Love-Love: How Tennis Took Over Hollywood (and Dealmaking)
Forget the U.S. Open: The real action is on L.A. courts as writers and producers reveal how playing sets became the best way to talk shop and make friends
This Ankler Feature is a 12-minute read
Gracie Glassmeyer has been wielding a tennis racket since she was just three years old. The Nashville native’s athletic accolades are piled high: She claimed the Tennessee state singles championship as a high school junior, and played Division I tennis at Tulane. So it’s unsurprising that she once considered going pro.
The real left turn is that if she hadn’t picked up the sport, she likely would never have become a successful Hollywood scribe. After Hurricane Katrina, most of Tulane’s sports programs, including tennis, were suspended, and the athlete ultimately trained her laser focus on a new goal: moving to Los Angeles to become a writer.
The now 37-year-old Glassmeyer — who has an overall deal with CBS Studios and whose credits include The Neighborhood and Ghosts — migrated west in the late summer of '08, shortly after graduating and not long after the writers strike came to an end.
Her first gig, as a production assistant on the Fox series Do Not Disturb, was short-lived: Glassmeyer recalls the job only lasting eight weeks as the Niecy Nash and Jerry O’Connell sitcom was the first show that year to be canceled.
But one of the series’ writers, Michael Kramer, knew that she had played tennis seriously and asked her to join a doubles group. In that 16-person tennis crew were The Office star Rainn Wilson, Oscar-nominated Hidden Figures producer Theodore Melfi — and Kramer’s former colleague and Gilmore Girls exec producer David S. Rosenthal, whom he had known from writing on Men In Trees together. Other notable alums include Suits exec producer Rick Muirragui, Pen15 co-creator Sam Zvibleman, and Steve Vitolo, a writer who won an Engineering Emmy for his script app Scriptation.
“I felt so lucky when I moved out here that I had that skill,” says Glassmeyer of tennis. “Because I felt like, oh wow, tennis is to the TV and movie world as golf is to the business world.”
That friend group would play every Saturday morning as well as most Wednesday nights for a decade, forming friendships — Kramer is now her BFF — and building vital TV career relationships, but that wasn’t all.
In 2015, Glassmeyer and Rosenthal wed, with Kramer officiating. “Part of our wedding ceremony was that Kramer spun a racket for us to see who would do their vows first, as a little nod to our beginning,” she recalls fondly.
The couple, who now have two children, ages 6 and 4, go to the Indian Wells tournament every year, and finally checked off a bucket list item by taking the family to Wimbledon last summer. Although their old tennis group has faded out, they still regularly take to the courts at the Griffin Club in Cheviot Hills when they can. With friends in the business, “as opposed to just grabbing lunch, we often will just go play tennis,” Glassmeyer says. “We hit a little, we talk a little.”
“If I wasn’t a tennis player, not only would I not have met my husband out here and therefore wouldn’t have my two incredible kids, I don’t even think I would be a writer,” she muses. “I’d be a whole different person. Tennis has honestly been my road map for life, as cheesy as that sounds. It instilled a ton of qualities I use in my job every day: problem solving, determination, anticipation, adaptability, to name a few.”
Practically everyone who listens to The Ankler podcast or reads The Wakeup knows that this reporter is a tennis junkie (although unlike Glassmeyer, I have more enthusiasm than actual talent). Like so many others, I became reacquainted with the sport during the pandemic, and soon learned of its ubiquity among the entertainment set, not to mention a number of fellow trade journalists. There are the former competitive players, the Covid-era newbies, and the budding, scene-y liveball groups like LVBL that are sprouting through the city. (Liveball is essentially a fast-paced doubles tennis drill game without the serves.) Even tennis’ cousins padel and, yes, pickleball, are seeing a surge in interest.
Relentless teasing from The Wakeup’s Sean McNulty aside, tennis in Hollywood is no joke, booming after the pandemic and inculcating a new generation of creatives. All across Los Angeles County, the Gracie Glassmeyers of the entertainment industry turn to the activity to let off steam and spend time with friends — and in many cases, commune with future colleagues.
So as Tinseltown’s elite soaks in the last gasp of summer with a Honey Deuce in hand at the U.S. Open in Queens, which is seeing record attendance this year, just know that on the West Coast, tennis is arguably the primary sport of everyday Hollywood, forging personal and professional relationships that go well beyond the court.