The Cruelest Game

Lose a pickup basketball game and you shrug it off. Lose a tennis match, Matthew Futterman learned, and it feels like you got beaten up. As the US Open gets under way this week, Futterman, veteran sports journalist for The Athletic and author of The Cruelest Game, goes inside the sport’s real battleground — the head — where even the greatest lose nearly half the points they play, and the hardest thing any champion does is learn when to leave.Then there’s the money. At the top, fifty to a hundred million a year rides on winning, and every sponsor becomes one more voice in your head. Get full access to Talk Cocktail Podcast at jeffschechtman.substack.com/subscribe