Signature Family Tennis Invitation Made Easy

Signature family tennis invitation

it's now my pleasure to introduce best-selling author Douglas brunt a native Philadelphian he was the CEO of the security company elf NTM until 2011 the following year he released his debut novel the New York Times best seller ghosts of Manhattan that success was followed by a second novel the means Forbes magazine has called him a persuasive storyteller and Steve Forbes said of his first novel that readers will have a literary feast devouring this book his new book trophy son takes on the ruthless dynamic of father-son relationships in our achievement consumed society Sports Illustrated calls calls this look at the world of competitive tennis keenly observed and provocative and the observer hails it as a wise novel whose lessons go well beyond sports I think it's his best book yet when the library had asked me if I wanted to introduce Doug as we're both Haverford school alumni she politely inquired if he and I knew each other after I make the final introduction you can decide it the answer you can answer that question yourselves I'm actually am proud to call Doug a friend although maybe friend isn't quite strong enough Doug and I were classmates and football teammates at Haverford together we went to onto Duke University where we were fraternity brothers and roommates soon after college we both found ourselves in San Francisco where our friendship continued as I married and then he did we were the best man in each other's wedding as well more recently I've also embarked on my own writing career in Doug's counsel has been instrumental and helped me complete my first book which ironically I did this morning so it's great that Doug's here now his talk tonight will be a conversation with his wife and BC journalist megyn kelly well some of you may not know who Doug is Megan needs no introduction the only thing I will offer is that 99.9 percent of those who know her know the polished fearless and beautiful TV anchor and journalist I however am proud to say that I know her more as Doug's wife and a more accustomed to seeing her in a t-shirt and yoga pants with one of their three fabulous children perched on her hip we're so pleased to have them here tonight with us this evening ladies and gentlemen please join me in welcoming Doug brunt and Megan Kelly to the free library so hi everybody I'm Meghan Kelly this is my husband Doug run I'm married well I always say I love when people meet Doug because I just think he reflects so well on me you know that's saying show me who you love and I'll show you who you are nailed it and there's my mother-in-law there's your mom Jackie run in the audience who we love and you'll get to know thank you through some of this discussion you'll come to know her well so Doug was saying he was really looking forward to this because he thought it was gonna be a cinch so I'm gonna start I'm just gonna start right in what was the last time you had to say you're sorry no too much okay well he's into it okay so first of all one of the things I love about Doug's writing career is that they call him the Michael Lewis of fiction and if you're a reader you know what that means this is a guy who takes nonfiction subjects like Moneyball which you know became a book of his and then a movie and writes all about them in a way that is very user friendly and really you get you get to understand something about society and you learn you hear a story at the same time and I think that's what Doug does in the fiction world so I loved it that he was described that way because that's how I read his books the first one was about with the background of Wall Street the second one was with a background of politics and media and this latest one has a backdrop of tennis and sports and what we do as parents to our children and it's called trophy son okay so it's a USA Today notable book it's a New York Post must-read book and I want to start with this quote from The Observer which says this wise novel explores the themes of sacrifice and maniacal parenting and alerts us to the cost of success the lessons go well beyond sports so why tennis and why this subject well as I was sitting as you've suggested I have picked larger subject areas Wall Street politics and now sports and then tried to whittle that down into a fictional story that enables me to explore the themes that are interesting to me or disturbing to me and I pick sports because we're now experiencing this shift in parenting and the way that kids are experiencing athletics that is new to me when you know Megan and I were growing up and Bill mentioned our our football experience when we were kids eight nine years old we were not really in any kind of structured athletic program we played in the woods we played in the yard and we played ball in the neighborhood with with other kids but now our oldest is seven and we're on the cusp of entering this travel sports phenomenon and it has the intensity of professional or college level sports you have to give up every weekend for a torso soccer games and every weekday evening for practices and so I wanted to explore that a little bit I picked tennis because tennis is really at the extreme end of this tennis in the 80s with you was the only thing that's kind of like soccer and lacrosse is today and with tennis if you're very good you don't even finish high school you go off to Florida for one of the tenets Academy is sort of like a Bala Terry Academy and you're not really schooled in a normal way you do some classes but basically you're on the tennis court eight hours a day and so I wanted to explore this shift in parenting and in experience for youth who are trying to have an athletic experience and what the it's gotten so far along now that the parents are sort of these reluctant participants in this whole environment because if I think sports are very important it's a great way to learn discipline and teamwork and practice equals improvement things we want our kids to have in addition to our kids finding a passion for something but it's gotten to the point where if you want your kids to have a high school athletic experience they need to start the travel team at eight years old and if you don't you're no longer mainstreaming your kids and in addition to that the travel teams that these young ages the coaches push you to specialize in just one sport if you're doing soccer they don't want you to also do the cross they want you to stick with your one sport and so the thing that disturbs me the most about it is the early single sport specialization and tennis just happens to be a great way to you know explore that theme because tennis is I think as grueling and as as requires as much of a sacrifice as any of these sports all right now that we have the headline of the book let's take a step back we'll get back into trophy Sun a little bit more in a minute but this is a Philadelphia audience and you set this this book with the backdrop of Philadelphia anton is from philadelphia for the suburbs and there's a reason for that because writers write what they know so tell us about your connection to this town well you know so many friends from from growing up were here we come my mom still lives in in the area so we are back here a number of times specifically what is the street address [Laughter] so it's a it's an incredible place to grow up the Philadelphia we're out in the suburbs in Radnor and when we were looking around for neighborhoods in New York we thought man I would be great if we could find a place like that because Megan would experience it coming back to visit my mom and and there isn't one there is no New York suburb that we'd liked as much and it's just an incredible place and near and dear to my heart many close friends and family are here and when you pick a place to set a novel it is easier to pick a place that you know well because you're not just then describing streets and buildings and that you can really convey an emotion and feeling and and it's a much more effective way to set a scene you know what's amazing about Doug's family so doug is the third of four children and i think bill would back me up that all of the brunt children are overachievers they've all they're all extremely smart they're all extremely loving they're polite they're kind they're they're good kids they're good friends they're good spouses but my own impression and Jackie we're giving you the microphone soon is that there was not this there was not this pressure to achieve to win to kill or be killed the way you've documented in trophy son right there was not not in my family no it was you know go out into your best and they know my parents had a rough idea of what our best could be and we were not delivering that they would know that we were slacking off but it wasn't setting goals for us that we weren't interested in setting for ourselves and it wasn't you know coming up with arbitrary milestones and things they just said go out and do well do your best so high but I think this is a shift I mean a lot of parents struggle with this you want your kids not not to be losses and yet you you know so you want to push him a little but you don't want to turn into Anton's father and Anton of course that's the star of the book and his relationship with his overbearing father is what we learn about page after page and you root for Anton and you want to have a talk with that dad and you don't want to be that parent so what do you think where do we draw the line in trying to raise for successful Brunt children to get that instead of crossing over to get the abusive excessive pressure that Anton's dad puts on him well we talked about this a bit obviously and I think that one of the things that my parents did that we also try to do that helps is you do have to force like occasionally they need to be forced into something but it really is until they've had a real shot at trying it out you know our son doesn't want to try skiing or he doesn't want to try this baseball thing but we make him go and make him go enough times until he's really experienced it more than half the time and it was this the same with me more than half the time to end up liking it and then doing it for a while but then they want to say you know now I'm tired of that I want to try this and so our approach is to make them try as many different things as we can so they're doing I don't know how many different things our kids are currently doing but then it shifts and then it might come back around and they do need to be made to do it sometimes but I think the best thing you can do is encourage them to find something think they're then going to be passionate about like they hated piano forever but now our oldest is actually kind of loving piano so I use not going to be doing it we know we're not Tiger moms and dads about it but now Anton's dad is the least likable character in the book arguably there's a couple of other contenders but I would say he's the one who makes you feel the most and in frustration and to some extent we all know this parent right the one who's in there just pushing and pushing and pushing and taking all the fun out of the game and making it's like changing the experience into something that no one is able to enjoy no one is able to this was not your experience growing up and you did not have a dad that was anything like this right I love tennis and I loved my experience with tennis my dad I never even played tennis competitively so I wasn't even in a situation where I'd be pushed in that way and my dad didn't do that with with other sports either but I do enough about tennis to know some of the realities in the game and I did a lot of research for this book not just secondary research of reading biographies and other research on it but I interviewed a bunch of players who interviewed James Blake and if you John Isner and I also interviewed a bunch of players who had a similar experience from the ages of 8 to 18 but then never got to a number four in the world ranking like James Blake people who maybe never cracked the 500 but they went to voluntary for four years or so and then stayed in the game of tennis but by the time they got to 20 tennis as a as a competing tour professional was over but now there are club pros at tennis clubs and our coaches and things like that and I would say about half of them regret it they say man I wish I had a normal I could if I could go back I would have gone to my junior prom instead of going off the tennis academy I wish I had a childhood with a little bit more socialization in it and you know the one guy was saying you know he's this big handsome six foot three tennis guy and he's like man I went to my junior prom and I just didn't even know what to do like I went on a date I didn't even know what to do with girls you know he had had no socialization other than people trying to build him into a great tennis player but you know we're doing this to our kids academically too we live in New York City and the pressure to achieve academic excellence at the expense of everything right they're so focused on the IQ that there's no development of the EQ and then we send them out into the world and expect them to be able to relate to people and understand what real people care about and how to make friends and how to succeed at a business place it's like your Harvard degree may not win you any friends or a great spouse or a boss who likes you but this I think there's a backlash not only in against early single sport specialization and some of the athletic pieces we've talked about but also in the schools because we've we've taken a lot of different looks at school and built billy-oh is very involved in academics in schooling and when we're looking around at different schools some are described as homework factories and that was just an immediate eliminator for us like we are not going to send our kid to a homework Factory we want them to have other experiences and I think on the sports side a number of high-profile athletes are also raising awareness around this Steph Curry wrote a great piece saying that if you want to agree it'd be a great basketball player play more than basketball for as long as you can and McEnroe says that playing soccer helped him with his footwork in tennis and it's the same kind of thing there needs to be more range of experiences and so I think what the academics I agree there needs to be fun and you know some folly that is also a contributor to personal growth the heart of the book is Anton and his struggle to to find his soul really to find his soul in ghosts of Manhattan your debut novel New York Times bestseller it he was a man struggle to save his soul this is a fully grown mature adult who had found himself immersed on in Wall Street and the debauchery of it trying to figure out whether this was a conscious choice and this is how he wanted to live Anton Zeck it we meet him when he's held eat this and so you see this kid mature or or try to do you is that something that you struggle with because you see this theme in there's a little bit of this in the means as well but it's mostly the first and the third novel where you're really touching in on somebody's struggle to really save or find their soul well I think it's something that everyone can relate to I mean even in your interview with JT Vance last night he said the book wasn't about working something out and completing this endeavor of self-discovery it was the beginning of something that we'll be doing for the rest of his life and so there yeah I you know I hope I'm always growing and learning and learning more about myself and that process that I experienced is how I can try to weave that into a fictional experience where I'm exploring a point or a theme and then hopefully readers can connect with that and it's why you know every reader connects with a book differently from another reader or everyone who looks at a painting as a different individual customized feeling because their own experience are part of them that viewing experience of that reading experience they sort of fill in the gaps with their own experience on what's in there another I mean a piece of the book that I think reveals something about you too is his love of reading and this is an outlet for him despite all of the things that are being put on him and you've talked before publicly about how you were painfully shy as a child those are your words and and reading was an outlet for you it was an oasis for you yeah what I was very shy as a kid I think somewhere in this sort of high school range you know started coming out of that but I read all the you know the early books I've read all the Hardy Boys books and I'm a mom room so I'd go down to the basement like plow through all those all those books and have always loved reading and you know that was what I never approached writing as a career choice until much later I never took creative writing classes I just have always loved being around books and reading and sort of hobby to round the writing side of it and tennis too so the tests and ongoing love of your life do I overstate the case a great pleasure I don't want to give myself competition but what is it about tennis that made it so well-suited for this book well one one thing I liked about picking tennis is there's not a lot of fiction that explores the and there tons of books on baseball and other sports there's not that much fiction around tennis David there's David Foster Wallace which Andy and I were talking about earlier Andy who runs this place and not much beyond that and so it was interesting and I knew enough to sort of explore some of the things I wanted to explore with tennis but then it really was you know it's an isolating sport it's a grind you know it's this 11-month season when you're out traveling around and so many the people I talk to as part of the research and then I talked to who are it's being read on the - pro tour a lot James Blake was at the French Open is like everyone on the tour is reading your book right now we're all like devouring this thing and I've had a bunch of tennis journalists who were at the majors email me saying they want to write about the book and they're really interested in how it's how its portraying the tour but it's a grind out there these guys are on the road so they'll say you know this one guy was saying when it was 20 and he's on the Tory to meet a girl and you know Florida and she'd say well can we get together next week he's like let's see next week I'm in Switzerland and then I'm in Australia and then I'm in and it just goes on and on they basically get only December off and there's so much about the tour that I think most people don't know most of us associated with doubles and lemonade and it's a fun social thing but tennis when you're good is one of the least social sports out there and and isolating on the court as well I mean you know in a very unique way it is one of the few sports where you can have no communication with your coach and you don't really talk to your opponent even with boxing you're sort of rubbing four heads and you can you know talk trash with tennis you really you know you sort of the change over maybe you see the the other play little bit you can't talk to coach you're just in this bubble out there for a few hours playing and the whole life is that way and then if you achieve great success you you find yourself in a different kind of bubble and that's what happens to an time where you get surrounded by your entourage entourage that protects you even more from real life real people and it can be potentially very damaging and and as we see in the book it can introduce some nefarious elements into one's life that can be very corruptive right and in a way those are the lucky ones because the other hard thing about tennis is it's not there's not a big financial payoff when you get off the top ten is just a cliff in terms of prize money and someone's done some research about where the breakeven is for your tennis ranking and when you're making enough money just to break even because you still have to pay a coach you pay all your flights and hotel bills to get around to these tournaments a lot of expenses associated with being on the tour that math came out to be you have to be ranked about 55 in the world to be actually breaking even and if you're ranked higher than you're making some money and it's it's different from golf even the the purse money in golf is much higher than tennis I think the break-even in in golf was something like you know in the hundreds but tennis doesn't pay as much you know you get these Tour wins and you get a $10,000 or something the there's a documentary out now called dancer it's about this Ukrainian dancer Sergei pollutant and this is a guy who's been one of the world's top ballet dancers but is just now venturing off into sort of his own dancing not affiliated with any company because he wants to express himself and the way he wants and not necessarily dance exactly the way they want and wants to make some money and do you know that even in the New York City Ballet apparently the top dance only three of the dancers listed in the entire company make more than one hundred ninety thousand dollars a year I mean these the most elite dancers in the world it's just not that kind of sport profession what have you and tennis is the same in a way in that only like only the top top few yep actually earn a real living thanks to that enormous sacrifice that's right it's in so many families pour out so much money from these early ages because all these little satellite tournaments that the 16 year olds are going to yep the family has to travel around and get a hotel and you're paint you're still paying for coaches at that age so it's an enormous expense to pursue this for many years and then lottery odds of getting to be at the point where it's a you know a financial return and and how old once it's over I mean what's the average life span of a tennis career well by me Federer is defying that a little bit he's 35 but you know really a 30 year oldest Nadal is 30 and he's considered old and that these are the great these are the greats you know it's a it's younger for four except doubles players can go on a little longer but for most people it's in the 20s it's unbelievable and and then there are whole professions popping up to help these folks find their second career at age 30 right like head who are trying to figure out not not in a doll but somebody less than Nadal in terms of successes what you do many yeah and that's that's a tough thing because they haven't they don't know much beyond tennis in a way that's why so many go on to be a club pro or code sure or try to get a job the Tennis Channel and be a commentator I think what do you think that this enormous pressure to achieve to succeed is doing to American families right now I think the my own feeling is the way this bled into things is that it comes from a good place I think most parents are wanting the best for their kids and one of the things they want for their kids is to get them into a good college and the mine frame when you and I and and Bill and others in the audience were applying to college back in the 80s was be well-rounded to lots of different things play a couple sports volunteer for a couple organizations be on student government and that's that's a good-looking application now its flipped on its head it's no longer people out rounded the idea is be exceptional in one thing be Juilliard level great at the violin and that's how you get into Yale or Harvard and so then the training starts early you know along the lines of the tiger mom book you know they drill in violin lessons for hours or you know if you're a great lacrosse player you've got a good shot at night league school and so I think that's where it started and it sort of bleeds to earlier in earlier ages and it does sort of pull apart the family unit in some way because you don't we want to spend a lot of time with our kids in the weekends and we rest with us we're trying to resist any weekend activity for the kids because we wanted to be with us it's our time and we want to take trips and you know it's not always high quality time but it's medium quality time and that's good and adds up and if you are an a nine-year-old travel team you know that time is gone you're off doing other things and we're busy driving them around to different things it's not quality time with your child it's it that's no time the child is like little you know quality time is something right it's nothing it's I mean we've talked about this many times I grew up going to the town park and that was fine then I come home and my mom and dad would be there and we'd have dinner together every Saturday and Sunday there was no question but that we'd be spending the weekends together and I think we would have felt it if one of us you know the three of us children was out on the road instead of with us and yet we know so many people who are doing that already with their six and seven-year-olds six and seven are like a way for a month at sports camp at seven years old that can be a great thing for some families sometimes the kid just loves ice hockey we have a number of friends who have kids aren't ice hockey or they love soccer and if and you you know ultimately what we want is the kid to find somethings passionate about or if she's passionate about it so if that's it and that's great and for a lot of families it's really working but for others I disagree brothers who are going along thanks being so sensitive to anybody here who's made that choice but I think there are those who do it because they feel it's like a keeping up with the Joneses thing right not the Jonesy's thing no but it's true because we want our kids to play high school athletics and now the messaging from society is unless you start them on set athletics right now get them on the travel team this minute they won't even make the high school team it's not like we have dreams of sending them off to college on a scholarship it's just you know you want high school athletics to be part of their experience right and yet you know it may not be unless you join this crazy circle I won quite one one story about Tiger mom then I want to ask you about process so Tiger mom you know who that is Amy Chua she's a professor at Yale Law School now she wrote the Battle Hymn of the tiger mother like that I interviewed her recently and I said to her off camera you know one of the criticisms of your book is that it's very focused on how to get your kid in a caught into Harvard but not at all focused on how to raise a happy child and I said I'm sure you've heard that she said yes I've heard that many times and whenever somebody raises that with me I say you're right you're right I didn't I I should have focused more on happiness and inside I'm thinking yeah another one down my kids gonna destroy that kid kid will crush your kid okay so let's so we sort of have the the young Doug Brent Doug round who grew up in Philadelphia and he's a local boy made good but what the audience may not know is that young Doug run despite his love of literature did not go into a literary career to start after you graduated from Duke undergrad and in Georgetown for your MBA you went out and you worked in business and you were an entrepreneur and you were running a company down in Florida we meet we met and then our second child was born and something happened the writing career that was after the first child well yeah we were on maternity with Yardley we made a full time that's true I've got my first publishing deal on on the maternity leave with our our second child so I was frustrated with my my job running the the security company that we had a very this is a whole longer story but we had a very dysfunctional board of directors and half my time was spent navigating the board fights and traveling around a lot and Meg and I were walking in Central Park so this is before the second child we're strong our newborn first child and she was saying gosh you just seem like you're snapping all the time you're short-tempered and unhappy and frustrated I said yes and we were talking about changes I could make and at this time I'd been haa being around with writing a draft of what became the first novel just on the planes and things and I wasn't thinking about this as a career and our conversation moved from maybe switching to a different company or selling this company and doing something else to selling it and doing something entirely different of pursuing the writing and at this time I was I think still making more money than you and so it was a real family decision to do something like this big set but she was very supportive of it and said you know this would be great you love it and and she had read this draft and thought it was good and so I decided to start putting pieces in place to pursue that and so I approached the board and said that I intend to leave I'll stay for up to a year and lead the company through a sale if you want or I'll leave now I want to do the right thing by the company and so they said please stick around through us see all the company which I did and I also found an agent and started working with the agent on drafts of the book and fast forward roughly a year to that maternity got my first publishing deal with Simon & Schuster so that was a great step in the net but I still wasn't sure I always thought I'm not a real writer until I've done three because you know it could have been one of those things where I wrote the novel and then check the box but now I'm gonna go you know try and start another company or join another company but I do love it I love writing I have a number of friends where writers who feel like they've finished that book and they'll never have another idea and they procrastinate they don't want to start the next book they'd rather come up with household chores and paint the house but I'd love going there it's still creative time as time to myself and so I love that chunk of time when I'm in that phase of putting a few pages on the pile every day and and writing on it in a regular way I love doing that so I'm still very happy and and love this career I think it's a testament to how you can change your life at any age in any stage if you get honest with yourself about your level of happiness and where you are and just determine just determine to make the next decision to change your life that's the beginning of doing it what she had done it prior so that was in part inspirational to my own decision I think why you were so supportive of my taking that change as well because you were a hard-working unhappy lawyer who switched to journalism and so part of the conversation we had in Central Park that day included her own experience of following something that she loved and making a change and because we knew that money wasn't important to us it wasn't the driver you know it was each other and connecting with our friends and our family and our children and so it was like if I fail as a TV reporter or you fail as a writer so we've had a failure but we're still we have us okay you're gonna take some of your questions now and find out with you what you want to know about Doug okay given your favorable acknowledgement to James Blake and John Isner why do you suggest all other pro tennis players are using drugs hmm this is another piece of the novel that's caused controversy yeah this has so this was an interesting thing when when people first read the novel and they gave feedback and a Wintour read the novel and she wrote me this very glowing nice email which I loved it didn't talk about steroids once but there was a reporter for The Times who want to do a feature on it and off the book page cover coverage of a novel is great that's that's the best you can get especially in The Times and so he said of course this is great but the angle he wanted to talk about was the drugs which was a small but an important piece in the book and then of course that consumed all media that came thereafter that's that's the piece they wanted to talk about and we know steroids are in the sport there have been positive tests or thin suspensions there's a lot of buzz on the tour among players you know rumor mongering type stuff and then there's been a lot of reporting from credible sources talking about steroids on the tour and whether players can be ahead of the test like in the way that Lance Armstrong was so Nadal says release release all my tests but we know though that that kind of defense is meaningless because that was Lance Armstrong's defense for many years he would say on the most tested athlete on the planet and he was just ahead of a test and I did a lot of research for this book I won't say who but people in positions to know intimately many have said to me off the record that it's all over the tour and I think you know for me to omit that in the novel would be would be wrong we know it's in there we and and in a novel that's talking about the sacrifice is required to play at an elite level that has to be part of the discussion of the book and so what I included in there was really no more than well then if you if you dig a little bit you'll find reporting and and discussion of this so it had to be in there Doug did you find the transition difficult in moving from the corporate world to becoming a full-time author what do you miss most and what do you like most now it was a difficult transition for me and I thought a lot about this when I was when I was running the company I also joined this group called YPO it's young presidents organization and had this element to YPO called forum where you meet with CEOs of other companies usually 8 to 10 people get together once a month for a few hours and they discuss everything from personal issues to business issues work-life balance and it becomes this real intense close camaraderie and I love that and I love meeting with my executive team and that you know there was a time when I really loved all that and I was had so much human engagement throughout the day meeting with employees and customers and things like that and so when I started writing that all went to zero and I had not come up in writing so I didn't have a lot of friends and colleagues who were going through these similar things and the challenges of writing in that kind of a life and so I tried to replicate the YPO forum and it took a few years to meet enough writers to do this kind of thing but then I you know I met a few and through them one meet a few and I was just uncommon ly I think because most writers that I've met don't do this and I was I was always interested to meet more and then bring us together and then I had this idea to start a book club for writers and so I reached them out and they all said and some of them been writing since the 70s they had been doing this they said this is such a great idea I love this and it was such a novel idea is that still secret no it's a Nelson DeMille is a has become a great friend and a mentor to me so he's in it Lee Child and Harlan Coben and immortals I know right there's like 10 of us who get together at our apartment every other month and we pick a book and and read the book and then we start out you know with cocktails and we talk about the writing life for a while what people are struggling with with agents and publicity and Amazon and stuff like that and it's great for me because Nelson's been a big star since the 70s and he's seen this in we evolved so much and I'm only in it for five or six years and and all these guys have different you know opinions and and perspectives on it so it's been great for me but for they're all you know it's become a lovely time for all of us and so I sort of modeled it in a way off of the forum it's very sweet our three little kids are out there in their pyjamas serving the hors d'oeuvres yeah that's great but that's so anyway that that was that helped me feel fill a void that I was missing from my you know professional time before this career and the other piece of it was what do you like the most about well I well that at time when I'm writing I love that time I love reading through you know the work product at the end and we write the writings in the morning the writings in the morning usually we do drop where our kids go to different schools so it's all hands on deck in the morning meg will go one way I'll go the other want the kids by 9 o'clock the kids are all in school and I'll usually write from 9 to 12 Monday to Friday and and then in the afternoons I'll do editing or research or reading so but yeah when you when you write when you finish a page and Bill I know you're already experiencing this when you've written a paragraph it just feels right like man I captured that exactly and I captured in a way that no one else has and I think that's gonna like people are gonna stop at the end of that paragraph and thing well done on that one you know and you hope you can deliver something like that what what I hope to do is at the end of every page of you know a writer a reader gets something out of that page it's worthwhile how is the world of professional tennis responded to your novel well the world is pretty broad there it's specifically the ITF knee OTP were not happy they sent some letters in part because the New York Times guy was digging around that got everybody a little amped up and The Times is involved and they want to talk about performance-enhancing drugs so that that got a big reaction and some letters and so I met with Macmillan legal and we're fights this is a novel it's a fictional account it's characters in fiction they tried to scare him into not publishing it that he didn't back down yeah and I was I was very happy with my lawyers they said will defend vigorously so we were in good shape on that but that's one little tiny slice of the world most of the world has been really supportive from Anna Wintour who's just a big fan of it to James Blake who loved the book he said he read it on the flight over to Paris to cover the French Open tennis coaches to tennis coaches to former tennis players like that there's the one club pro in Westchester New York who went to voluntary and he said I'm obsessed with it I've already read it twice I'm giving it to everybody and he said every club pro up here needs to you know read and recommend this book so he's been my best salesman to the tennis journalists who have read it a number have reached out to me people who work for the Tennis Channel or people who write for the different tennis magazines have read it and loved it I think as a recovering lawyer and journalist when I heard the letters from the you know whatever they're called to tennis officials my first instinct was methinks thou doth protest too much I mean it's if there's nothing there if there's no problem in tennis why are they so agitated about what was written in a novel in the novel something said by a fictional character I submit that to you ladies and gentlemen of the jury did you ever want to become a professional tennis player no more than I wanted to become a professional writer this one worked out but you can do it with oh you know I loved it was this is one of the things that my dad and I in particular loved to do we would watch you know in the era of the Borg and McEnroe on Connors matches we would watch those and you know he could he could really sort of analyze the games and that was our thing you know it's like that baseball thing like my dad and I could never talk but we could watch baseball it wasn't like that because we could also talk but tennis was what we would watch the most and I loved watching the game and loved playing it with him and you know idolized those guys in the way that kids idolized Jeter now but I never really thought about approaching tennis as a career I'd never picked it as a sport that I played even in high school but always loved it and now you do that with with our son eventually all of them but our oldest son is seven so he's kind of at the age now I haven't told you this story but Doug was playing a tennis match yesterday morning and so I brought the three kids down to go watch a little bit and yeah it's our seven year old who's been watching some tennis with Doug and I don't play tennis I don't know anything about tennis you know it's a lovely game but I don't know how to play it I really don't even understand the rules as will become clear in a minute and so Yates watching you play he said daddy are you winning and you said well we won the first set and it's whatever it is in the second set and Yates looked at me and I'm trying to think of something I try to add some back to getting my daughter say I'm like how many sets in a match and he was like three and I was like right all I could think was aren't there different rules when it's men versus women and the professionals like here at Club Tennis it is three but I don't I've already misinformed him does your novel have any similarities to the life of Andre Agassi some some IRA that was one of the biographies I read and what I found in doing my research is that what's remarkable about Agassi's story is that it's so unremarkable it's so common on the tour when you look at crazy parents Mary Pierce Steffi Graf Agassi I mean the list goes on they all have not all but many many have a domineering father or a strong and domineering mother and you know while Agassi went to voluntary so have you know tens of thousands of players going down to one of these tennis academies and in talking to people they all have a story in and around like this I mean that the the club pro in Westchester was like you have written my life story here this is a guy whose top ranking was probably 500 in the world Wow but it's it's so it's not Agassi it's not it's just it's a pretty accurate and credible fictional account of what life can be like on the vomitorium okay because this is 2017 America there's a trump question in here and I am gonna read it to you because this actually involves some crossover unbeknownst to whoever wrote this question between your life and your tennis and our president the question is how did you and your family deal with Trump's outrageous behavior toward your wife well you know we hunkered we have a strong connection to begin with and we have a strong you know when that when the chips are down were were together more than ever and they're for each other more than ever and so in that way we were you know even more of a team than we needed to be here than we might otherwise have been I mean it was just instinctive and automatic how we kind of came together as a unit and there was what this viewed the yeah so this one it was an incident yeah we were playing tennis at the same place and there's this tournament every summer and my partner and I it's a doubles thing and he and I played the same tournament every year for like 30 years now and we got to the finals and it was a tough match it was its best of three sets we lost in a tiebreaker and the third set so we lost the match and and I was you know mad and and the match was in August of 15 August of 15 so things were the debate had already happened but Trump was not yet the the nominee of the Republican Party so the match was over people are filling out a lot of family and you know other people it's a it's at a club it's a private club so most people are sort of off the court by this time and I had I have I still may know you had I had left something court so you went on to get something get my waiting for you I was waiting for you to come off okay and so the one of the players from the other team at that time pointed right at Meg's chest and said Trump 2016 and I didn't see that but she came over and she goes that guy's really rude and I said what happened and she tells me and I went bananas and so and I go story back on the court and grab the guy and if you ever talked to my wife that way again and you know all sorts of threats and he says oh I did I always said I I was pointing to my wife I wasn't pointing to her yeah and I was you know of course that wasn't true and I knew that wasn't true so he's very that's I didn't love the incident but I loved your reaction okay so anyway we that turned into a whole like disciplinary meeting you know being at the club the tennis professionals yeah so but otherwise we didn't deal with too much you know personal stuff you know we were there are lots of threats and things like that obviously but not many reached our front door really but we we had to take lots of precautions and things like that so it was a weird year so just a note on that because I this story in my book and one of the heroines of the aftermath of the Trump nonsense was my mother-in-law Jackie Brown who is the most dear lovely sincere person and she was with us at the beach we were at the beach for a lot of August after that presidential debate when Trump was you know pretty relentless and she was driving home from the beach one night and she pulled over and said I just wanted to tell you I pulled over at the hawawa because I really want to have a conversation with you about how you are and to tell you that no one is listening to what he's saying about you or believing what he is saying about you and the world can see who you truly are and just you know hearing something like that from someone like her meant so much I can still get emotional about it but it explains a lot about Doug and how he wound up - all right last question what the audience may not know is that you already have your fourth novel written and are you willing to reveal anything about it it's set in a wah wah [Laughter] this I the main character is a writer of literary fiction and his best friend is a writer of commercial fiction and the funny thing is I started this as my third novel and then I put it to the side because I hadn't quite figured out what I was gonna do with it and then I started trophy sandwich has now become the third novel so this will be the fourth but the early drafts were really was the third and since that time I've met so many other writers that are both literary and commercial that it's informing the book but I might have to be a little careful too about how I you know everyone thinks if I didn't ickle for everyone who thought they were a character one of my novels the book club made disband that's right I could exactly could end things but it it talks about some of the differences and that you know how different literary and commercial writers view themselves and how the world views them and the tensions between them you know every commercial writer would like some more literary acclaim and every literary writer would like to have one-tenth of the sales of Stephen King you know it there are people who win Pulitzer is in National Book Awards and you wouldn't believe how little their sales are and how little money they make for these books so it just has one example but it's oh it explores things like that and it starts out as more of a literary book but then become the OH murder happens it becomes more of a commercial book in the end well I'll say this it says since our talk has in some ways been a you know the outline is how awesome the Brunt's are philadelphia brats despite the encouragement your family provided to you to achieve and the fact that you did you and your brothers and your sister and your mom Manley's no longer with us have always stayed so humbled and just in getting ready for this event another one we did down in Washington I actually went to your reviews - I pulled them all up you know the reviews that have been done of trophy Sun and I found a ton of awesome reviews that he never said to me now I would have had those over to him in a New York I'm gonna what they said that's not true it is true and honest he's not even forwarding them anymore and they're awesome Sports Illustrated and vogue and the AP and time and on and on the list goes of the lovely lovely reviews of trophy Sun honey so congratulations and proud of you and thank you all for being here [Applause]