By the time I got around to watching it, I hadn’t managed to keep any food down for going on 72 hours. So when I say the speech made me well up, do take it with a pinch of oral rehydration salt. Because by that point, I’m fairly certain an advert for contents insurance would have reduced me to tears. But this is Mary Carillo we’re talking about.
Unless you are a proper tennis nerd or live in the United States, it is possible you have never heard of Carillo. But if you’re reading this newsletter, my hope is that you and I share one thing above all else: an admiration for great storytelling1 and people just generally meeting the moment. And boy does that describe Carillo.
My first piece of advice for anyone giving a speech (though, come to think of it, no one has ever asked) is simple: assemble a supportive audience. This is the primary reason why bad wedding speeches are quite so disastrous: it takes a special kind of incompetence to fall on your face in front of a crowd that only wants you to succeed.
Sure, that Tony Blair address to the Women’s Institute was wildly ill-judged, but even at the height of New Labour, those people weren’t voting socialist anyway.
That voice
Carillo enjoys a few other advantages that many speakers lack. She was being honoured with a prize (induction into the International Tennis Hall of Fame), she had, I think it is fair to say, second billing (the other inductee being Roger Federer) and, most handily of all, she talks in front of a microphone for a living. Still, not many can pull off what she does.
Carillo has this quality of making the listener feel completely at ease. Part of this stems from her distinctive voice: deep, rich and never far from breaking into mid-sentence laughter. Even in her serious moments, that Long Island warmth shines through, buttressed by a genuine authority about her subject. All in, it’s a devastating combination.
She was captivating from the off, calling Billie Jean King, fresh off introducing Carillo, “the most singularly American person I’ve ever known”. She told stories — of her tennis origin (winning in the “ferociously competitive” six and under age group at the annual Douglas fishing contest in Queens, New York), of the time she first took a set off Tony Carillo (her dad) and of her childhood friend, John McEnroe,2 who was, she recalled, “so damn good, even when he was so damn short”.
Like all the great storytellers (and indeed tennis players), she mixed up her paces and played with variety. Carillo followed a sincere call for truth-telling (the “occupational hazard to piss off people in power”) with what she described as a “brief but moving poem”. A transcript cannot possibly do it justice, but nonetheless: