The Cruelest Game with Matt Futterman: Why Players Quit, Their Childhoods, and Happiness Compared to Other Sports

Matt Futterman is an award-winning sports journalist for The Athletic and New York Times. His new book is The Cruelest Game: Chasing Greatness in Professional Tennis. This is a fascinating conversation about the book and why professional tennis can feel uniquely brutal, even for the best players in the world. We talk through the childhood pipeline, the mental load of constant losing, and what separates the era of Serena, Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic from the stars trying to survive now. ...