Mary Carillo is headed into the International Tennis Hall of Fame on Saturday night in Newport, and she knows the hardest part may be the speech. She will go in alongside Roger Federer, a pairing that gives the ceremony extra weight for a longtime player and broadcaster who has spent decades around the sport.
Carillo said she has to give a speech at the induction and hopes she can keep herself together long enough to get through it. She said Federer is the kind of player whose game was so beautiful and powerful that words can run out trying to describe it, adding that his style seemed to please the gods. The emotion is not hypothetical. Carillo said Federer is very emotional and that she can get jammed up herself, which is why she is preparing for a night that could turn on her in a hurry.
The induction is the latest public marker in a career that has moved from the court to the microphone without losing its connection to the game. Carillo spoke to The Post’s Steve Serby before the ceremony, and her answers kept circling back to the places and people that shaped her, especially Queens and the Douglaston Club. She said there will be a watch party there Saturday night up on the third floor, a homecoming detail that fits a woman who said she was once a waitress there, worked the snack bar, dragged clay courts and played tennis there too.
That local thread matters because Carillo did not sound like someone talking about a distant honor. “These are my people! I’m a chick from Queens!” she said, and the line landed with the force of someone who never stopped seeing the game through the neighborhood that raised her. She also said fans become New York fans once they go to the U.S. Open, and that the tournament makes a different sound from any other in the world, a reminder that her compass is still set by the city where she came from.
Her ties to John McEnroe also give the moment its own charge. Carillo said they grew up together and were kids together, and she said McEnroe won often and easily when they were juniors. She remembered him playing basketball for Buckley Country Day School and running track there, and she said the 1977 Wimbledon run was when he became famous for being John McEnroe. Then came the fact that still startles her: she and McEnroe won the 1977 French Open doubles title when she was 20 and he was 18.
Carillo said it was a year of World Team Tennis and that many of the best players were not at the French Open, but she and McEnroe still looked at the doubles draw and thought the same thing. “Oh, we should win this thing,” she recalled McEnroe saying. Her answer to that memory was almost pure disbelief: “Who the hell thought that was gonna happen?” It is the right note for a Hall of Fame week that mixes ceremony with memory. Newport will give Carillo a formal place in the game’s history, but the speech she has to deliver may tell the clearest story: even after all these years, she still sounds like someone who cannot quite believe where tennis has taken her.
