It should come as no surprise that the person who delivered, to my mind, the single most profound remark at Saturday’s International Tennis Hall of Fame Induction Celebration was Mary Carillo, a 2026 inductee herself, and one of the sport’s most shrewd, prolific, and velvet-voiced raconteurs.
The 69-year-old Carillo, taking the dais before her fellow inductee Roger Federer, gave a funny and engaging account of her childhood in Douglaston, Queens, comparing her discovery of tennis to the “clap of creation,” the kind of rhapsodic flourish that called to mind her singular presence in the broadcast booth. She remembered the first time she took a set off her father, Tony, and her own short playing career, of which a Mixed Doubles title alongside John McEnroe at the 1977 French Open was the apogee. She even sprinkled in a short catalog poem, working her way through the professional tennis pantheon in rhyming couplets. “Venus and Serena, in every arena / Rafa and Roger, and Novak, the dislodger…”
“But here’s the thing,” Carillo continued, striking a more serious note. “Some of their best memories are mine, too.”