But are all these tennis movies any good at depicting the sport?
Yes, Olympic trials are underway, Yankees outfielder Aaron Judge is hot, and NFL fans await Aaron Rodgers’ decision. But for some fans, the real action is tennis: Wimbledon is a week away, and U.S. Open tickets are already being sold. And it’s having a reel moment in popular culture, too: In Challengers, on our streaming screens, Zendaya is coaching two players in a back-and-forth romantic rally. In theaters very recently was Step Through Time, a documentary about Stan Smith, a former player most known these days for the sneakers that carry his name. Twelve Final Days, a documentary about the end of Roger Federer’s career, premiered at Tribeca Film Fest and is available on Amazon Prime. Next month, In the Arena, an eight-part docuseries about Serena Williams, airs on ESPN.
Off-screens and hopefully on its way to Broadway is a play called Love All, about the life, romances, and times of Billie Jean King. It debuted at the La Jolla Playhouse in California and has dreams of moving up by the time of the Open. On television, the Annette Bening series Apples Never Fall, based on Liane Moriarty’s 2021 NY Times bestseller, deals with a married couple who run a tennis academy. Peacock is pushing for Emmy nominations.
Speaking of bestselling novels and novelists, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2022 novel Carrie Soto Is Back was described as “a deep dive into womens’ tennis.” Even Barbie is picking up a racquet: Mattel will honor Serena’s sister, Venus Williams, and eight other athletes as part of a project just announced. “Throughout my career, I’ve always been driven by the idea of shattering glass ceilings and staying true to myself, and Barbie’s mission couldn’t resonate more deeply with that ethos,” said Williams, who has won seven Grand Slam singles titles. Now, she’ll be a doll.
“Perhaps, just perhaps, the surge of interest in women’s sports has sent people to tennis and the pioneer role of Billie Jean,” observes Joel Drucker, one of the best writers about the game. “That, in turn, sends them to explore other dimensions of the sport.”
“I’ve found almost every movie with tennis as the central theme to be hugely disappointing,” says Tim Barry, the long-time pro in the luxurious Malibu Colony neighborhood who has taught countless celebs including Barbra Streisand, who he helped perfect her single serve for The Way We Were. “Mostly that’s because the actors rarely look authentic.” (Malibu has long been a tennis hub of sorts: In 2007, Oracle billionaire founder Larry Ellison — also an avid player and fan — walked into a dilapidated attempt at a club and bought it on the spot. Today, his beautifully renovated Malibu Racquet Club has a waiting list of 250.)
When it comes to accurately portraying tennis on screen, professional guidance is crucial: Tennis legend Brad Gilbert, who now coaches Coco Gauff, served as key consultant on Challengers. He brought in Eric Taino, a pro who had helped on the biopic King Richard. “Most of my work was working with Zendaya before the film started,” says Taino. “She was easy to teach, as she’s very coordinated and athletic. At the very least, we wanted to match or do better than King Richard, setting a new standard.”
Plenty of older films have obviously dealt with the game, including Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Woody Allen’s Match Point, and Will Smith’s Oscar-winning role in the aforementioned King Richard. (And speaking of Allen, let’s not forget that Annie Hall met Alvy at a New York tennis club.) Joel Drucker notes that some of the game’s best players — including bi-coastal John McEnroe and his long-time opponent Boris Becker — struggled with personal issues while being athletes and icons. “There came the view,” Drucker says, “that at its core, tennis may be toxic. That notion blossomed further in Andre Agassi’s 2009 book Open: Tennis devours the souls of its young.”
As players’ personal lives became tabloid fodder, the game became more dramatic, too, and made for great TV: ESPN’s documentary series 30 for 30 offered compelling takes on the Borg-McEnroe rivalry and the Evert-Navratilova one. The latter two were rivals, ultimately friends, and now co-cancer battlers — and apparently, another show featuring them is in the works.
Now, of course, there’s the threat of another racquet sport flying past tennis in popularity: I dare you to find one court in the last few years that hasn’t been chopped in half to make more room for pickleballers. “Our weekly drop-in clinics are the perfect opportunity for players of all levels to improve their skills, meet fellow enthusiasts, and enjoy the thrilling sport of pickleball,” promises the 92Y. And the number of those players grows seemingly by the day. How long before we see a rom-com in which George Clooney and Julia Roberts test their reflexes on the court? Call it Love in the Kitchen…
As a junior, author Michele Willens was once ranked 13 in Southern California. “It’s been all downhill since then,” she notes.
