I Love (ALL!) Tennis Films

Monday is about movies, sometimes TV. Today: Tennis films. I love them! Challengers is just the latest…

I’m a fan of sports films. Not all. Rugby films leave me cold, I’m not sure I”m that into soccer films either. I don’t care for fictional movies about all sports, but basketball films are usually pretty good. And Hoosiers is an all-timer for me. But that might be more about the fact that it’s a Gene Hackman film. I like those corny, heartfelt underdog films too. Well, I certainly love Rudy.

But what I have been thinking about — for a while now, it’ s not just because Challengers is out in the cinemas at the moment — is that I love Tennis Films. #notalltennisfilms — the title of today’s post is meant to be a slight play on words, and it’s not all that clever, but it’s the best that I can do right now, so it’s staying.

Anyway, I did love Challengers. And couldn’t wait until today’s newsletter — after seeing it early last week. I had to go old school and write a review:

Now’s a good time to remind you that my old “Off The Tracks” site is archived here and a paid subscription gets you access to all the old reviews, blogs, and interviews. A free subscription is cool too and if you download the app you’ll be able to check in and see new reviews from time to time as well…

I remember realising I loved tennis films when I watched Borg vs McEnroe. Old review from the time here:

Yes, I remember the rivalry, and I knew those players, and watched some of their matches. But that film was just a masterpiece, and not least for how the actual tennis was depicted.

I do love watching tennis. I was an average player (High School B Team) but I do at the least understand the game. And I enjoy checking in on the Grand Slam tournaments, and I’ll even hit up YouTube for some archival matches. After watching The Battle of The Sexes (another very good tennis film) I went down a rabbit hole for days, starting by watching the full match that is documented in that film between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Next thing I was watching old Navratilova matches, and highlights from all the players I remember across the 1980s and into the early 1990s.

I also watched a lot of the actual Borg/McEnroe matches. And Boris Becker. And Ivan Lendl. Chris Evert (Lloyd). And Monica Seles too.

When I finally resurfaced, I realised that what I love about a good tennis film is that the game is a perfect one-on-one to explore; a chance to put two characters up against one another. So it can be about the actual game, or the game can be a metaphor — or both.

This Vanity Fair piece from 2017 (which is when both Battle of the Sexes and Borg vs. McEnroe were released) starts by saying top tennis coach Nick Bollettieri has never seen a good film about the sport; the usual whinge from someone too close to the subject — this and that about it not being realistic and so on. I don’t know many jazz drummers or jazz school-trained musicians that liked the movie Whiplash. I heard a lot of “it’s not like that at all” comments, which I think is to miss the point really. Because this is where the metaphor-aspect comes in. In fact, I think I used that example in my review of Challengers. Saying it’s as much a film about tennis as Whiplash is a film about drumming. Which is to say, about both: Yes and No. It is about the subject. But only as a metaphorical launching pad for human desire to achieve, as a landscape for the battle, an actual playing field.

One of the great examples of tennis being a metaphor — or used in an allegorical way even, is Woody Allen’s Match Point. One of his best films, and where one of his other best films (Annie Hall) had a tennis scene, Match Point uses the sport for the film’s title, and the sport’s gruelling psychological battle becomes the essence for the movie’s great thriller storyline. But it’s also probably a case of Woody being inspired by Alfred Hitchcock (Strangers on a Train) who first saw the properties of a tennis match as being a perfect visual metaphor for the stress of a properly fraught psychological (and physical) battle.

I even liked King Richard, which was more about was Serena and Venus Williams’ father. And though it was supposed to be more about him than them, in the end it was arguably more about Will Smith.

But, there are documentaries and biographies/autobiographies for the ‘true’ story of tennis.

A fictional tennis movie (and King Richard arguably was not, for it was a biopic — that interesting blend of based on a true story, and movie-making, ie a kind of “truthiness”) is as much about the way the tennis is used as movie-prop, as expositional moment, as coat-hanger for the film’s background themes as it is a realistic portrayal of the actual sport.

Challengers, to me, was Whiplash, The Social Network, and Saltburn in a blender. Which is to say it didn’t quite resemble any of those films on their own, but the extraction of some of the ways those movies moved, some of the motivations of the characters, some of the ways those filmmakers told stories, could have been poured out into something Challengers-shaped, or into an end-result that tasted very much of Challengers.

Tennis is a way for us to see characters up against the wall against themselves and a nemesis. It’s a way for us to watch heroes become the villain, and villains show true heart and grit and flip the script to become (almost) the hero for a moment. It’s a way of pitting characters against one another and letting them fight to make a metaphor.

The family tennis match in The Squid And The Whale is a brilliant example of the way the sport can be used on screen. It also reminded me a tiny bit of when my dad hit me as hard as he could in the nuts during a tennis match where me and my brother played against my mum and dad. Bent-double at the net, and in the pain of my life, of course my dad jumped over the net to check I was okay. But not before reminding me he’d produced a hell of a shot, and, had also, with that hard-earned point, won the game.