US Open - Federer, Carillo steal show as Day 1 beckons

**Catherine Whitaker** (0:10)
Hello, and welcome to The Tennis Podcast. Coming to you tonight, the eve of the 2026 US Open from Newport, Rhode Island, or rather Kingston, Rhode Island, which is about 30 minutes and two bridges away from the town of Newport, which is of course home to the International Tennis Hall of Fame, where this evening we watched Mary Carillo and Roger Federer be inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. To be honest with you, I think all tennis podcasts from now on might end up coming from Rhode Island, because we like it here so much, we might not leave.

**David Law** (0:51)
Yeah, this has been a bit of an upgrade on what I was expecting, to be honest, I thought this would be a good trip. It's been an absolute belter.

**Catherine Whitaker** (1:00)
Can you believe that 24 hours ago we were in a McDonald's on the side of the road in Milford, Connecticut, which I'm sure is a lovely place, by the way.

**Matt Roberts** (1:10)
Someone messaged us on Instagram to say, I got married in Milford.
And look, we made great memories there too, different memories. But those chicken nuggets went down well.

**Catherine Whitaker** (1:24)
Yeah, whatever chicken thing I had did not go down well. But yeah, happy memories nonetheless. But nothing quite like what we experienced today, quite frankly.
I'm still in a state of emotional and sensory overwhelm, quite frankly, about what we experienced today at the International Tennis Hall of Fame. So I'm going to need some handholding to get through explaining the experience to our listeners, quite frankly, David.

**David Law** (1:56)
Yeah. Well, I think it was significant, above all else, because of the two people involved on a very personal basis. The fact that Mary Carillo was being inducted was the reason we were here. I've never been to the International Tennis Hall of Fame before.
And it was an absolute treat to come primarily just to see that moment, and to be granted by her a space on the fourth row of the horseshoe, where all the people that are invited and the people that have been inducted in the past are all sitting, and obviously being followed by Roger Federer, who just sort of means so much to so many people in so many different ways, and his own response to it. It was a very emotional evening. And even the fact that we just got to see the Hall of Fame generally, and walk in, and walk around the museum, and kind of compare it to Wimbledon. It was a similar sort of feel, and they have done the most marvellous job with the place over so many years. And then just the running of the event itself. I just don't think they could have done it any better in terms of creating a platform for this celebration, which in strict terms is a little bit peculiar to us in Britain. We still don't do that many halls of fames, though there's more of them around. But such a big deal made of this. And yet when we were there, I was completely bought into it.
I didn't have an ounce of cynicism in my body as I watched Mary Carillo and Billie Jean King introducing her, and Roger Federer's wife introducing him, and then Federer himself speaking. The whole thing was wonderful and it was just done in such a good amount of time. We've just released a T-shirt, we'd cut the faff on it, and there was no faff around this day.

**Catherine Whitaker** (4:11)
I was braced for it, quite frankly. I mean, there was a stage. Where there is a stage, there is so often faff.
There wasn't any. The whole thing was, it was a TV broadcast. It was going out live on a lot of significant networks in big countries. You see, here in the US, it was going out live on Sky Sports. And again, I had in my memory the One Point Slam at the Australian Open this year, which we all really enjoyed, but was diminished as an experience by clearly being a TV product, first and foremost, at the expense of the in-person experience. And to be honest, I think the fact that it was a TV product and they had that in mind with the production, seemed to enhance the production to me in terms of the in-person experience, because it was so slick and so smooth, it felt like there was a premium on cutting the faff tonight. And look, I'm saying that not having anything to compare it to, this is our first experience of the Hall of Fame, but I had the exact... You've put it perfectly, David, like, my body is programmed as a Brit and as lots of other things as well, to try and find cynicism in things, and I could find none tonight. It was so pure and so joyful.