Talking ‘The Cruelest Game’ with Matt Futterman

**Catherine** (0:11)
Hello, and welcome to The Tennis Podcast, a very special tennis podcast today in a very special place, which if you're watching us on YouTube, you can probably already see. You find us in the Wimbledon Library, the actual Wimbledon Library. We've been granted special access for this show today because it felt like the most fitting place to talk to a man about a book. That man is Matt Futterman or Matthew Futterman. Do we have to call you Matthew now?

**Matt Futterman** (0:40)
No, just call me Matt, please. It was a mistake I made years ago when you had to decide what your byline was. And I thought Matthew sounded more grown up and nobody calls me Matthew except my mother when she's mad at me.

**Catherine** (0:53)
Okay. I had the same. I rebranded to Catherine on my first day working with David. And I've had to commit to it ever since. So I understand the struggle. So Matt Futterman, the book is The Cruelest Game, Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis.
It's coming out next week, Tuesday, the 4th of August, but available for pre-order now.

**Matt Futterman** (1:15)
Yes, pre-orders. Like the most important thing in book publishing these days, apparently, is pre-orders.

**Catherine** (1:21)
Most people that are promoting a book have hundreds of copies of the book that they're carrying around with them. They're telling everybody when the book's coming out, you're the most modest promoter of a book that I've ever known. So, well, this is your chance, Matt. This is my chance. So I'll lift it up. Hold up the book. Here it is.

**Matt Futterman** (1:40)
Several years of blood, sweat and tears right here.

**Catherine** (1:45)
We're biased. I'm particularly biased because I was asked by you and incredibly flattered by it to read the audio for the book. So I've read it twice now.
It was a great process getting to do that. These two have also read it. And I think what struck me, and I think all of us, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but we've talked about it, but I think what struck us all was that we live and breathe tennis our whole lives. Matt spends half his life here in the Wimbledon Library reading all about the history of the game, and yet we all learned a lot from this book about the game and how it is at this moment as a sort of snapshot of professional tennis right now. And I think that was your intention, right, when writing this book?

**Matt Futterman** (2:34)
Yeah, that was completely my intention. Well, thank you. Thank you for the kind words about it. And thank you for reading the audio. That's a really hard job that I was not up for. And you seem like the best person to do it.
And so all of your listeners, if they... All of your listeners are tuned in every week to, you know, hear your tones, can now hear them for I think 13 hours and 52 minutes of Catherine Whittaker.

**Catherine** (3:02)
Wow.

**Matt Futterman** (3:02)
So, order the audio and you'll get Catherine Whittaker in your ear balls for 13 hours.

**Catherine** (3:09)
It's so much in the edits also. It was four solid days in the studio, plus a day of sort of pickups and retakes and so on. So I'm like, hmm, only 13 hours.

**Matt Futterman** (3:21)
There you go. Right. With me, it would have been 40

**Catherine** (3:24)
The rest was outtakes and mistakes. But no, I loved doing it. Actually, I'd never done anything like that before and it was a great process. So thank you. Anyway.

**Matt Futterman** (3:33)
But yes, that was my intention. I mean, what I really wanted to do was I really wanted to explain to people what it was like to be a professional tennis player these days. I haven't been a professional tennis player. The only thing I know about professional tennis players is what people tell me about that. So this was just a sort of a deeply reported deep dive into the behind-the-scenes world and torture that is professional tennis in the mid-2020s.
And if it was only going to be sort of describing great matches and stuff like that, I really didn't know why people would buy it because they could just watch those things on television. Chances are they have watched those things on television. So, I wanted to sort of go far beyond the matches, even far beyond sort of the moments before the matches and the match days, but really get into childhoods and practice courts and psychology sessions that people go through and all those kinds of things. And it took a while to convince people to trust me to do that, but eventually they did and this is the product of that.