DB 00:03 

“And when the tennis was over, I was empty. I had no crutch, nothing to make me feel special. The world was gray and dull. When she offered me the needle from the very first shot, I was hooked. It just seemed to fill the hole, he said, putting his fist over his chest, Right here. ” from The Tennis Partner

DH 00:25 

Welcome to Apollo On Call, the podcast of MedHum.org. I’m your host. Dr. David Hsu, hope you enjoy the show. 

DH 00:38 

All right. We are back for our monthly Apollo On Call episode, and this is a special episode of Apollo On Call. I am joined here today by my co-host, Mr. Dave Bryant. Dave and I do a regular podcast called the Sports Literati podcast. If you haven’t heard of this, what we do on the Sports Literati is we break down a sports book every month. Actually, it’s like every two months, right? But we’re trying to bring the love of reading back for sports fans. And I thought, You know what, we should do a collaboration episode where we bring Sports Lit and MedHum together, because these are my two pet projects right now. So you know how when you go to the store and they have a designer, and he’s merging with Nike, and they put the big X sign between them, right? This is Sports Lit X Apollo On Call. 

DB 01:34 

Yeah, this is very exciting. I’m so happy to be here and part of this crossover episode, this is exciting, Dave, and I can’t wait to dig into the book that we’ve read this month. 

DH 01:44 

Right, and so the quote that Dave read is from The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese, which is a seminal work of medical humanities. It is, you know, on a lot of reading lists for medical trainees, and it’s actually a great sports book. I mean, the title kind of gives it away. It’s a great tennis book also. So checks off all the boxes. I actually read this book maybe 15 plus years ago when I was training as a doctor, and I kind of forgot about it. But recently, when I got in touch with MedHum and we were thinking about what would be a good thing to read, this book popped out. It was sitting on one of the tables at my mom’s house, and I flipped through it. I’m like, I kind of really want to read this again, so I made Dave read it. So we’re ready to go and talk about The Tennis Partner by Abraham Verghese. 

DB 02:36 

Absolutely. And Dave, I personally want to thank you for bringing this book into my life. That’s what I think about this book.  

DH 02:44 

Wow, he’s never thanked me for anything before. 

DB 02:47 

First time for everything. I’m not as well-read as you are you. I mean, you’ve probably read 1000s of books over the course of your life. I mean, for me, it would probably be in the hundreds at most, but I have to say, probably about 80 to 90% of the way through this book, I was sort of getting through the book, and I sort of talked to my wife about it, and I just told her, I think this might be the best book that I’ve ever read in my life. I’ve read some classics, right? You read some of the classics from high school. I’ve read Shakespeare, I’ve read Catcher in the Rye, I’ve read all these classic books, but none of them hit me the way this one hit me. And I know that probably sounds like high praise, and an exaggeration, but I don’t know, in my current mindset, this is the best book that I’ve read in a long time.  

DH 03:47 

Well, normally we don’t tell the audience if we really liked the book or not. We always leave it to the end. We have this thing on Sports Lit where we kind of decide whether this book will belong in the pantheon of great sports books. But I feel like you already cast your vote and it’s over, like this book is already going to be on the list.  

DB 04:04 

Are we still doing a pantheon even though this is a crossover episode? I feel like it’s not a pure sports book, so it doesn’t qualify in that sense.  

DH 04:13 

We will see, we will see. We’ll leave that discussion till the end. All right, I’m going to give everyone the two minute drill of what this book is about. So Abraham Verghese is a well-known physician, medical educator and writer. He, I believe, is currently teaching at Stanford University, and because of his writings, he’s a well-known name in the world of medical humanities. The Tennis Partner is one of his earlier books. It was written in the early 1990s and describes a period of time when he had moved to Texas. Specifically, he’s living in El Paso at the time, and he’s an internal medicine physician. He’s a specialist in infectious diseases. He had actually been working with a lot of AIDS patients in the 1980s when AIDS was becoming a thing. So this actually is part of this story too. 

While he’s in El Paso, he befriends a medical student named David Smith. The only reason he befriends David Smith at the beginning is because he hears in the medical hospital grapevine that David is a former tennis professional. And since Verghese is a tennis nut, and I can relate to that being a tennis nut myself, you know, he makes a point to befriend this guy and say, Let’s go hit some tennis balls. And he’s a very good recreational hack tennis player, and so the book talks about him and David getting to know each other on the tennis court, and also him teaching David on the wards and showing him the ropes of the hospital. David, at the time, I think he’s a third- or fourth-year medical student at the beginning of the story. 

The backdrop of this is that his personal life, Abraham’s personal life, is starting to fall apart. He’s still living with his wife at the beginning of the story, but there are cracks in their marriage, and they’re kind of working towards gradually separating as the story goes. So in some ways, David is filling this gap that he needs for companionship while he’s in this new town. 

Trouble is, as the story goes, we’ve kind of discovered that David has his own demons. He’s been in medical school for several years. He’s been in and out and in and out because of a history of substance abuse problems, and so these problems start to escalate as the story goes. And Abraham finds himself getting sucked into David’s orbit, befriending David, getting to know David’s girlfriend. And then when things start to unravel in David’s life. It kind of takes Abraham with him and the whole thing starts to spiral out of control. I won’t give away the actual ending, because I think people do need to read this, but it is a gut-wrenching finish, and basically is the story of these couple years. It’s a memoir of Abraham’s life, of this time period when his marriage was falling apart and he befriended David and this very, very complex relationship that teaches him and us something about medicine, something about life, something about death, something about the value of friendship and, most importantly, the value of tennis. 

DB 07:23 

Yes, indeed, tennis is does feel like the connective tissue that binds the story together. It’s almost like a character in itself. What struck me from your intro there is that although this is one story in one book, it’s weaving many stories together and this is an incredibly layered book. One thing, you have the story of these two men pursuing their medical careers at different points in their career, right? You have a story of addiction, you have the story of family dynamics, what happens to a family amid a divorce. You know, at its core, this is kind of a bromance, right? You have these two guys who really have not many other people in their lives besides each other, and the tennis is what brought them together. And they’re basically pals, they’re basically best friends, essentially, by the end of the book. This is also a period piece in a way, right? This is set in the late 80s, early 90s. It’s a different time in North America, it’s in the time of the AIDS epidemic. Dr. Verghese is an infectious diseases specialist, so he’s sort of right at the forefront. He’s seeing this happen, he’s seeing the AIDS epidemic happen right before his eyes. And this is a particular period of time in America. It’s also the story of El Paso, a border town. One thing that I love is when an author is able to paint a very vivid picture of a place that I don’t know anything about. And I don’t know much about El Paso. I’ve never been to El Paso, but what’s notable about it is that it straddles the border between the United States and Mexico, and that’s what makes it an interesting place. It makes it a unique place where you have the American influence and you have the Mexican influence. It has an interesting geography and topography that he goes into. It took me to that place. His writing was so vivid that it took me to that place in time. It is such an incredibly layered story. 

DH 10:02 

Absolutely. It’s so layered, we probably haven’t even described every layer. There’s still a few other layers, I think, that you didn’t touch on.  

DB 10:12 

Yeah, here’s another one. It’s basically a love letter to tennis. It’s a lifelong passion of the authors, and a lifelong passion of his tennis partner as well. And both of these passions sort of collide together and it makes the book what it is.  

DH 10:35 

Yeah, I read this book about 15 years ago, and I don’t think it registered on me. I didn’t appreciate it that much. It was this time reading it, the second go around, that I was like, You’re right. This book, it’s not even just that it covers these topics and these themes, it’s just so well-paced, and the language is so right all the time, right? It’s just such a really smooth read. And then in the final third, it just ratchets up the tension and it turns into The Wire, actually. I mean, people who listen to us normally know that we love The Wire. And so it takes you to a really dark place at the end, but it is a great story.  

DB 11:23 

Yeah, absolutely. And he’s such a talented writer. I’m so impressed by Dr. Verghese. First, I’m impressed by his technical acumen in medicine. I don’t know, all these little vignettes that he sort of described, like how he sort of looks at patients. It’s very interesting, as you sort of get into his mind, right? But he’s such a beautiful writer. The story is littered with just these beautiful anecdotes and vignettes. I mean, it’s clear he has a lot to say. There’s all these metaphors throughout the book. I mean, I would love to give an example, I can’t think of one right now.  

DH 12:03 

Well, you will have a chance in the final quote. You get to read one more quote. 

DB 12:09 

I can find one. I can uncover one. But it’s just there’s these beautifully done metaphors throughout the book linking often medical terms with his actual life.  

DH 12:22 

Right, or even linking El Paso, some of the things that are particular to the community, like the indigenous community around that part of the desert with what’s actually happening in the hospital, or what’s happening with the illness. There’s so much to talk about and we don’t have all day. Let’s try to cover a few things that we want to hit. Give me something that you want to talk about, about this book. 

DB 12:50 

So, I mean, since it’s called The Tennis Partner, I feel like we should talk about the tennis a little bit and but I’m not thinking about tennis as a sport, I’m thinking more about tennis as a conduit and as a ritual. And I think the book makes the case that there’s a big value in having rituals in your life. That it becomes clear to me over the course of the book, that it becomes a ritual for both these guys, it’s just a part of their week. If they go a couple weeks without it, they feel a little bit off. And I think that’s what rituals are, right? You’re so used to doing it, it becomes part of your life. And when you’re not doing it, something about your life feels off.  

DH 13:45 

I think it’s more than just a ritual. I think it’s almost like a haven from life for both of them. Because both of them, when we meet them, are struggling. David is struggling with his personal issues, and we don’t know that yet, right? We think he’s just a busy medical student. Abraham on the surface, is a dude with, you know, married, two kids, doctor, all the students look up to him. So they’re both putting on this veneer that, No, life is great. But actually they’re both cracking underneath slowly. And so the tennis is a thing that gives them some salvation for an hour each time they play. At the beginning, it’s really great, the tennis brings them together. When you play tennis, it’s like you’re imagining that you’re – Verghese does this all the time. He imagined that he’s John McEnroe. He imagines he’s Björn Borg. And so it’s this release. But then, as they play longer, you start to see the real-world things seep into the tennis. Sometimes they get angry at each other, they’re not always there for each other. At some points, David starts to get into some nasty rows with his girlfriend, and he doesn’t show up for tennis, and Abraham’s like, Why is he not here, right? Is she more important than me? There’s all sorts of these little mental games that they’re doing to each other around the tennis. So it’s not even that straightforward that, Okay, we just meet up every time, play, have a good time. It becomes layered with all the typical insecurities and anxieties that human beings have that I guess occur in all friendships, but especially occur in relationships, real deep relationships with people, like your girlfriend doesn’t call you right away, it makes you edgy. This type of stuff starts to happen to the characters in the story. So it is a conduit to bring these two people together, because without tennis, they wouldn’t have been brought together. But it also shows how complex human interaction can be, over something as seemingly straightforward as, Hey, meet me after your shift, let’s go hit some tennis balls. 

DB 15:58 

Those are some great points, actually. It also struck me, now that I was listening to talk in that because they’re both going through such problems in their own lives, the tennis is like a therapy. It’s like a therapy session for them as well, almost like an unspoken therapy session where you just whack a few balls, you express yourself. It’s a way to express yourself non-verbally, doing something that you love. 

DH 16:28 

Right, this is probably the only sports book we’ve read that talks about sport in this way, right? So sometimes we read sports books, and a lot of them talk about professional sports, which ultimately are sort of a silly endeavor, right? People are getting paid to play child’s games and then we as fans are watching and with bated breath to all the things that they do, and trying to feel amazement all the time. But this book is actually talking about sports for real. Regular people bringing their regular lives, and how your lives can be enhanced and changed by sport, which is a bit of a different thing, and I think it’s a cool way to think about it, because I’ve always felt this way about sports.  

DB 17:12 

Yeah, I mean, it doesn’t have to be played at a professional level to have value, right? That’s what we’re seeing here. You don’t have to be the world’s greatest tennis player, to play tennis and enjoy tennis. You can play it for fun. That’s what sports should be, actually, it should be a fun endeavor. Shouldn’t be a professional high-stress endeavor. If you want to shoot some hoops, go shoot some hoops. If you want to put on some skates and skate around and play some shinny, go do that. 

DH 17:42 

Now, I want to ask you a question. So you’re not in medicine, but you’re a dentist. Actually, I didn’t tell people this in the onset. So if you haven’t heard Dave talk before, he’s a dentist. Looking at Abraham’s relationship with David, there is some boundary issues occurring here. He is supposed to be David’s teacher and in medicine, and probably in dentistry, we’re always taught to try to keep a nice boundary between you and your patient, right? You don’t want to be going out to play tennis with your patient or go out for drinks with your patient, because that can get kind of weird. You also want to keep a boundary as an educator. You don’t want to take your students out for coffee too many times. Maybe if you become really close friends, you’re going to be less impartial when you have to grade them or evaluate them or make some tough choices. Abraham, because his love for tennis, throws all this out the window. He’s like, I gotta hit with a pro, and that’s more important than all that stuff. That’s how this starts. Do you feel like he goes way over the line of boundaries, or is what he does in this story still acceptable to you? 

DB 19:01 

That’s something I hadn’t considered, and this is a really good point. It does feel like they need each other at some level, beyond just your typical mentor-mentee relationship. It starts off that way. That’s what they are, that’s literally what they are. They’re not friends. David is a student, and Abraham is his teacher. And, yeah, within that relationship, there should be boundaries, but this relationship evolves, and it clearly evolves over time, to the point where they become, as I said earlier, best friends. And once you get to that point, it’s hard to go back. It’s hard to put the toothpaste back in the tube at that point, right? To answer your question, yeah, I think he is overstepping. If you’re really looking from the viewpoint that he’s overseeing multiple students, with one of his students, specifically, he’s spending hours every week hitting a tennis ball with him, and going out for coffee, having meals together, knowing about each other’s personal lives, he’s been into his home, they’ve been to each other’s homes. 

DH 20:23 

Right, if you describe it in a certain way, it almost sounds a little creepy.  

DB 20:26 

It’s dicey, it’s very dicey. If I was one of these other students who’s not getting this preferential treatment, I’d feel a bit put off by it. But you know, this relationship was allowed to fester, and it was allowed to continue, and then it became something else. 

DH 20:45 

Well, maybe not even fester. Flourish, for a while. 

DB 20:48 

Flourish, exactly, and it became something else. So it’s kind of like once it becomes that other thing, at that point, it doesn’t seem that questionable anymore. 

DH 20:58 

But what happens later in the story, if you remember, is when David gets back into trouble with the drugs, and Abraham finds out. His duty should be to go to the school and say, All right, our student, I found out he’s on drugs again. We need to do something about it. But actually, what does he do? He tells David, Look, they’re coming to do a test. Get out of here and sober up before your test and clean your system before you get tested. He’s actually trying to help his buddy out, right? And so it shows just how far he has gone in terms of over the boundary at that point. But what I will say to your point too, is that the fact that Abraham, at the end of this, is willing to write this story down and share it with everybody, I don’t know if it absolves him of it, but clearly he must have understood everything that was happening. I mean, if you wrote this down and published it, it’s possible that the board of directors in your university or something will be like, Okay, you need to be a slap on the wrist for inappropriate behavior with students, or at least get a warning or something for future, right? He was actually very honest about everything that happened, and I thought that was the really interesting thing about this. Because I was like, You know what, if I’m going to write a memoir, I probably would leave out a lot of this stuff. So he was pretty brutally honest about it, and I do respect him for it. And it kind of shows, I think he knows he’s over the line. He definitely says words to that effect in the later part of the story.  

DB 22:38 

For sure. I mean, it’s a classic moral dilemma, right? Where do your loyalties lie? Is it with your friend or is it with the system that you work for that provides your salary?  

DH 22:51 

I was just asking my wife this question. It was on an unrelated topic. Just last night, I was like, You know when you apply to dental school or medical school, they’ll give you that scenario, right? During the interview, they’ll say, You know, you and your buddy have been working together for years, but you notice that he’s showing up for his shifts drunk. Do you report him to the hospital admin or do you sit down and talk to him? What’s the correct choice, right? And this exact scenario basically pops up in this book, and Abraham makes his choice and has to live with it.  

DB 23:22 

And I think it all depends on, I mean, to answer the question is, how good of a friend are you? Or how good of a friend is that person to you? 

DH 23:31 

Well, that’s the real answer.  

DB 23:33 

What’s the size of the transgression, right? 

DH 23:35 

The official answer is, you salute and report all the news back up to your superior. But the real-world answer is quite a bit more nuanced.  

DB 23:42 

It’s not realistic to, I don’t know, when there’s people involved in relationships, that always gets skewed, and it becomes a gray area. 

DH 23:55 

Right, so the alternative is for Abraham, or anyone in his shoes, to say, I’m never going to befriend my students. I’m going to keep a stone wall barrier. And I’ll admit, I teach medical students, and I’ve actually played tennis with them because of this book. I’ve gone to shoot hoops with them because it’s a nice way to get to know people. But you do become aware that there is this line, and if you go over the line, it could become uncomfortable.  

DB 24:23 

Yeah, that’s true. I just remember my second or third year out of dental school, I was an associate at a practice where the owner of the practice noticed I was getting very friendly with the staff in terms of, like, we were hanging out. And he pulled me aside, and he said, If you want to become the boss one day, you can’t be friends. You can be friendly, but you can’t be friends. That’s just the reality of it, right? And I always remember him, you know, telling that to me and I sort of took it to heart at some level.  

DH 25:00 

Is it true? You’re a boss now, do you feel that way then? 

DB 25:05 

I don’t feel like I’m friends with the staff. I’m friendly with the staff, you know, to have a positive work environment, right? But, no, yeah, I wouldn’t say I’m friends with them.  

DH 25:20 

I guess what he means is if you decide at some point you need to change the staff, you need to fire somebody or do something for the sake of the business, it’s much harder to do that once you’ve entered the true friendship zone. 

DB 25:34 

Yeah, absolutely. Your decision-making becomes skewed, and if you want to let go of someone, it becomes much harder and if you want to talk to someone about changing their habits, sometimes it becomes much harder. It does sort of color the relationship.  

DH 25:51 

But it does seem to be looking at it purely from the vantage point of pragmatism, for the sake of the financial health of the business and the most efficient decision-making possible, not having friends is the way to go. But that seems to be somewhat empty, in a way, like look at our book here. What happens if Abraham does this and says, Okay, there’s a tennis player, but I’m gonna resist the urge to go for a hit, and he just won’t befriend him, right? So this never happens. Are we, as a world, better off without that happening, or are we better off with the way it actually happened?  

DB 26:28 

I mean, I would say we’re better off with the way it happened. And I would go even further. I would say that if they never found each other, I’d be worried about both of them. I mean, with David Smith, the former pro, I mean, that’s self-inherent in the book, right? It’s obvious in the book. But I think with Abraham, with Dr. Verghese, he went through a lot of trials and tribulations. I’d be worried about his mental health if he didn’t have this tennis in his life, right? Because it felt like he was veering down not a great path. He was living in his own apartment away from his family, with basically a cardboard box as his table, with no furniture. I mean, it has all the hallmarks of someone who’s undergoing a depression.  

DH 27:21 

Right, at least a major midlife crisis.  

DB 27:23 

Yeah, absolutely. And he sort of glazes over it in his book, because it’s not really the main topic of his book, but I felt like if he didn’t have the tennis and he didn’t have David Smith in his life, he could have veered down a very dark path.  

DH 27:37 

It’s possible. I didn’t feel that at the time I read it, but maybe that’s because we’re hearing it from his learned writing voice, right? He sounds like a very put-together guy. And even as he described living with the cardboard box, he described it in such a beautiful language that I was like, Well, this guy is still okay. I never felt that he was that close to falling apart, really. Except that when you take a step back and think about it, yeah, he’s living in this less than ideal living situation, and he’s hanging out with a med student every other day, he has no other friends, he has no other family around. Yeah, he’s pretty unbalanced at this point. So I think you’re right. And then, moreover, the fact that they went through this experience and then have this story to tell, like, it is a beautiful story. Sometimes people are like, Why do stories exist? Why do we need novels? This book is so good that it’s kind of like, this is why this story needs to exist.  

DB 28:40 

Yeah, absolutely. And the fact that it’s based on a true story, actually is a true story, only adds to it. I have a question for you, just to change topics for a bit here. The main sort of crux, the main shadow that sort of hangs over the book is a story of addiction, right? And not just any addiction, a drug addiction, an injectable drug addiction that really, it leaves one of the characters very much in a bad place. And part of the topic of the book is that there’s other medical professionals who go through this addiction. There’s an addiction center for doctors. 

DH 29:34 

They fly David to one of these centers. 

DB 29:35 

Yeah, and it made me think, Okay, they’re making it sound like this is not uncommon, right? A lot of medical careers are very stressful, and it can lead to this kind of thing. I don’t have much exposure to this. I’m wondering what your exposure to this is. Have you noticed this? Have you ever encountered this in your career?  

DH 30:00 

Very limited, also. I’ve never seen it firsthand, but I think this book is kind of old, right? This book comes from the early 90s. I imagine that when this book came out, this would have been something rather shocking to read about. I didn’t feel shocked by it. I mean, I’m re-reading it now, but even when I read it years ago, I wasn’t shocked by it, even though I haven’t seen these things happen. I guess it comes up in the media in other forms of discourse about doctors, like medical television dramas, it often happens. I think we kind of know this idea that doctors can also do bad things. Maybe in 1990 that was kind of really new to be talking openly about it. But I think now it’s not a surprise. 

DB 30:52 

I’ve always felt like most medical professionals, most doctors, are pretty put-together mentally to be able to get through undergrad and to get through a degree in medicine. It’s hard to do, right? It takes a tremendous amount of willpower and discipline that usually these people are more insulated from this kind of thing than other people, but this book paints a different picture. One thing I actually do remember from the first week of dental school, a lot of it was just orientation, and there was this dentist, or former dentist, who gave a talk, and basically he tells his story about how he became addicted to drugs after becoming a dentist, and it was a pretty heart-wrenching story. He was still a fairly young guy. I don’t remember if he continued to work as a dentist, but what I remember the most was his voice, and his voice sounded off. He sounded like someone who had been badly damaged by drugs. That’s what it sounded like to me, and it kind of scared me a little bit. Maybe that was the intent of the of the talk, but I think part of it was just to give us the idea that, okay, there are resources to help you with these kind of issues. But this was the very first week of dental school where we were exposed to this. We never talked about this ever again after that. Well, it was an interesting introduction to dentistry.  

DH 32:30 

I feel like there’s always that joke, right, like dentists have a suicide rate that is higher than, I don’t even know if that’s true. 

DB 32:38 

It’s not. 

DH 32:40 

But between dentists and doctors, I mean, you alluded to it. It’s a very high-stress training, and the job can eat up your whole life. I feel like this book, as we talk about addiction, I’ll admit that even my medical training, I didn’t really understand a lot about addiction. If you pulled me aside two years ago, three years ago, and said, Well, why do people become addicted to fentanyl or to opioids? I would have probably said something like, Well, they took it, they took it multiple times, and after a while, biochemically, their body just decided, chemically, it needs this drug, and then the patient, or the person can’t stop using it right? And that the use of the drugs somehow chemically rewires them, and now they need it all the time. That was my very primitive understanding of addiction, and it was only in the last couple years that I started seeing all these people talking about how actually most addicts have some underlying trauma, right? There’s some void in their life, something in their childhood, something has happened, and they’re disconnected from people, and now the addiction is a thing that springs up to fill this void, and it’s not a good thing. It fills it temporarily, but they need to fill it again and again, and then you need more hits then. I had never even heard about this. I went to medical school, I did residency, I worked for many years, and I don’t work in the field of addictions, so I guess I’m not seeing this all the time. But then actually understanding that, which is our new way of understanding addiction, and then going back and reading the tennis partner, I was like, Okay, this kind of makes sense. Abraham doesn’t write this explicitly, but he does talk a little bit about David’s complicated past, or what little he knows about it. I think there’s a part in the book where I think it’s David’s mother passes away, and they actually send them back for the funeral, and it turns into a disaster. He comes back from this even worse than before because it brought back all this pain from his previous family life. So I feel like our understanding of it as a society is starting to change, but probably we don’t talk about it enough. These days when we see it on the news, it’s like, Well, the reason people are getting addicted is because the drugs are being allowed into the country, and we need to close the borders and stop the Chinese and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but what actually is happening is there’s some broken down people, emotionally, mentally and that we’re not dealing with that, we’re trying to cut this thing off at the border, right? And I think this book is really good at painting David as a really complicated person. It doesn’t judge him as being good or bad. He’s just a guy with a really complicated past. He’s a great tennis player, he’s super attractive, apparently, there’s women falling all over him, and because of that, he can be a jerk to the ladies, but he can also be very childlike and innocent at times. He’s a very complicated character. I think the book did a really good job of painting the picture of addiction and making it much more nuanced than what we’re used to seeing.  

DB 35:56 

Absolutely, one thing the book did not explore, which is a little bit of a void in the book, as I see it is, they weren’t able to explore his backstory. So you talk about this trauma, these holes in your life. We don’t know what those holes are, it hints at it a little bit, definitely, some stuff happened, we don’t know what, but it’s clear he does not have a great relationship with his parents. They’re halfway across the world in Australia. He’s about as far away from them as you can get, really.  

DH 36:35 

I mean, it’s by design, I guess. Most of the time, we don’t know what the real cause of it is, and since the story is written from Abraham’s point of view, they never get to that point where David can share this. He would have needed to get better from the addiction, and maybe years down the road, share, and that’s not happening in this story.  

DB 36:54 

Yeah, and maybe he’s not even aware of it himself, right? There’s something that’s going on. He knows that he didn’t have a great childhood, he knows there were some traumas, he’s still trying to process it, as many people tend to do. They’re processing it throughout their life, right?  

DH 37:11 

I think that’s a really interesting thing to think about. But why don’t we flip it the other way and say, Well, what about Abraham? His life is kind of messed up at the, well, throughout the story. Why is his life messed up? And he is actually Mr. Introspection, he’s given us everything he can about his life. Do you feel that you understand why his marriage falls apart? Or is it as simple as he’s working too hard, he’s never home? I don’t think that’s it.  

DB 37:35 

Well, he had an affair, right? I think that was the breaking point.  

DH 37:38 

Right, so why did he have an affair? 

DB 37:40 

That’s the point of no return. That was a symptom of the underlying problems. But his wife took the kids and left and went to India, and that’s when he had the affair, they left him. But why did they leave him? I mean, it’s a variety of reasons, he was a bit vague about that part of it.  

DH 38:00 

Right, so maybe even he doesn’t know, right? These things are possible. A lot of times these things happen, we kind of look back, and try to make sense of our actions. They are sometimes rooted in our past, sometimes they’re not. But he does tell a bit about his parents’ relationship and his parents, I think, were separated too. I think at one point he alludes to that he’s doing the same thing that his parents did to him. So he’s a little bit aware of what’s going on, at the very least, at this point in time. But it’s interesting to think about it. These are complicated characters, much more complicated than most fictional characters, actually, because you can really see their inner flaws. 

DB 38:45 

Yeah, absolutely. One moment that I want to bring light to, and I see it as almost like you can divide the book into two parts, right? There’s the first half and the second half. The dividing line is, there’s a time where they have a drink together, and they discuss, and the truth comes out of them, and they tell each other their truth. They’ve been basically hiding behind the tennis for a long time. And Abraham comes clean about how he’s getting a divorce, and him and his wife are going to be separated soon, and he’s gonna be separated from the rest of his family. They had never discussed that before. And David came clean about his addiction issues and how he had to repeat multiple years in medical school, right? And I felt like after they were able to confide each other their truths, the story sort of took a different turn after that. It became much more of a friendship after that, and they let their guard down a lot more after that. Before that, it was the tennis that really kept them together, but I feel like after that, now they’re really intertwined from a relationship perspective. 

DH 40:11 

When you say it that way, it makes me realize there’s another angle to this book. I guess you mentioned it, the bromance thing, but I think this is really a man’s story, you know? Because I don’t know how true this is, but I definitely feel like as an adult, middle-aged guy, it is hard to nurture friendships. And this book shows how difficult it is and how strange it is even for them to start to become friends. There’s so many rules in place to block friendship, right? And because of the circumstance, because of the tennis, they’re able to get past that barrier and get to this point where they can openly share stuff. How rare is that in life?  

DB 40:58 

Yeah, that’s true. I mean, I would say once you get past the age of 30, it does become exponentially harder to make friends.  

DH 41:05 

Maybe it’s not a guy thing. Maybe it’s true for women too. So maybe it’s just an adult life thing.  

DB 41:08 

Possibly, I think, Okay, first thing happens once you get in a relationship, and then you get married, that that starts to take up a lot of your time, right? Then next thing, you have kids, maybe one kid, maybe two kids, now, the second kid is here. 

DH 41:25 

Right? And now you’re rising up in your career, and your mentor told you, just be friendly to people. Don’t actually be friends with them. So all these people are out, right?  

DB 41:34 

Yeah. So then your friends are basically the friends that you had before, but then you’re gonna lose some of those friends because you’re just not going to have the time, or they’re in a different space, a mind space in life, right? You’ll tend to relate better to the people who are going through the same thing as you are, so usually people with kids as well. Maybe your kids can have playdates with each other. That’s how you maintain those friendships.  

DH 41:55 

Okay, so then I’ll ask you this, because we’re about the same age, and we’re both going through adult life, if something like this was happening to you, do you feel like you have people in your life that you could talk to about? Because it takes a long time for Abraham and David to break this veneer for him to admit that he’s having marital problems and stuff. Do you feel like you have a couple people you can turn to? 

DB 42:16 

If I was having marital problems, or if I was going through addiction issues? 

DH 42:20 

Or something major crisis, the things that normally we wouldn’t talk about to casual friends, because people are like, Hey, how’s it going? It’s good. Things are good, right?  

DB 42:29 

Things are good, fine. I’m good. I’m fine.  

DH 42:32 

Taxes suck, right? But I’m good.  

DB 42:36 

Well, I don’t know, can I come talk to you, Dave? 

DH 42:39 

You definitely can talk to me, but we have to do it around the guise of talking about a sports book every month. 

DB 42:45 

Right, maybe we should record it on a podcast. No. I mean, I feel like I do. There’s people out there that I can talk to. How many people? Not as many as there used to be probably. 

DH 43:01 

Right, a few, right? I would say there’s probably a couple.  

DB 43:03 

There’s a few, and these are people who I’ve known probably most of my life. It’s not going to be someone new in my life.  

DH 43:10 

That’s what makes this special, right? This friendship is like Haley’s comet. It appears very rarely in life that you would meet a new person that you have a big age gap with. Abraham and David are different generations, big age gap, different culture, different standing in the hospital. The hospital is probably, you know, the education system forbids them to actually become friends, so they have to get around all these things. And the thing that lets them bypass all this is they both love to play tennis. So that’s kind of neat.  

DB 43:45 

I think it is a beautiful story when you put it that way. I am a sucker for a good bromance. I don’t know what it is, just having that sort of companionship. It’s a little bit off topic, but I was recently watching re-watching a movie that I really enjoy. It’s called End of Watch. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of it before. It revolves around a bromance between these two cops who are partners. Jake Gyllenhaal is in it. Michael Pena is in it. They have so much natural chemistry as friends, right? They’re both married to their wives in the movie, but they have such a connection throughout the movie. And it made me think of that, because I love myself a good bromance, and Tennis Partner is as good as any. It’s as good as that.  

DH 44:37 

All right. Well, since you’re sharing about your love of bromance, I will tell you the thing that I’m a sucker for in stories is mentor-mentee relationships. I don’t know why, but I think, you know, in the original Star Wars movie, my all-time favorite character in Star Wars is the old man, Obi-Wan Kenobi. To me, that is the coolest character. This is a grizzled old guy who’s been through the wars, bad stuff happened to him. He should be really down on his luck, really cynical, but he’s been charged with the task of teaching Luke something, and I thought that was the coolest thing, because he’s just paying it forward. And that’s why this story works for me too, because this is the mentor-mentee, right? Abraham wants David to become better, almost to the point where it’s getting a little weird, you know, like in the later, Abraham’s an internal medicine specialist, and he specifically does infectious diseases. He secretly has this thing where he really wants David to go into internal medicine. And when David tells him, I want to do emergency medicine, or I want to do surgery, he gets all offended, right? He’s like a jilted lover, right? So, he can’t handle that. But I love that there is this element of the old teaching the new, and trying to push the young guys to become better. I love that. 

DB 46:05 

Yeah, Abraham is very honest emotionally throughout this book, to the point where it is a little bit odd and uncomfortable. But I think that you love the mentor-mentee relationship. It goes back to your love of college basketball coaches like Bob Knight. Leaders of young men, teaching them not just about basketball, but about life. Coach Dean Smith.  

DH 46:31 

I love that. I mean, it’s also just my relationship with my own mentors, right? Your mentors teach you, and then you grew up and you mentor the next generation, and it’s like this cycle. It’s great. I love it. I love teaching and learning. So I guess that’s part of all this.  

DB 46:48 

It’s great. So, one thing that struck me emotionally in the book was towards the end, when David had his relapse. That part of the book kind of frightened me, kind of scared me. Just the turn that it took in what happened to David, what took hold of him. 

DH 47:13 

You’re talking about the last relapse. 

DB 47:14 

Yeah, and who he turned into, it freaked me out, basically. And I don’t know, when something like this happens, it’s always like you get the idea that you’re not that far away from something like that. It’s possible, life is a bit crazy, and one wrong turn, you could end up like that. I don’t know that that’s true, necessarily, but it did freak me out in that way a little bit.  

DH 47:43 

Be more specific, you felt like that could happen to any of us, that we could take one wrong turn and suddenly lose everything? 

DB 47:50 

Yeah, I mean, because David’s throughout, I’m gonna say 80 to 90% of the book, comes across as a very normal human being and a relatively bright guy, right? And, you know, on the surface, I guess it’s purely on the surface. 

DH 48:12 

I would say maybe for 40% of the book, he maintains that veneer until you start to see the cracks. His relationship with his girlfriend, I think is one of the early signs that this guy’s a bit of a mess. Then you start to meet some of the people that knew him earlier in medical school, and you start to hear what other people think of him and it’s not that straightforward. So I think by the end, I’m not that surprised that this is happening. All the seeds have been there for a long time. 

DB 48:40 

Yeah, it’s supposed to, but I was just struck by how fast it happened and how extreme the changes were. That’s probably what’s what scared me the most is how he basically turned into a werewolf, essentially. 

DH 48:54 

Yeah, I mean, we’re joking about it, but it is actually quite frightening, what happens at the end, right? He becomes completely disconnected from all of them. 

DB 49:03 

Yeah, we don’t want to spoil it completely, but yeah. 

DH 49:06 

People can tell where we’re going with this.  

DB 49:08 

Yeah, absolutely. Any other thoughts about the book, Dave? Any other favorite parts, or any anything interesting to share? 

DH 49:17 

I think we covered all the main things I want to talk about, except this thing of should we put it in the pantheon of greatest sports books of all time? 

DB 49:27 

I mean, for us to do that, it would have to be a sports book.  

DH 49:33 

All right, so let’s answer that question.  

DB 49:34 

I think this is loosely a sports book. I wouldn’t call this a sports book. I think it’s a bromance that weaves many topics into it, one of them being a regular tennis game, but that’s not the story. Even though that is in the title, that’s just a reference to a person. It’s not necessarily a reference to the sport in particular. To me, this is not a sports book. What do you think?  

DH 50:01 

All right, I’m gonna try to convince you that it’s a sports book. Without the tennis, the relationship doesn’t happen, right? And it’s not just a conduit for them meeting the first time. The tennis recurs throughout the book multiple times. They have multiple conversations on the court, there’s this whole journey of how, I think they even watch tennis together on TV. It is really a vehicle for them to further their relationship over time. It also is a vehicle for them to play out a lot of their feelings towards each other. I think usually when they play, David kind of lets Abraham hang with him, but later in the story, at some points where he’s feeling volatile, he pounds Abraham. And I think Abraham beats him once, and stuff. So there is some sports action here, but there’s a lot of subtext to what’s going on. I think without the tennis, the story doesn’t even happen. So I will make the case that I think this is actually a sports book. It talks quite a bit about Abraham’s tennis life, as a recreational tennis player and a tennis fan. Enough that I think it should qualify. I just want to play the pantheon chimes. But I would call this a sports book, and a medical humanities book, and a bromance. 

DB 51:29 

Okay, I mean, I guess you could say – we talked about this in the beginning – it is many stories weaved together, and one of those is a book about sports, and that sport being tennis. Okay, you’ve convinced me, Dave. But now the question, does it deserve a spot?  

DH 51:46 

Well, now that we’ve said it that way, you called it one of the greatest books you’ve ever read. I will not call it one of the greatest books I’ve ever read, but it is a very good book. I would vote for it to go into the pantheon, but I’ll let the deciding vote sit with you.  

DB 51:58 

Well, I think we obviously know where I sit with this. This is such a slam dunk case for the pantheon.  

DH 52:06 

A smash, not a slam dunk.  

DB 52:09 

It’s an overhead smash, easy, no thought involved, this book belongs in the pantheon.  

DH 52:17 

All right. There we go. Play the music. 

DH 52:29 

All right, so we’ve inducted another book into the pantheon. But seriously, whether it’s a sports book or not is not that important of a distinction. This is just a great read, and I’m happy that it hits sports so that you and I could talk about it. I’m happy that it’s part of medicine and medical education so we can talk about it. From a humanities standpoint, it’s a great book. We tried not to give away too much of the nitty gritty details, but I think even if we gave some of it away, people should just read it. It’s such a deep book. There’s so much going on in it.  

DB 52:58 

Yeah, if you’re listening to this right now, I hope you’ve either read it or you plan on reading it because it’s well worth your time and it’s well worth your energy. It’s a must read.  

DH 53:10 

I was reading it at the swimming pool one day during my kids swimming lesson, and a guy saw me reading the book, and was like, Is this book good? I’m like, yeah, it’s good. He’s like, I’ve been meaning to read this. And I was like, Oh, are you a doctor? And he said, no, it’s just a book that I’ve been meaning to read, but if you said it’s good, I’m definitely going to read it. So, whoever you are out there, I hope you got to it, because this is actually really worth it.  

DB 53:33 

Yeah, you know what? It is rare, actually, to see someone else physically reading a book. I take my son to Taekwondo, and occasionally there’s this other parent there, and he’s usually reading a different book each time. I’m always curious to see what he’s reading.  

DH 53:49 

Do you talk to him? You should talk to him. You should tell him that you are part of a literary podcast, and now you’re also on a medical humanities podcast. They’ll be blown away.  

DB 53:57 

Dave, it’s extremely hard to make friends at this age, extremely hard. There’s a meme that I always laugh at where you’re given two choices, talk to the parent of another kid at the playground, or put your hand in the blender. I look at the blender and I think, maybe the blender.  

DH 54:17 

All right. Well, anyways, maybe you can take us out with a quote. Have you found something to show us one last taste of The Tennis Partner? 

DB 54:31 

Within your secrets lies your sickness, Dr. Talbot had said to me when I talked to him long after David’s death. If David never sustained a lasting recovery, it was because he never let go of his secret. There were some bars that never came down. His secret is still with him. He still walks alone. 

DH 54:53 

Apollo On Call is produced by MedHum.org. Special thanks to my co-host, Mr. Dave Bryant. To hear some more conversations between Dave and I, please check out the Sports Literati podcast available on Spotify or Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The theme song Un Sospiro performed by my wife, Dr. Justina Sam. For more medical humanities content, please check out MedHum.org. Thanks for listening. 

Web image by Ahmed