later, right, right, But that that
2:11:04
Speaker 2: comes in. But certainly Martina, now he wasn't trying to.
2:11:07
Speaker 1: The girl store the way Chris ever was absolutely leaning,
2:11:11
Speaker 1: and I don't think that's fair to say she.
2:11:13
Speaker 2: Leaned into it. That might just be who she was,
2:11:15
Speaker 2: who she is, but you know, but it's Billy jan
2:11:18
Speaker 2: King and the entire women's liberation movement rights and so
2:11:21
Speaker 2: the prominence that's afforded the women's sports, you know, in
2:11:25
Speaker 2: the way that Althea. Gibson, even if she had been white,
2:11:27
Speaker 2: would have had these opportunities and these doors open for
2:11:30
Speaker 2: her in the nineteen fifties for example. And then for Martina, yes,
2:11:36
Speaker 2: she grew up, you know, on the other side of
2:11:38
Speaker 2: the Iron curtain. But the fact that she was in
2:11:39
Speaker 2: the Czech Republic and not the Soviet Union made a
2:11:42
Speaker 2: big difference because the Soviet Union really emphasized the team
2:11:44
Speaker 2: sports like hockey and basketball, and they threw their considerable
2:11:47
Speaker 2: weight behind those sports, whereas other countries in Eastern Europe
2:11:51
Speaker 2: were more about the individual sports, so tennis could be poluted.
2:11:55
Speaker 2: You think of Romania and Nadia Kominici. They're great gymnasts,
2:11:58
Speaker 2: you know, figure skating and some of those other Eastern
2:12:00
Speaker 2: European countries. So the fact that Martina was born, let's say,
2:12:03
Speaker 2: in the Czech Republic as opposed to the Soviet Union.
2:12:08
Speaker 1: I love this what if from you. When we were
2:12:10
Speaker 1: doing our planning, you were bringing this up, and I
2:12:14
Speaker 1: was sitting there and wondering, if she's a Soviet citizen,
2:12:19
Speaker 1: right and raised in the Soviet system, you know, they
2:12:22
Speaker 1: would have probably forced her to play another sport because
2:12:26
Speaker 1: they didn't really at the time, weren't pushing tennis. They
2:12:29
Speaker 1: might have pushed her into an Olympic sport, or might
2:12:30
Speaker 1: have pushed her into a team sport or something. You're right,
2:12:34
Speaker 1: it's an interesting what if, right, just of you know, yes,
2:12:38
Speaker 1: she was born in a repressive area of Eastern Europe
2:12:41
Speaker 1: at the time, but she could have been in an
2:12:44
Speaker 1: environment that didn't even embrace tennis.
2:12:46
Speaker 2: You know McEnroe, you know, he for this image of
2:12:49
Speaker 2: being a New York City guy and they kind of
2:12:51
Speaker 2: played that up. But his family moved to the suburbs
2:12:54
Speaker 2: and they joined a tennis and swimming club in nineteen
2:12:57
Speaker 2: sixty seven.
2:12:58
Speaker 1: Well, if he's raised in the city, he never plays
2:12:59
Speaker 1: ten right.
2:13:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so you know it gets his first tennis
2:13:03
Speaker 2: Lesson at age eight, you know, and again it you know,
2:13:07
Speaker 2: it poises him to sort of peek around the late seventies.
2:13:11
Speaker 1: All right, I've won. Before we get into the iconic
2:13:14
Speaker 1: matches here, I've got one other your aspect of this,
2:13:18
Speaker 1: and that is the advantage of being left handed, because
2:13:26
Speaker 1: this is coming up now. It is there is an
2:13:29
Speaker 1: over indexing of great left handed point guards in basketball
2:13:34
Speaker 1: now and there's always even though there's this lopsided nature
2:13:37
Speaker 1: of right hander versus left handed people in the country.
2:13:42
Speaker 1: In tennis, it seems on the elite level we've almost
2:13:45
Speaker 1: always had a great right hander versus a great left hander.
2:13:52
Speaker 1: You know, a dollar letter.
2:13:54
Speaker 2: Right, Connors was a lefty. McEnroe was a lefty boy.
2:13:57
Speaker 2: You know, it's there. I just you know, there's it's funny.
2:14:02
Speaker 2: It's like, and there's something about being.
2:14:05
Speaker 1: A left You talk to lefties that are successful and
2:14:08
Speaker 1: they'll basically in some ways, because you're you're forced to
2:14:11
Speaker 1: use you're more ambidectous, you're forced into it more because
2:14:15
Speaker 1: society sort of favors right handed. I don't know what
2:14:18
Speaker 1: it is, but it does feel as if the successful
2:14:20
Speaker 1: left handed athletes can make you know, there's almost like
2:14:23
Speaker 1: an equal representation in the elite level as there is
2:14:26
Speaker 1: with writings.
2:14:27
Speaker 2: So there's actually a discussion of this in the book
2:14:31
Speaker 2: and the benefits of being a left handed and I'm
2:14:33
Speaker 2: not well versed enough in tennis to really understand or
2:14:36
Speaker 2: explain it, but it has something to do with, you know,
2:14:38
Speaker 2: the ability to serve to like deduce cord under certain
2:14:41
Speaker 2: circus as a left So there are some benefits to
2:14:45
Speaker 2: being a left handed server, you know, and what that
2:14:48
Speaker 2: can do, and how that you know, serving to someone's
2:14:51
Speaker 2: backhand as opposed there beforehand, all all these things, right, So,
2:14:54
Speaker 2: so there's something to that. Arthur Ashley was really good
2:15:00
Speaker 2: it explained. Like so Tiger Woods was great at explaining
2:15:03
Speaker 2: the technical if he asked them to talk about sort
2:15:06
Speaker 2: of you know, more weightier matters, he would shy away
2:15:09
Speaker 2: from that, but you talk about the technical aspects of
2:15:13
Speaker 2: hitting and golfall and Arthur ash was similar in this book,
2:15:15
Speaker 2: like he really breaks things down. He talks about the
2:15:18
Speaker 2: way borgs, what made borg so good on grass, The
2:15:22
Speaker 2: way his shots would dip just as they crossed the
2:15:24
Speaker 2: net made it harder to play him. He moves better
2:15:27
Speaker 2: laterally on grass than most people do, and ass said
2:15:29
Speaker 2: that there isn't as much adhesionto the sole of the
2:15:32
Speaker 2: shoe and the court on grass. So that level of
2:15:37
Speaker 2: detail what made you know, Borg such a great champion
2:15:40
Speaker 2: at Wimbledon. So all these people just there were just
2:15:44
Speaker 2: things about them that were suited to Wimbledon. There were
2:15:47
Speaker 2: things about them that you know, make them perfectly suited
2:15:49
Speaker 2: to take advantage of the time and the place of
2:15:52
Speaker 2: this boom in tennis. And you know, this focus on
2:15:56
Speaker 2: Wimbledon in America.
2:15:58
Speaker 1: All right, let's talk about the cathedrals. Within the cathedral,
2:16:01
Speaker 1: and that is center Court, because center look Wimbledon center Court,
2:16:06
Speaker 1: There's Yankee Stadium, there's Augusta, there's Madison Square Garden, and
2:16:09
Speaker 1: there's Center Court at Wimbledon. And what's great about Center
2:16:12
Speaker 1: Court is that, just like when Notre Dame runs out
2:16:14
Speaker 1: of their locker rooms, you know, play like a champion
2:16:16
Speaker 1: today and you hit the sign. There's something fitting about
2:16:21
Speaker 1: tennis that you walk under a Rudyard Kipling quote. Yeah,
2:16:28
Speaker 1: and you said you had the quote you you actually
2:16:32
Speaker 1: I had.
2:16:32
Speaker 2: Somewhere framed just as I've been moving, I just came
2:16:35
Speaker 2: across it. But yeah, Sampras was someone who really took
2:16:40
Speaker 2: it to heart. I think he edited I Get the
2:16:43
Speaker 2: Funeral for Fed Perry something like that. He was one
2:16:48
Speaker 2: that really put him. You know, Sapriss just loved all
2:16:50
Speaker 2: things Wimbledon. He loved the fact that as a defending champion,
2:16:54
Speaker 2: you get the first men's match, like and I think
2:16:57
Speaker 2: it's noon on Monday, the first day, right, you get
2:17:00
Speaker 2: that honor of starting off on center court to begin
2:17:04
Speaker 2: your your your your title defense. Yeah. He he was
2:17:08
Speaker 2: just really into all things Wimbledon and playing on Center
2:17:12
Speaker 2: court and the Rudier Kippling poem. If he just lapped
2:17:18
Speaker 2: all of it up, the quote from the poem and
2:17:22
Speaker 2: it and it just there's you know, in the I
2:17:24
Speaker 2: read the Feeder, the book about the great Federal Nadal
2:17:28
Speaker 2: match of twenty oh eight. If you can meet with
2:17:31
Speaker 2: triumph and disaster and treat those two.
2:17:33
Speaker 1: Impostors just the same and better.
2:17:37
Speaker 2: You know, the more these guys, you know, the more
2:17:39
Speaker 2: they play on center court, the more they win or
2:17:41
Speaker 2: lose on Center court, the more that quote has more meeting.
2:17:45
Speaker 1: To them, depending on whether they're doing well or not well.
2:17:48
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, you can really take it hard, but you
2:17:51
Speaker 2: can apply it to so many things, right, you know,
2:17:53
Speaker 2: I love it, you know. Yeah, there's also the notion
2:17:57
Speaker 2: of the ghosts, right, you know, you know Yankee Stadium,
2:18:00
Speaker 2: you know, you hear about them, the old Boston Garden
2:18:03
Speaker 2: or you know now Madison Square Garden, you know, and
2:18:07
Speaker 2: that Wimbledon certainly has its as well.
2:18:10
Speaker 1: Look, Center Court was bombed during World War Two and
2:18:13
Speaker 1: they rebuilt it. You know that that that that in itself,
2:18:18
Speaker 1: so the here we set you up in the cathedral.
2:18:21
Speaker 1: What's really great about Wimbledon is that every generation can
2:18:24
Speaker 1: claim its own match as the defining match of their generation.
2:18:29
Speaker 1: Right where were you when Borg and McEnroe played the
2:18:32
Speaker 1: great tiebreaker? Where were you when Becker won at seventeen?
2:18:36
Speaker 1: Where were you when Venus and Serena took over? Where
2:18:38
Speaker 1: were you when Federa and Nadal played into the Dark?
2:18:41
Speaker 1: Where were you when Djokovic beats Federer?
2:18:45
Speaker 2: Right like?
2:18:46
Speaker 1: And and depending on how old you are, depends on
2:18:49
Speaker 1: what you think the greatest match is. And let's be honest,
2:18:53
Speaker 1: Jay and I are gen xers, which means the first
2:18:56
Speaker 1: match in our head is going to be Borg McEnroe
2:18:58
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty. And this is one of my favorite things
2:19:01
Speaker 1: because if you ask the average American who remembers this
2:19:04
Speaker 1: match who won. I promise you most people would get
2:19:08
Speaker 1: it wrong.
2:19:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, especially because Borg comes out in the first set
2:19:13
Speaker 2: and smokes them sixty one. You know, I'm sorry, McEnroe
2:19:16
Speaker 2: beats Borg six one. You know, it looks like it's
2:19:19
Speaker 2: going one way. But then you know Borg steadily fights
2:19:21
Speaker 2: back and and and the fact that wins the most
2:19:27
Speaker 2: famous uh you know set of that one is too right.
2:19:30
Speaker 1: You know, the fra win's the fourth set. He stays
2:19:33
Speaker 1: on time break, right, he stays off championship points. After
2:19:37
Speaker 1: championship point, looks like Borg is gonna win. You know,
2:19:40
Speaker 1: it's all about I think at this point, Borg's trying
2:19:42
Speaker 1: to win his fifth in a row at that point,
2:19:46
Speaker 1: or fourth in a row, I think at that point.
2:19:49
Speaker 1: And what's interesting in some ways, the legend of John
2:19:54
Speaker 1: McEnroe is born in some ways because he lost this man.
2:20:02
Speaker 2: Ultimately, you know, he kind of I think he won
2:20:05
Speaker 2: over the people though. That's a big part of the
2:20:08
Speaker 2: two because, like I said, they're brewing him when he
2:20:10
Speaker 2: comes out. You know, they they've got they don't like
2:20:12
Speaker 2: his style.
2:20:13
Speaker 1: They don't like the loud, you know, out of mouth
2:20:15
Speaker 1: Yankee right, Mac and.
2:20:16
Speaker 2: Brad, I think is what the tabloids. That's something brought
2:20:20
Speaker 2: up the fact that the tabloid press is a character
2:20:22
Speaker 2: at Wimbledon, you know, I mean they can take over,
2:20:25
Speaker 2: they can like hound people in the submission and run
2:20:28
Speaker 2: them out and make them leave the tournament early because
2:20:31
Speaker 2: the relentless presser, especially at the time when you know,
2:20:34
Speaker 2: newspapers occupied a more prominent place in the media sphere.
2:20:39
Speaker 2: So and Georgy was on the way to win five
2:20:43
Speaker 2: consecutive ultimately, so he wins there.
2:20:45
Speaker 1: What's weird? You know the fifth set, by the way,
2:20:47
Speaker 1: you know, we talked about the great four set tiebreaker
2:20:49
Speaker 1: eighteen sixteen. McEnroe wins it, and it's one of those
2:20:52
Speaker 1: where you assume, well that he broke or but he
2:20:56
Speaker 1: didn't break board. Borg wins the fifth set eight six
2:21:00
Speaker 1: mind you right, like in itself what a fifth said,
2:21:05
Speaker 1: And even though Borg wins, McEnroe broke him. Because the
2:21:12
Speaker 1: career is never the same after that match.
2:21:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, and and Borg just eventually bails out and rather
2:21:18
Speaker 2: than like, Okay, I'm not to deal with this guy
2:21:20
Speaker 2: for the next few years, and that just doesn't seem
2:21:22
Speaker 2: that pleasant to me. So yeah, we forget about him.
2:21:25
Speaker 2: We also kind of forget about him how great he was,
2:21:29
Speaker 2: because you know, McEnroe stays around. Even though Biorg was
2:21:33
Speaker 2: a better player, Borg Bjorn Borg was a better player.
2:21:36
Speaker 2: You know, McEnroe stays in our consciousness because we see
2:21:39
Speaker 2: him every wimbled and we hear him every Wimbledon, right
2:21:42
Speaker 2: we do.
2:21:42
Speaker 1: Now, that's for sure, you know. And of course he
2:21:45
Speaker 1: his brother was a pretty decent tennis player, wasn't John McEnroe.
2:21:50
Speaker 2: I say this.
2:21:50
Speaker 1: I know Patrick a little bit. He's a he's a
2:21:54
Speaker 1: good tennis journalist in his own right. It was fun
2:21:56
Speaker 1: when the McEnroe brothers would play, would play doubles and
2:22:00
Speaker 1: stuff that you're right Borg, And you know, here's the
2:22:04
Speaker 1: other thing, you know, Borg just Borg Also he had
2:22:09
Speaker 1: ended up having his own He had some personal issues, right,
2:22:12
Speaker 1: he had some money issues and all this stuff. And yeah,
2:22:17
Speaker 1: I think I would always claim that Borg was a
2:22:19
Speaker 1: better player than McEnroe, But McEnroe might have had the
2:22:22
Speaker 1: better career.
2:22:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, just certainly he exists and occupies more of
2:22:27
Speaker 2: a place in our head. And some of it was
2:22:29
Speaker 2: intentional by Borg. He you know, he admitted that, you know,
2:22:33
Speaker 2: there was more to him than you saw, but he
2:22:35
Speaker 2: very intentionally kept that cold exterior. But just as a
2:22:38
Speaker 2: way of paying tribute to him before we move on
2:22:40
Speaker 2: Vetus Jerry Elidis, who was a player who was in
2:22:43
Speaker 2: that era and was friends with both of Borg and
2:22:46
Speaker 2: Macenroe at one point. So the big three was considered Macenroe,
2:22:49
Speaker 2: Borg and Connors. You know, before there was Nadal or
2:22:52
Speaker 2: better and Djokovic. There were those three and Joe Lidis
2:22:55
Speaker 2: was playing well and someone asked him if he thought
2:22:57
Speaker 2: he'd broken through and was a part of that big
2:22:59
Speaker 2: three and zero Latta says, there aren't three, there are
2:23:04
Speaker 2: the rest of us. Then there's Born.
2:23:08
Speaker 1: Well that's how I mean. He was. Look, he was
2:23:10
Speaker 1: the guy. And that is the interesting thing about tennis, right,
2:23:14
Speaker 1: is that there really does feel like even if there's
2:23:17
Speaker 1: an you know, there'll be a great rivalry, there is
2:23:19
Speaker 1: somebody that has the belt, right, you know, you know,
2:23:24
Speaker 1: even during the Federal Nadal great match, and yes Nadal
2:23:28
Speaker 1: won that match, Federer was still the guy holding the belt.
2:23:32
Speaker 2: Right.
2:23:32
Speaker 1: He was still felt like and because what happened, he's
2:23:35
Speaker 1: still the two seed, right, Nadal was still the two
2:23:37
Speaker 1: seed to Federer's one set, who then goes on to
2:23:40
Speaker 1: win the US Open later that year. You know, it
2:23:44
Speaker 1: is so in all of this time, there was always
2:23:47
Speaker 1: still somebody that felt like, like Martina and Chris, You're like, yeah,
2:23:52
Speaker 1: but Martinez won, she has the belt.
2:23:54
Speaker 2: But it was ever right. Ever, it's born before like
2:23:58
Speaker 2: Martina grows up. She got a poster of Chris Everett
2:24:01
Speaker 2: on her wall when she's growing up as a kid
2:24:03
Speaker 2: in the Czech Republic, and so that's that's the goal
2:24:06
Speaker 2: she talks about. How you know, she she comes to
2:24:10
Speaker 2: to uh to Florida, and she's like seeking out Chris Everett.
2:24:14
Speaker 2: You know, she like can't wait to meet her. And
2:24:15
Speaker 2: then she's she's surprised and presently surprised that Everett had
2:24:20
Speaker 2: heard of her, you know that, Oh there's this checkrol
2:24:23
Speaker 2: that comes. So they're they're initially friendly as they start off.
2:24:26
Speaker 2: It's a friendly rivalry. It's the media that tries to
2:24:32
Speaker 2: right you know it is it's not just it's not
2:24:34
Speaker 2: just the media though, and and certainly it was set
2:24:36
Speaker 2: up to be, you know, the all.
2:24:37
Speaker 1: American girl against the Czech, but it was a little
2:24:40
Speaker 1: bit of Cold War I it's always felt like there
2:24:44
Speaker 1: was a Cold War prism with which that that rivalry
2:24:50
Speaker 1: got covered.
2:24:51
Speaker 2: And somehow, even after Martinez became in a America, it's
2:24:54
Speaker 2: so considered, uh, you know, the representative of Eastern Europe.
2:24:59
Speaker 2: But what I didn't know until listen to this podcast
2:25:02
Speaker 2: is that Nancy Lieberman for friends Martina and helps her
2:25:05
Speaker 2: train and gives her advice and then also says, you know,
2:25:08
Speaker 2: the basketball Great Hall of Fame, Nancy Leber says, you
2:25:13
Speaker 2: can't be friends with her. You know, that's your enemy.
2:25:15
Speaker 2: You're trying to take what she has.
2:25:17
Speaker 1: And so how very Larry Bird, like Larry Magic like
2:25:22
Speaker 1: it becomes Larry Bird's mother's favorite second son. Well, Larry
2:25:26
Speaker 1: Bird's like, what am I doing? I can't be friends
2:25:28
Speaker 1: with you?
2:25:29
Speaker 2: But kind of what happens with Magic and Isaiah though
2:25:31
Speaker 2: who they're super tight until they go against each other
2:25:34
Speaker 2: in NBA finals and it fractures their relationship and so
2:25:37
Speaker 2: this wedge comes in between them and there is some
2:25:41
Speaker 2: coldness that develops after they initially were friendly. But also
2:25:47
Speaker 2: Navratilova does her password, particularly at Wimbledon, and there's this
2:25:51
Speaker 2: Wimbledon focused episode. You know, Navratilova clearly is the superior
2:25:57
Speaker 2: of the two. At Wimbledon, ever.
2:26:00
Speaker 1: Won enough Wimbledon's to make sure she's an all timer, right,
2:26:04
Speaker 1: like like like she'll always be second, and she even
2:26:11
Speaker 1: her coming out moment she does. I mean, what's interesting
2:26:14
Speaker 1: about Chris Everett is that here's somebody that faced both
2:26:16
Speaker 1: Billy gen King in a final and Martinez five, who
2:26:20
Speaker 1: are the two greatest my number of titles Women's Wimbledon
2:26:25
Speaker 1: contestants of all time.
2:26:26
Speaker 2: You know, we mentioned Boris Becker in eighty five, so
2:26:29
Speaker 2: he didn't have the rivalry. It's interesting. He he faced
2:26:32
Speaker 2: Samprius in two thousand things, so Becker, but he's not
2:26:38
Speaker 2: that old, you know, He's like it was he.
2:26:40
Speaker 1: Hadn't had a good run. That was a that was
2:26:43
Speaker 1: that one of those Hey look bors, Becker's back.
2:26:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, he somehow makes it to the final and then yeah,
2:26:49
Speaker 2: you know, he just was no mass I remember one point,
2:26:53
Speaker 2: you know, San Francis is blowing serve after serve after
2:26:56
Speaker 2: Becker just closes his eyes and weaves his racket andree
2:27:00
Speaker 2: points like I might as well do this because I
2:27:02
Speaker 2: got no chance of returning deserves if I'm trying. But
2:27:06
Speaker 2: but you know, Becker, those were his kind of bookend
2:27:09
Speaker 2: appearances in the finals. You know, and at seventeen, you know,
2:27:14
Speaker 2: he was his breath of fresh air. It was great
2:27:16
Speaker 2: for Wimbledon though, because you're you know this very well.
2:27:18
Speaker 2: He brought power, right, don't you feel like? Right, he's
2:27:22
Speaker 2: just all over the place, diving and and you know
2:27:25
Speaker 2: it becomes the first German Man to win at Wimbledon,
2:27:28
Speaker 2: and of course the tablets had to feel there. Yeah.
2:27:30
Speaker 2: I can't tell you the amount of Luftwaffer references andlitz
2:27:33
Speaker 2: Krieg and all this stuff, Like the tabloids could never
2:27:38
Speaker 2: restrain themselves from making some type of World War two
2:27:40
Speaker 2: reference when there was a German involved.
2:27:42
Speaker 1: You know what was interesting about Becker for me as
2:27:45
Speaker 1: a as sort of this amateur tennis casual kind of fan,
2:27:49
Speaker 1: is that like the power sir, Like you know, now
2:27:53
Speaker 1: everything when I think of Wimbledon, I think of the
2:27:56
Speaker 1: you know that this is this is where the power
2:27:58
Speaker 1: servers can dominate, right, you know the guys that really
2:28:01
Speaker 1: have the powerful serve And it feels like Becker is
2:28:04
Speaker 1: what And I know he's not the first, but he
2:28:07
Speaker 1: really sort of felt like that. And in some ways
2:28:10
Speaker 1: there was a time where I didn't love watching that
2:28:13
Speaker 1: kind of tennis where it was just ace after ace
2:28:16
Speaker 1: after ace. Now, you know, in some ways tennis is
2:28:22
Speaker 1: incredibly as athletic as it was in the eighties and nineties,
2:28:26
Speaker 1: it's somehow jumped another level. And it's just in some
2:28:30
Speaker 1: ways I think more phenomenal the way that they have
2:28:33
Speaker 1: one hundred and twenty mile an hour serves and they
2:28:35
Speaker 1: returned them right like you're just you know, there's there's
2:28:38
Speaker 1: incredible back and forth. But there's something about Becker that
2:28:41
Speaker 1: felt like he brought this like power and mainstreamed it
2:28:46
Speaker 1: a little bit at least for the modern era.
2:28:48
Speaker 2: I would call it energy and less energetic. It was
2:28:53
Speaker 2: Pete Sampers, who was never beloved. For as much as
2:28:56
Speaker 2: he loved Wimbledon, the crowd didn't love him back.
2:29:01
Speaker 1: You know, is that is it just he wasn't loud
2:29:04
Speaker 1: and bright colored guy.
2:29:05
Speaker 2: You know. Funny because they initially booed McEnroe, but maybe
2:29:09
Speaker 2: they just came came to think of McEnroe as what
2:29:11
Speaker 2: American tennis, you.
2:29:12
Speaker 1: Know, like they didn't like, they didn't want a blak.
2:29:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, they wanted to like the Sims can do, you know,
2:29:18
Speaker 2: uptight and and I wouldn't call it Sampras uptight, but
2:29:21
Speaker 2: reserved certainly, and like, if you're going to have an
2:29:24
Speaker 2: American coming over here and beating our boys, like he
2:29:27
Speaker 2: should act American. You know, like if we wanted a
2:29:30
Speaker 2: you know, a stoic person, you know we'd have we'd
2:29:34
Speaker 2: root for, you know, one of one of our Brits here.
2:29:36
Speaker 2: So they just never took to Sampress. It was kind
2:29:40
Speaker 2: of polite applause, but you know, you would you put.
2:29:43
Speaker 1: Stephie Graff as sort of the women's version of that
2:29:46
Speaker 1: because you could argue, you know, before the Waims for
2:29:50
Speaker 1: Serena and after Martina and Billy Jeane King. I mean,
2:29:54
Speaker 1: Stephie was as dominant of about a seven year run
2:29:57
Speaker 1: as anybody she was.
2:29:59
Speaker 2: And and also addition, I think the with with with
2:30:04
Speaker 2: you know, McEnroe was volatile, right, you know, Graph and
2:30:09
Speaker 2: Sampras were just efficient, you know, frauline forehand. Yeah, I
2:30:13
Speaker 2: mean you just you let her get that forehand on
2:30:17
Speaker 2: you and forget about it. So Sampress, Graph and they
2:30:23
Speaker 2: were simultaneous. Right in ninety five when I covered it,
2:30:25
Speaker 2: Sampras won the men's and the Graph one of the women's.
2:30:27
Speaker 2: So they come up in the same era. The Sampress
2:30:31
Speaker 2: Agassy rivalry, which Nike really tried to push and it
2:30:34
Speaker 2: was sort of a thing, but they just didn't have
2:30:37
Speaker 2: enough meeting. And I kind of blamed Agassy more because
2:30:39
Speaker 2: Agassy kind of fell off and he had that walk
2:30:41
Speaker 2: away walk about, right, he l left, and it also
2:30:45
Speaker 2: boycotted Wimbledon for three years because of the dress code, right,
2:30:48
Speaker 2: So that rivalry didn't get to play out very often
2:30:51
Speaker 2: at Wimbledon. So maybe Sampras would have been better beloved
2:30:55
Speaker 2: if you know, he had the the mace and roll
2:30:59
Speaker 2: to his boy. Right.
2:31:01
Speaker 1: My favorite timeline here of the recent era is when
2:31:06
Speaker 1: we were going through our great matches. There's another phenomenon
2:31:09
Speaker 1: here is sort of I always love the passing of
2:31:11
Speaker 1: the torch match, right, and how often Federer was a
2:31:15
Speaker 1: part of one. Right, Because when does Sampras's run.
2:31:19
Speaker 2: End when he meets a young nineteen year old Federer
2:31:22
Speaker 2: who one year after winning Wimbledon for the last.
2:31:25
Speaker 1: Time, right, and then Federer Nadal, Right, He sort of
2:31:29
Speaker 1: in some ways it wasn't quite a passing of the
2:31:31
Speaker 1: torch Federer. Basically, it was sort of a it allowed
2:31:35
Speaker 1: Nadal and to become to join him. But then you
2:31:38
Speaker 1: have Yokovic you know, he almost literally it's eleven years
2:31:42
Speaker 1: after the Nadal Federer match, is the Yokovich Feeder's final,
2:31:47
Speaker 1: And think about that timeline. Twenty nineteen is Yokovic Federer,
2:31:51
Speaker 1: which is an incredible match, goes, it goes even this
2:31:54
Speaker 1: is after the twelfth you know when they instituted they
2:31:57
Speaker 1: had to trigger the twelve twelve tiebreaker in the fifth set.
2:32:01
Speaker 1: We just got through telling you about Federer's first title
2:32:04
Speaker 1: of No. One eighteen years amazing between them. Federer for
2:32:10
Speaker 1: a moment because he felt like the endgame were like
2:32:13
Speaker 1: a fusion, if you will, because he had a sampraslike
2:32:16
Speaker 1: serve in agasty like groundstrokes, and it just made him
2:32:19
Speaker 1: seem like the perfect tennis player. It's funny.
2:32:24
Speaker 2: Sarah Kaufman, who was the dance critic for the Washington Post,
2:32:28
Speaker 2: wrote a column about Federer, which I've actually taught in
2:32:31
Speaker 2: my class several times were used in my classes because
2:32:34
Speaker 2: it's a great example of writing when there's no statistics
2:32:37
Speaker 2: to back you up, when there's just a feeling that
2:32:39
Speaker 2: you have. And so she made the case that Roger
2:32:42
Speaker 2: Federer is the most graceful athlete of our time. And
2:32:45
Speaker 2: it's interesting and graceful is a perfect word, yeah, and
2:32:51
Speaker 2: a perfect description, and of course she provided the perfect
2:32:54
Speaker 2: definition and examples of what made him so graceful and
2:32:58
Speaker 2: descriptions of his great But that was that was fed
2:33:03
Speaker 2: and just a special and kind of a weird place
2:33:07
Speaker 2: for a place that does reverence, or a weird person
2:33:10
Speaker 2: for a place that does reverence.
2:33:11
Speaker 1: But what do you do, Jokovic, Federer, Nadal, Right, this
2:33:14
Speaker 1: is one of the great It's you know, you've gotten
2:33:18
Speaker 1: you know, we do this all the time with basketball
2:33:20
Speaker 1: Lebron versus Jordan's it's different eras versus these three which
2:33:26
Speaker 1: all played, they all played each other, and they all
2:33:29
Speaker 1: have twenty plus majors, and you just wonder how many
2:33:33
Speaker 1: they'd have if they didn't have to go against each other. Right,
2:33:36
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, you know we we you and
2:33:37
Speaker 1: I are sitting here lionizing the old Borg and mcenrodes
2:33:40
Speaker 1: and those guys were great. But this most recent domination
2:33:45
Speaker 1: of this trio of men, and look, and we may
2:33:48
Speaker 1: have already seen the torch pass right, I talk about
2:33:51
Speaker 1: the torch passing matches Alcoraz and Yoka.
2:33:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, I mean, now we got right, and you
2:34:00
Speaker 2: wonder like there was that match where Alcaraz was out
2:34:02
Speaker 2: and Cinemas out and Jokovic got be and you wonder,
2:34:05
Speaker 2: like if it's really done, Like it seemed like it
2:34:07
Speaker 2: was all opening up for him to get one more
2:34:09
Speaker 2: Grand Slam and he couldn't do it. Two guys out,
2:34:12
Speaker 2: You know, it just might not happen. I mean he
2:34:14
Speaker 2: did get, he did get he did get another Olympic
2:34:18
Speaker 2: gold medal, a little bit surprisingly right in Paris. But
2:34:23
Speaker 2: uh yeah, but let's just just move to the Williams sisters,
2:34:27
Speaker 2: who were their own thing and who who changed it.
2:34:32
Speaker 2: You talk about the athleticism that Becker brought, but Williams aprop,
2:34:38
Speaker 2: yeah's similar thing to women's tennis, and what was I.
2:34:41
Speaker 1: Can argue Stephanie Graff was sort of the first power.
2:34:45
Speaker 2: She was a for runner of it, but just the
2:34:48
Speaker 2: serve wasn't as big, the range wasn't as big, right,
2:34:52
Speaker 2: so she out like like Serena, Serena to just chase
2:34:55
Speaker 2: down anything and get it back over the net, right.
2:34:58
Speaker 2: And what was amazing to me was how they made
2:35:00
Speaker 2: Martina Hingis obsolete. So Hinus was this great player who
2:35:03
Speaker 2: was very skillful, but she just didn't have the power.
2:35:07
Speaker 2: So she had. It looked like she was gonna be
2:35:08
Speaker 2: the next thing. And I was actually there when she
2:35:11
Speaker 2: was having some of her first appearances at Wimbledon, and
2:35:15
Speaker 2: you know, everything felt she was next. And she was
2:35:18
Speaker 2: just very poised and polished and just had a very
2:35:20
Speaker 2: precise game and the accuracy on her shots was incredible
2:35:24
Speaker 2: and she just didn't make mistakes. And then the Williams
2:35:27
Speaker 2: sisters just came along and just overpowered her, and she
2:35:29
Speaker 2: just had no answer. You can't get bigger and stronger,
2:35:31
Speaker 2: you know, and so the game belonged to the Williams sisters.
2:35:34
Speaker 2: Lindsay Davenport was a pretty powerful player. You know, you
2:35:38
Speaker 2: had to have that in your game. You had to
2:35:39
Speaker 2: have that type of athletic ability to compete. Now, you know,
2:35:43
Speaker 2: the servers got bigger. You used to be able to
2:35:45
Speaker 2: break serve pretty easily in women's tennis. When you had broken,
2:35:49
Speaker 2: you just break right back, And it wasn't happening now
2:35:52
Speaker 2: with these more powerful servers.
2:35:54
Speaker 1: The William's sisters meet four times together. Serena wins three
2:35:59
Speaker 1: being as once against her sister. But let's step back.
2:36:06
Speaker 1: Is there a better sibling siblings? What other pair of
2:36:10
Speaker 1: siblings are essentially both Hall of famers in their sport.
2:36:14
Speaker 2: Who was ready for for this one?
2:36:17
Speaker 1: But I know I didn't and I wasn't like I've been.
2:36:20
Speaker 1: You know, I wish i'd you know, gone deeper into
2:36:23
Speaker 1: this right when you start to it is it is,
2:36:30
Speaker 1: it's really you know we I talked about the back
2:36:32
Speaker 1: and Row brothers and certainly they played together, but you
2:36:34
Speaker 1: know Patrick wasn't John right.
2:36:36
Speaker 2: There was a time the Beatus was right. There is
2:36:39
Speaker 2: in Steph Curry, the DiMaggio's like I get, you know it.
2:36:44
Speaker 1: It's probably they've got to be collectively the greatest siblings. Uh,
2:36:50
Speaker 1: there's I can't. I'm sure. Here's the challenge for those listening.
2:36:53
Speaker 1: We'll be doing our our you know, we'll take your
2:36:56
Speaker 1: questions and comments. If we're missing a pair of siblings.
2:36:59
Speaker 1: Let us know.
2:37:01
Speaker 2: There was a great moment at the US Open actually
2:37:03
Speaker 2: when what we thought was Serena's farewell to singles tennis,
2:37:08
Speaker 2: but you know, as you know, as we're recording this,
2:37:10
Speaker 2: she's getting ready to come back and play in Wimbledon.
2:37:14
Speaker 2: Also want to take a note to give our best
2:37:17
Speaker 2: wishes to Chris Evert, who as we're recording this is
2:37:19
Speaker 2: announced the return of the cancer battles that she has
2:37:24
Speaker 2: fought so along with Martina. They both went through cancer,
2:37:27
Speaker 2: and we thought they were both on the other side
2:37:29
Speaker 2: and can kind of save her And just really, you know,
2:37:32
Speaker 2: look back and spend these times reminiscing, and now I'm
2:37:34
Speaker 2: sure Martina will be you know, by her side again
2:37:37
Speaker 2: and providing support as they go through. You know, these
2:37:41
Speaker 2: kind of had to take turns going through it and
2:37:43
Speaker 2: supporting each other, and now it's gonna be Martine's turned
2:37:46
Speaker 2: to support Chris again.
2:37:47
Speaker 1: They really seem like public sisters. Now, Yeah, you know,
2:37:50
Speaker 1: in our own way, they take care of each other.
2:37:53
Speaker 2: We certainly want to, you know, send our best wishes
2:37:56
Speaker 2: to Chris and our support and but simultaneously were excited
2:38:03
Speaker 2: about the return of Serena Williams and excited to see,
2:38:09
Speaker 2: you know, what she can still do in her mid forties.
2:38:13
Speaker 1: Look, I don't think we could. I just I feel
2:38:16
Speaker 1: like every time I feel like we've made it clear
2:38:20
Speaker 1: how great.
2:38:20
Speaker 2: The William's sisters are. Then there I realized there's still
2:38:23
Speaker 2: things I left out.
2:38:24
Speaker 1: They have twelve Womenedon singles titles together. Serena has seven, right,
2:38:29
Speaker 1: Venus has five from two thousand to twenty sixteen, and
2:38:34
Speaker 1: one of the two sisters either held the title in
2:38:36
Speaker 1: eleven different years. I mean, that's just, you know, there's
2:38:42
Speaker 1: just nothing like them we've ever seen.
2:38:45
Speaker 2: Yeah. I was there when they faced each other at
2:38:48
Speaker 2: Wimbledon for the first time in the semifinals in two
2:38:50
Speaker 2: thousand and The place was going crazy, and the WTA
2:38:54
Speaker 2: put out a three and a half paid press release
2:38:56
Speaker 2: about sisters in the history of the tournament and the tour.
2:39:00
Speaker 2: And that was the first time sisters had met in
2:39:02
Speaker 2: the semi finals. As you described, in the very first
2:39:06
Speaker 2: Wimbledon Women's tournament, sisters met in the final. But I
2:39:13
Speaker 2: just remember kids were going around going to Williams is
2:39:16
Speaker 2: Venus and Serena. They were just like bopping around, like
2:39:19
Speaker 2: the match itself. That that was the problem, Like when
2:39:21
Speaker 2: they played each other, matches have never been great, right, Yeah,
2:39:25
Speaker 2: there was just too much going on, right, We talked
2:39:28
Speaker 2: aspect of it. Yeah, the matches themselves.
2:39:31
Speaker 1: Right, You never sit there and say, and I don't look, no, no,
2:39:36
Speaker 1: I'm an only child, so I can't get inside the
2:39:38
Speaker 1: whole sibling rivalry thing. I mean, you know, and I
2:39:42
Speaker 1: have two kids and they don't really place sports against
2:39:45
Speaker 1: each other. You know, I don't. That's a dynamic that
2:39:49
Speaker 1: I think is just unique that nobody can quite understand
2:39:53
Speaker 1: unless you're actually inside their heads.
2:39:56
Speaker 2: And crazy that they won fourteen Grand Slam doubles finals together,
2:40:00
Speaker 2: he puteque. Every time they made the final, they were winning,
2:40:04
Speaker 2: by the way, I.
2:40:05
Speaker 1: Do you know, I hated. I don't want to I
2:40:09
Speaker 1: want I don't want to leave. I want to go
2:40:12
Speaker 1: back one quickly to stephie Graff here in a minute,
2:40:15
Speaker 1: because I think I worry that we kind of glossed over.
2:40:19
Speaker 1: She is the only woman to ever have the Golden Slam,
2:40:26
Speaker 1: and you know what the Golden Slam.
2:40:27
Speaker 2: Is, Yes, so yeah, ninety two. I think we did it.
2:40:32
Speaker 1: She pulled it off and now you're yeah, she won.
2:40:36
Speaker 2: It, winning the Australian Open, the French Open in the
2:40:40
Speaker 2: same slendar and Olympic gold medal. I want to it
2:40:44
Speaker 2: was ninety two, maybe ninety six, I think.
2:40:47
Speaker 1: It is, and it you know, it's interesting again. I
2:40:49
Speaker 1: think that it's just a reminder that, you know, the
2:40:53
Speaker 1: d it is it is, there's always another generation that's
2:40:58
Speaker 1: going to come and say, hey, we're going to top this,
2:41:01
Speaker 1: and there's no doubt the Williams sisters in some ways
2:41:04
Speaker 1: top Stepfie, but Stephie was was was a was a
2:41:09
Speaker 1: dynasty in and of herself for a period of time.
2:41:12
Speaker 1: There's three other shoutouts and matches in Wimbledon history that
2:41:15
Speaker 1: we have to talk about. One is the greatest fairy
2:41:17
Speaker 1: tale of them all, Goron evon Isovich. I really was
2:41:23
Speaker 1: practicing evon Isovic. Evon Isovic, he is the greatest sports
2:41:27
Speaker 1: fairy tale maybe ever. This is the equivalent of a
2:41:33
Speaker 1: sixteen seed beating a one seed in the NCAA tournament,
2:41:36
Speaker 1: right he was, his ranking was one twenty five. He
2:41:39
Speaker 1: gets a wild card, which is what Serena Williams is
2:41:41
Speaker 1: playing under in the twenty twenty six Wimbledon, and he
2:41:45
Speaker 1: wins the whole tournament. It is something that's never been
2:41:50
Speaker 1: done well.
2:41:52
Speaker 2: He had this game or serve that was perfectly suited
2:41:55
Speaker 2: to Wimbledon, right where you could just serve your way through,
2:41:58
Speaker 2: sometimes all the way to the five. All right. It's
2:42:00
Speaker 2: like like a NASCAR there's a road course specialists, right yeah,
2:42:05
Speaker 2: and so so you know they're they're they're not good
2:42:08
Speaker 2: on the ovals, but put them on a road course
2:42:10
Speaker 2: and they're unbeatable. So like you put him at Wimbledon,
2:42:12
Speaker 2: and he was just well suited for it. So I
2:42:15
Speaker 2: covered him against Sampress, and so what Sampras had, So
2:42:19
Speaker 2: he had a bigger serve than Sampress, right, a bastard
2:42:22
Speaker 2: served than Sampriss. There were whole service games of Evenisovich.
2:42:26
Speaker 2: For Sampress just wouldn't even get his racket on the ball,
2:42:29
Speaker 2: you know, just a bombo, you're done, next round game, Evenisovich, right,
2:42:34
Speaker 2: and then but Sampress was mentally stronger, and so you know, Evenisovich,
2:42:42
Speaker 2: you you mess up, you get a you get a
2:42:45
Speaker 2: second serve. And every time you give San frans a
2:42:47
Speaker 2: second serve, he was going to pounce on it, right,
2:42:49
Speaker 2: And if he wasn't going to make any mistakes, Evenisovich
2:42:51
Speaker 2: would just make enough mistakes to let Sampris have this
2:42:55
Speaker 2: little window that he was able to sneak through and
2:42:57
Speaker 2: get through. But Evenisovich was was fun because he was
2:43:00
Speaker 2: just perfectly suited for that that place. And if you
2:43:04
Speaker 2: could be well suited, if your game could match any venue, right,
2:43:08
Speaker 2: I'm not just gonna say in tennis, if a game
2:43:12
Speaker 2: any venue in sports, yeah, would you wanted to be
2:43:15
Speaker 2: Wimbledon a close second. I think would be like Bred
2:43:18
Speaker 2: couples always managing the well at the Masters, I would
2:43:21
Speaker 2: I would take that as my superpower. I can play
2:43:23
Speaker 2: well at the Masters, even if I don't win it,
2:43:25
Speaker 2: I can love Wimbledon.
2:43:27
Speaker 1: So even if Yovich only wins one major title ever
2:43:31
Speaker 1: and obviously Croatia, he's in important. But he does get
2:43:35
Speaker 1: a young pupil to start coaching, mhm, a guy named
2:43:39
Speaker 1: Novak Djokovic. So he is he has been a pretty
2:43:43
Speaker 1: good coach. Let's just say uh as well as UH
2:43:48
Speaker 1: is holding this, holding this incredible record here, I think
2:43:53
Speaker 1: he got Andy Murray right. The Brits don't get to
2:43:56
Speaker 1: win Wimbledon very often anymore, you know, as we've as
2:43:59
Speaker 1: we've indicated everything victory so right every seventy seven years,
2:44:05
Speaker 1: and you know, think about when Andy Andy Murray we
2:44:08
Speaker 1: talked about the dominance of Federal, Nadal and Djokovic in
2:44:12
Speaker 1: this period here of the last sort of twenty five
2:44:15
Speaker 1: years where really it's just been mostly those three guys.
2:44:19
Speaker 1: Andy Murray is the is the loord of the Venus
2:44:27
Speaker 1: Jeralitis of the crowd. Right, he was sort of almost
2:44:31
Speaker 1: good enough. He'd make a few finals, and he'd meet
2:44:34
Speaker 1: Djokovic once at Wimbledman and it was it may to
2:44:38
Speaker 1: the to the British citizen, it's probably still their most
2:44:42
Speaker 1: recent favorite Wimbledman final.
2:44:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you weren't alive in nineteen thirty six, that's one.
2:44:50
Speaker 2: So it's funny because for so long, you know, all
2:44:55
Speaker 2: the British hopes were resting on the likes of ten
2:44:57
Speaker 2: Himen and that's just not fair. Like it'd be like
2:45:00
Speaker 2: if you were dependent on you know, the pre Nikola
2:45:05
Speaker 2: Jokics Denver Nuggets to win a championship for you, right,
2:45:08
Speaker 2: Like if the entire nation's hopes were resting on the
2:45:11
Speaker 2: Denver Nuggets, right, who were like a good team, but
2:45:14
Speaker 2: they weren't going to beat the Lakers or the Celtics
2:45:16
Speaker 2: in the eighties. They weren't going to beat the Bulls
2:45:18
Speaker 2: in the nineties. So it's it was an unfair burden
2:45:24
Speaker 2: that everyone was hoping to tend him. Like he wasn't Samprus,
2:45:27
Speaker 2: he wasn't Agacy, he wasn't any of those guys, right,
2:45:30
Speaker 2: he just didn't have it in him. And murray to
2:45:33
Speaker 2: his credit because he's not Jokovic or Federer, and he
2:45:36
Speaker 2: had to play an their era and he somehow was
2:45:38
Speaker 2: able to do it like he should get bonus points.
2:45:40
Speaker 2: Not only did he end the British route, but he
2:45:42
Speaker 2: did it in that era, which is super impressive. And
2:45:46
Speaker 2: with that pressure you could feel it. I've been there
2:45:50
Speaker 2: in a match with the British player, like on center court.
2:45:53
Speaker 2: You feel the hopes with every serve and the letdown
2:45:58
Speaker 2: with every net cort. Know, it's just it's too much
2:46:02
Speaker 2: for an individual to bear.
2:46:05
Speaker 1: I feel like one other it is. And I do
2:46:09
Speaker 1: feel like you can see that pressure on the British,
2:46:12
Speaker 1: you know, because they want it so much. But there's
2:46:16
Speaker 1: one other guy that I feel like, if we're going
2:46:17
Speaker 1: to do this before we get to our Mount Rushmore's
2:46:21
Speaker 1: is this is John Issner because he's been involved in
2:46:27
Speaker 1: two and he's not really a well known tennis player,
2:46:30
Speaker 1: but he's arguably written into lore of Wimbledon. So John
2:46:35
Speaker 1: Isner is the guy that's involved in the famous seventy
2:46:40
Speaker 1: to sixty eight five set match eleven hours, five minutes,
2:46:44
Speaker 1: three days. It was a first round match, so it's
2:46:48
Speaker 1: not it wasn't even a final or semi final or quarterfinal,
2:46:52
Speaker 1: and he's facing this guy Nicholas Mayhutt and it's just crazy,
2:46:59
Speaker 1: the fifth end seventy to sixty eight. What's interesting is
2:47:02
Speaker 1: that Isner is also involved in the longest semifinal in
2:47:06
Speaker 1: Wimbledon history, so that that eleven hour match over three
2:47:11
Speaker 1: days is in twenty ten and twenty eighteen, he faces
2:47:13
Speaker 1: a tennis play named Kevin Anderson. It's six hours at
2:47:17
Speaker 1: thirty six minutes, and it is the last time that
2:47:21
Speaker 1: they don't have a fifth set tiebreaker. He wins the
2:47:24
Speaker 1: fifth set twenty six, twenty four, okay, and it became
2:47:30
Speaker 1: the second longest Wimbledon match effort after the other one
2:47:33
Speaker 1: that he had, but it was Isner. He's essentially being
2:47:37
Speaker 1: involved in all these matches that convince them to finally
2:47:40
Speaker 1: put in even the tiebreak rule for the fifth set
2:47:42
Speaker 1: in the final as well.
2:47:43
Speaker 2: It's crazy because it's there is like a super tall
2:47:46
Speaker 2: guy too, especially in the tennis world, so like you'll
2:47:49
Speaker 2: see him at the SPS or whatever now and then
2:47:51
Speaker 2: and you see him and it just clicks like, like,
2:47:54
Speaker 2: oh that.
2:47:56
Speaker 1: Guy right, the Marthon match guy.
2:47:58
Speaker 2: Right. I remember I was. I was at ESPN headquarters
2:48:02
Speaker 2: in Bristol and I was sitting at a desk and
2:48:05
Speaker 2: you know, I just had this little monitor on and
2:48:08
Speaker 2: you were there, Tell what you were there for. I
2:48:11
Speaker 2: was there for the lebron decision stuff. Right, So I
2:48:15
Speaker 2: was the road watching bron Watch in twenty ten. But
2:48:20
Speaker 2: you know, I've got this monitor going on and like
2:48:23
Speaker 2: you want to see it in But then you got
2:48:25
Speaker 2: to go do your do Sports Center or something, right,
2:48:27
Speaker 2: it just wentn't So I was I was in the middle.
2:48:29
Speaker 1: I was doing a daily rundown back. Savannah and Guthrie
2:48:33
Speaker 1: and I had at a at a cable show on
2:48:36
Speaker 1: MSNBC back then. We're in the makeup room. She's a
2:48:39
Speaker 1: big tennis fan, huge uh, she's she's a Fetterer groupie.
2:48:45
Speaker 1: She will uh, she will admit, and you know she
2:48:49
Speaker 1: wanted the tennis on. We're watching the tennis. We do
2:48:51
Speaker 1: our hour show. We come back and they're still in
2:48:53
Speaker 1: the fifth set.
2:48:54
Speaker 2: You know.
2:48:55
Speaker 1: Well, as we try to land the plane, we have
2:48:58
Speaker 1: our Mount Rushmore's to to you know, Jay, I think
2:49:01
Speaker 1: the reason Wimbledon survives is that, and why it's stayed
2:49:07
Speaker 1: Wimbledon stayed special is that it has figured out it is,
2:49:13
Speaker 1: you know, sometimes in a forcible way and sometimes in
2:49:16
Speaker 1: an elegant way. Of what's negotiable and what's sacred.
2:49:22
Speaker 2: And not holding on of things just to hold on
2:49:25
Speaker 2: to them just because this is what we've always done.
2:49:28
Speaker 2: I think the people Sunday in the middle, Sunday is
2:49:30
Speaker 2: the best thing. Well, we don't play on Sunday, that's
2:49:32
Speaker 2: home what we do. Well, sometimes you have to to
2:49:34
Speaker 2: get the tournament done in a reasonable timely manner. And
2:49:38
Speaker 2: also it's a cool thing to let others experience Wimbledon, right,
2:49:42
Speaker 2: you don't want to be too exclusive where no one
2:49:44
Speaker 2: can say that they've been. And so you know, adapting
2:49:48
Speaker 2: with it, you know, the hawkeye technology, like, let's get
2:49:51
Speaker 2: with the twenty first century. And you know it's funny,
2:49:54
Speaker 2: you wonder how diminished the legend of John mcenroll have
2:49:57
Speaker 2: been if he hadn't been blowing up at those umpires
2:50:00
Speaker 2: and that you can't argue with the with a digital line,
2:50:03
Speaker 2: right or a laser eye.
2:50:05
Speaker 1: But let's just think about just grass here a minute.
2:50:08
Speaker 1: It is more expensive. If we were just talking about
2:50:12
Speaker 1: how could Wimbledon make more money, profit more, they would say,
2:50:16
Speaker 1: just get rid of the grass courts. But it wouldn't
2:50:19
Speaker 1: be the money. That's exactly right. It is sacred you
2:50:22
Speaker 1: cannot You couldn't pave over the grass, right.
2:50:26
Speaker 2: You can put a roof on center court, but you
2:50:29
Speaker 2: can't put a hard court on center court. Yeah, and
2:50:31
Speaker 2: I think that's the There are lines that are drawn
2:50:34
Speaker 2: right and they'll they'll be flexible for the sake of
2:50:37
Speaker 2: you know, being pragmatic. And you're right the court, you know,
2:50:40
Speaker 2: especially as the turners expanded. I don't know how many
2:50:42
Speaker 2: people that originally, but the tournament is so big with
2:50:44
Speaker 2: men and women now and the court gets so worn out,
2:50:47
Speaker 2: even center court, which they try to preserve some bit,
2:50:50
Speaker 2: but by that final championship weekend, it's rough out there,
2:50:54
Speaker 2: you know, and it's worn down. So, uh, throw one
2:50:59
Speaker 2: idea tournament. Actually if they got rid of where they
2:51:02
Speaker 2: put synthetic grass, how about that? Well here's another. So
2:51:06
Speaker 2: this is a here's a unchallenge to Wimbledon about whether
2:51:11
Speaker 2: this would be negotiable or break a sacred you know how.
2:51:17
Speaker 2: And I know that this is done.
2:51:19
Speaker 1: I believe at the Phoenix Dome and I you know
2:51:24
Speaker 1: which is they grow the grass on the outside, then
2:51:27
Speaker 1: they roll it in for the game. Can you imagine
2:51:30
Speaker 1: if Wimbledon borrowed that technology where you essentially grew your court.
2:51:35
Speaker 1: Your grass court was maintained off site and they rolled
2:51:40
Speaker 1: it in the way you know on some football indoor
2:51:43
Speaker 1: football stadiums they roll in the grass. You think that
2:51:45
Speaker 1: would be a break of tradition or not.
2:51:49
Speaker 2: I don't think you're still playing on grass, and I
2:51:51
Speaker 2: don't think anyone could plain about having.
2:51:52
Speaker 1: It would improve it would be a better surface for
2:51:55
Speaker 1: the final.
2:51:56
Speaker 2: Yeah, just visually too. Esthetically We've talked about the importance
2:51:58
Speaker 2: of television, like, it just looked better aesthetically to have
2:52:01
Speaker 2: a nice you know, even grass throughout the court, you know,
2:52:05
Speaker 2: rather than it worn down on the on the baselines
2:52:07
Speaker 2: and in the middle on the teeth. So you wonder
2:52:11
Speaker 2: if they would do that, you know, but you have
2:52:13
Speaker 2: to keep the grass. It's funny the US Open had
2:52:16
Speaker 2: no problem moving locations and going from grass to hard
2:52:20
Speaker 2: court because why it wasn't wimbled in and it's its
2:52:22
Speaker 2: own thing, right, and it's got its own feel to it.
2:52:26
Speaker 2: But it doesn't feel class luck and this is.
2:52:29
Speaker 1: True of the French Open, right if they got rid
2:52:30
Speaker 1: of the clay courts, what would make the French Open interesting?
2:52:36
Speaker 1: I mean Paris is great, don't get me wrong, right,
2:52:38
Speaker 1: and the grass court, you couldn't get rid of it.
2:52:41
Speaker 1: But as technology comes along to better maintain it. I mean,
2:52:45
Speaker 1: it's already a different grass. And in fact, that was
2:52:48
Speaker 1: one of my favorite. You know, some players swear that
2:52:51
Speaker 1: the ball is bouncier now and that it does this
2:52:54
Speaker 1: now because they use a different grass, which is true.
2:52:57
Speaker 1: They change the grass, they use a different grass, and
2:53:01
Speaker 1: starting in two thousand and one, then they used to
2:53:03
Speaker 1: use for the first one hundred and thirty years, one
2:53:05
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty three years.
2:53:08
Speaker 2: So all right, we got only four on the Mount Rushmore?
2:53:12
Speaker 1: Is that what we decided?
2:53:14
Speaker 2: Yes?
2:53:14
Speaker 1: Men, women's I tried to man, just what you guys
2:53:18
Speaker 1: to know we're down. Instead of yelling at each other,
2:53:21
Speaker 1: Jay and I, we're gonna talk to you in the audience.
2:53:23
Speaker 1: I try to convince him of doing a Mount Rushmore
2:53:26
Speaker 1: for matches. I try to convince him to do men's
2:53:29
Speaker 1: and women's and he says, no, We've got to keep it.
2:53:32
Speaker 1: It is one Mount Rushmore, only good.
2:53:35
Speaker 2: For four faces on that mountain. So love, you want
2:53:41
Speaker 2: to go, here are roles?
2:53:42
Speaker 1: Let's just remember so what are we what are we
2:53:43
Speaker 1: doing here? We're going to pick the four greatest or
2:53:46
Speaker 1: most influential people in Wimbledon history. That's right. That player
2:53:53
Speaker 1: doesn't have to be so the four who shaped Wimbledon.
2:53:59
Speaker 1: So oh, all right, you want to do yours first?
2:54:04
Speaker 2: Yes, I have a slightly different So I do have
2:54:06
Speaker 2: the four greatest Wimbledonians or those who reformed it. Womens
2:54:10
Speaker 2: not necessarily the most influential. So it sounds like you
2:54:12
Speaker 2: want to do the people in shape, which is kind
2:54:14
Speaker 2: of something that I've done in the past. But for me,
2:54:18
Speaker 2: who are the greatest performers on center court? Which is
2:54:21
Speaker 2: what it comes down to. And so I've got Pete
2:54:24
Speaker 2: Sampras who won seven times, Roger Fetter who won eight
2:54:28
Speaker 2: singles titles, Martina Navratilova nine singles titles, twenty titles overall,
2:54:33
Speaker 2: and my final one is she only one twice, but
2:54:37
Speaker 2: pretty significant in the history of not just oneman but sports.
2:54:40
Speaker 2: And that's AUTHA Gibson.
2:54:44
Speaker 1: I have never had a harder time coming up with
2:54:48
Speaker 1: four so far that we've done, right. It was so like,
2:54:52
Speaker 1: you know, I had maybe five or six steelers to
2:54:56
Speaker 1: pick in my head for the four or maybe was
2:55:00
Speaker 1: you know, for me the four for the four years,
2:55:03
Speaker 1: excuse me, the four for the Warriors were easy for me.
2:55:06
Speaker 1: I had the hardest time. And I think the beauty
2:55:10
Speaker 1: of this is that we're going to have almost completely
2:55:13
Speaker 1: different fours. I did Billy Jean King. I think she
2:55:17
Speaker 1: just again, first of all, she's got the tide for
2:55:21
Speaker 1: the most titles, but you know she was, you know,
2:55:25
Speaker 1: she opened the door that I have Federer.
2:55:28
Speaker 2: Here's the thing with Billy jan King. For me, when
2:55:30
Speaker 2: I think of the iconic Billy Jean King match, it's
2:55:33
Speaker 2: not at center court at wimbled it's at the after
2:55:35
Speaker 2: Doll in Houston.
2:55:36
Speaker 1: I hear you, it's a fair point. It just feels like,
2:55:42
Speaker 1: you know, you know, she just I think that's that
2:55:46
Speaker 1: that that's why I also have Martina. But I the
2:55:55
Speaker 1: struggle I had is is is Federer versus Yokovich, And
2:56:01
Speaker 1: I didn't want to put them both in here. And
2:56:04
Speaker 1: I'm going with Federer just because I think the fans
2:56:07
Speaker 1: love them more and I think that matters. Right, There's
2:56:09
Speaker 1: this there's this feeling you get when you know the
2:56:14
Speaker 1: entity that is the tournament embraces the player. And it's
2:56:18
Speaker 1: not fair to Yokovic that it's that way.
2:56:20
Speaker 2: It just is right.
2:56:21
Speaker 1: It's the same way like Fetterer is not as embraced
2:56:25
Speaker 1: and beloved in Paris as nadal is, and Nadala is
2:56:29
Speaker 1: never going to be embraced in London the way Feedterer
2:56:32
Speaker 1: is or Yokovic. So I put Fetter on there, even
2:56:35
Speaker 1: though I know you could argue that yokovich is is
2:56:39
Speaker 1: is the greater and I was going to cheat and
2:56:46
Speaker 1: put the Williams sisters on there, but I'm just going
2:56:47
Speaker 1: to do I'm gonna do. I'm going to do. I'm
2:56:52
Speaker 1: gonna douce Venus because Venus is the one that got
2:56:56
Speaker 1: the money. Equal. Look, Serena's on the Mount Rushmore of
2:57:02
Speaker 1: women's tennis, right, but if you're asking me Wimbledon.
2:57:07
Speaker 2: Venus has had more impact on Wimbledon than her sister discussed.
2:57:13
Speaker 2: So that's similar to me. I would put Billy Jean
2:57:15
Speaker 2: King on my tennis Mount Mount Rushmore. And again, it's
2:57:19
Speaker 2: not like she hasn't performed at Wimbledon. I just I
2:57:22
Speaker 2: just don't associate her with Wimbledon, you know, And so
2:57:25
Speaker 2: that's kind of to me. Part of it is like, Okay,
2:57:27
Speaker 2: who are the people that I think of and I
2:57:28
Speaker 2: think of greatness at Wimbledon, And it might be ignorant.
2:57:31
Speaker 2: Some of my falled it. It's probably probably because her
2:57:33
Speaker 2: greatest accomplishments were before was watching Wimbledon.
2:57:36
Speaker 1: And by the way, tennis junkies are going to say,
2:57:39
Speaker 1: I can't believe you didn't even talk about Margaret Court,
2:57:42
Speaker 1: and you're like, you're right, and Margaret Court, you know,
2:57:46
Speaker 1: it's sort of punished because of just when she was great, Right,
2:57:50
Speaker 1: Margaret Court was in fact beat Billy Jean King at
2:57:54
Speaker 1: Wimbledon and probably one of one of it's to this day,
2:57:58
Speaker 1: one of the longest women's final matches of all time,
2:58:01
Speaker 1: that nineteen seventies final. And but you know, it's it's
2:58:06
Speaker 1: hard to sit here and say that when you think
2:58:08
Speaker 1: of Wimbledon, she's one of the first four people you
2:58:10
Speaker 1: think of.
2:58:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you know, we talked about people who benefited
2:58:17
Speaker 2: from their era. Margaret Court probably gets demerits in the
2:58:23
Speaker 2: public eye for for her era when she came about
2:58:26
Speaker 2: you very maybe yeah, well Rod Labor, right, yeah, Rod Labor?
2:58:32
Speaker 1: What if what if Rod Labor plays the five years
2:58:35
Speaker 1: that he was banned from playing?
2:58:36
Speaker 2: Right? You know there are fours uh withol Wimbledon Bey
2:58:46
Speaker 2: on your it almost has to be Mount Rushmore of venues.
2:58:51
Speaker 1: That's an interesting So if you did the if you
2:58:53
Speaker 1: did the all time venues right, and you did it
2:58:58
Speaker 1: with a met with an even if you're getting through
2:59:00
Speaker 1: the American if you do it through the American eye,
2:59:02
Speaker 1: you're going to go Madison Square Garden is one, right?
2:59:06
Speaker 1: Going to do Augusta? I think it's Wimbledon.
2:59:13
Speaker 2: And both fields or it's a the Rose Bowl Stadium
2:59:18
Speaker 2: by field.
2:59:19
Speaker 1: I might argue the rose Bowl more than more than
2:59:22
Speaker 1: any of the others because of the Rose Bowls hosted
2:59:25
Speaker 1: a lot of iconic sporting events.
2:59:28
Speaker 2: You know, outsarts mixed in there too. Yeah, so you
2:59:35
Speaker 2: know what, I'll say this, it's not beloved, But how
2:59:39
Speaker 2: do you top the LA Coliseum. It's two Olympics, that's right,
2:59:44
Speaker 2: the first Super Bowl where it's about to get its
2:59:47
Speaker 2: third Olympics. Yeah, by the way, so and Dodger Stadium
2:59:51
Speaker 2: in the LA Coliseum, I believe the largest the World Series.
2:59:55
Speaker 2: I think we talked about this in the Dodger but
2:59:57
Speaker 2: like a World Series, Olympics, a super Bowl, Like can
3:00:01
Speaker 2: your stadium do that? Yeah?
3:00:04
Speaker 1: No it can't, But you're right. I think what we're
3:00:06
Speaker 1: trying to say though, is despite going down a rabbit
3:00:09
Speaker 1: All on the La Coliseeam. I think Wimbledon is that venue.
3:00:13
Speaker 1: It's one of the four. It is a Mount.
3:00:14
Speaker 2: Rushmore un venue, and it's certainly a bucket list destination. Again,
3:00:21
Speaker 2: I was fortunate to get to go there, not once,
3:00:24
Speaker 2: but twice, even though I didn't I just envisioned one
3:00:29
Speaker 2: or I had this desire to go there, even though
3:00:31
Speaker 2: I didn't want to be a tennis writer. You know,
3:00:34
Speaker 2: it wasn't sure how I could do it. And again
3:00:37
Speaker 2: to not go once but twice super fortunate, and uh, hey,
3:00:42
Speaker 2: you have to go there and you'll just be You'll
3:00:44
Speaker 2: just be amazed at how green it is. I mean national,
3:00:48
Speaker 2: it's just so green. And that that sounds overly simplistic
3:00:52
Speaker 2: to reduce it to that, but that's why when I
3:00:55
Speaker 2: think of Wimbledon, when I think of the All England Club,
3:00:58
Speaker 2: I just think green.
3:00:59
Speaker 1: Well, but there's also something else here that I think
3:01:02
Speaker 1: gives it this right. It's we live in a world
3:01:05
Speaker 1: where everything gets renamed, resold, rebranded, sponsored, streamed, optimized, monetized. Right, Wimbledon,
3:01:13
Speaker 1: even in this era, has kept its distinct feeling right, and.
3:01:20
Speaker 2: It's what that the name just kind of elevated right again,
3:01:24
Speaker 2: because it's the championships at the All England Fontanas Club.
3:01:29
Speaker 1: Well, it's intentional. They know what they're doing, you know,
3:01:33
Speaker 1: and it's it And this is why we believe.
3:01:37
Speaker 2: It's a dynasty, right. It's that, it's it's it's it's
3:01:41
Speaker 2: a tournament.
3:01:42
Speaker 1: That arguably props up an entire sport. There's no other
3:01:48
Speaker 1: tournament that does that. Enjoy the Fortnite Why please look
3:01:55
Speaker 1: as we wrap up, a big thank you to Steve Hall.
3:01:57
Speaker 1: He's our partner and executive producer. Andrew Sampson is the
3:02:00
Speaker 1: head of Programming at Showboat Media. Our production partner, Kevin
3:02:03
Speaker 1: Kennedy is our producer. In Meracioli is our chief researcher.
3:02:08
Speaker 1: A big reminder to you follow us on social media
3:02:10
Speaker 1: at Dynastic Pod. You could also follow both Jaya Donde
3:02:13
Speaker 1: and myself on various social channels like and review though
3:02:16
Speaker 1: and the Dynastic Pod. We'd really love that wherever you
3:02:19
Speaker 1: listen to your podcast, and please like and subscribe on
3:02:22
Speaker 1: our YouTube channel and post some questions that we will
3:02:25
Speaker 1: answer on our next episode where we will do we'll
3:02:30
Speaker 1: have an interview with an icon iconic character from Wimbledon's.
3:02:36
Speaker 2: Past, and also we're going to in that episode rank
3:02:41
Speaker 2: the greatest matches at least the five greatest matches of
3:02:45
Speaker 2: all time in Wimbledon history.
3:02:47
Speaker 1: So we will see you on our next episode.