There’s a moment in Challengers, the new movie starring Zendaya as a former tennis great named Tashi Donaldson, where she’s asked to describe what the sport means to her.
This happens at a time when his character was the next big thing, in a sport that produces phenomena with the spontaneity and smoothness of a nuclear reaction.
“You know how it is,” she tells Josh O’Connor (The Crown) and Mike Faist (West Side Story). They are his co-stars, or perhaps his co-moons: two young prospects vying for his attention and kept in his orbit.
“It’s a relationship.”
It is the moment intended to circulate discussion among tennis players of all levels, from stars to weekend hackers, because philosophical discourse about the meaning of tennis – “what it is” – is as much a part of the game as blurred balls and contested lines. -calls. Challengers, Tashi and the film’s director Luca Guadagnino have a lot to say about this metaphysical dilemma. They have a lot to say about the aggression-filled state of flow that two players enter when they’re in the middle of a high-octane match, rhythmically hitting and tapping a ball back and forth through a net.
Challengers may not really be a movie about tennis, but it has a lot to say about the quintessence of the sport.
Some things you often hear when the topic comes up among people who play or coach tennis for a living, or who have devoted their lives to it in other ways:
It’s boxing, or some other form of hand-to-hand combat, except you’re not allowed to touch the opponent, even though you would if you could. You would rip their throats out.
It is a form of self-expression.
It’s ballet with a racket.
It is a war, psychological and otherwise.
It is a socially acceptable masochistic torture, a search for moments of perfection that, for the most part, never arrive or are so rare and euphoric that they inspire despair.
“A relationship” isn’t something that’s gotten a lot of airtime in this discussion, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful or provocative, especially in the context of this tennis love triangle that revolves around the often toxic interactions between the two. people and in sport. And it’s this dynamic that pushed screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes to tackle this project in the first place.
“T“There is such a deep intimacy that is created on the field, because for the hours it takes to play a match, you are totally focused on this other person,” says Kuritzkes, who played in some matches as a child but became obsessed with the sport after watching the 2018 US Open women’s final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka, one of the most dramatic matches of the modern era.
“You have to know them so intimately to be able to fool them, because that’s how you win points in tennis: you fool someone. This requires in-depth knowledge of them.
In an interview last weekend, Kuritzkes described his particular fascination with watching matches where a player is completely comfortable treating the first matches, or even the first set, as an information-gathering exercise, even if it means losing for a while. Think of Novak Djokovic in virtually any five-set match against a first-time opponent: he could fight his way to 6-6, in a surprisingly ungainly, even amateurish struggle with him and the opponent -even. But he doesn’t struggle, he calculates, then he wins seven points in a tie-break, then two more sets to devastatingly reveal his analysis.
If he loses first, he will most likely prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
“It’s his own kind of mind game he’s doing, isn’t it?” Kuritzkes talks about 24-time Grand Slam champion Djokovic. “He lets this guy know, ‘I’m not afraid to lose a set just to find out something about the way you play.’ It’s an interpersonal relationship, very intimate and very charged.
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Tennis snobs will launch their usual complaints about the Challengers, that the combination of actors and their body doubles are poor facsimiles of the greatest players on the planet.
(Memo to those tennis snobs: you are too, and so is everyone else who isn’t an elite player. Get over it.)
This happens every time a movie about tennis, quasi or not, is released, whether it’s Wimbledon, a 2004 Kirsten Dunst vehicle, Battle of The Sexes, about Billie Jean King’s confrontation with Bobby Riggs from 2017, or the Oscar-winning King Richard, on the direction of the Williams sisters from 2021.
In this case, there’s only so much that even Brad Gilbert – the American tennis legend who coached Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and Coco Gauff to Grand Slam titles and got the cast of Challengers to deal with the racket and ball like they would a baseball bat and a pinata. – could do.
He East strange to see training scenes where Faist and Zendaya perform drills that involve feeding each other slow balls from the middle of the court, something elite players almost never do. It’s an unforced error, but it’s okay. And Zendaya has certainly dedicated herself to familiarizing herself with the unique footwork patterns and body movements of top players:
Zendaya trains for “Challengers” with understudy Kara Hall Wangler. pic.twitter.com/pWc7r40zt3
– Zendaya Updates (@Zendaya_Updated) April 23, 2024
As she said of the film at a press conference this weekend: “I couldn’t define what kind of film it was; it was funny, so funny, but I wouldn’t say it was a comedy, but it had drama, but I wouldn’t say it was just drama, and there was tennis, but it wasn’t It wasn’t like a sports movie. »
As the rivalry between O’Connor and Faist’s characters plays out and the love triangle involving Zendaya evolves, it’s hard not to wonder why these characters are tennis players. Could they just as easily have been rival musicians, mathematicians or writers?
Maybe.
And yet the journey the film follows, from the time Kuritzkes began designing it to a marketing campaign that involved Zendaya showing up at tennis tournaments in Indian Wells and Monte Carlo wearing designer dresses tennis and high-heeled shoes finished with tennis balls, has never strayed far from this seductive game, its particularities and its contradictions.
Let’s go back to that 2018 US Open final. Williams was trying to win the record 24th Grand Slam singles title, which she would never win. Osaka, who had burst onto the scene that year, held her own with Williams and won in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4 – but the only thing that will be remembered is that Williams blew a joined when the chair umpire penalized her because her coach and former boyfriend, Patrick Mouratoglou, was coaching her from the stands, which wasn’t allowed at the time but is now.
Kuritzkes went years without paying attention to tennis, or even really thinking about it. He had played as a child in and around Los Angeles, a hotbed of young tennis talent. Everyone seemed to be better than him, because, well, they were. No shame in that.
Then he found himself watching that US Open final almost by accident and seeing Williams’ collapse because, she said, the chair umpire had unjustifiably accused her of cheating .
Kuritzkes was stunned by the interpersonal logistics and consequences of the moment.
You’re all alone on your side of the court, and there’s this other person in a huge tennis stadium who cares as much as you do about what’s happening to you, but you can’t talk to them.
What if there’s something really important you need to talk to them about? What if it had nothing to do with tennis? What if it was something that happened between the two of you, or with the person on the other side of the net, or both?
How do you have this conversation?
Kuritzkes began to play with these ideas. He also started watching a lot of tennis.
Another match he remembers very well is the 2019 Wimbledon final between Djokovic and Roger Federer. Djokovic won in the fifth set tiebreak, back when that only happened when the final set score reached 12-12. As Federer wasted two match points at 8-7 and the match continued in the tennis equivalent of a soccer penalty shootout, the camera kept showing Federer’s wife, Mirka. His own tennis career was cut short due to injury; she then helped her husband become one of the great players in history – much like Zendaya’s character arc in Challengers.
“She was pulling her hair out and I couldn’t understand why,” he says.
“Because in my mind I was like, ‘Well, he’s got 20 Grand Slams, you’ve got all the money in the world.’ What’s so stressful about it right now? Should this just be another day at the office?’
At the Australian Open the following year, Kirtzkes was watching the Swiss great again.
Federer faced American journeyman Tennys Sandgren in the quarterfinals. As an aging and battered Federer withstood seven match points en route to a tough five-set victory, Kuritzkes saw a battle of existential proportions.
Sandgren played the match in a pair of goofy shorts and a sleeveless shirt with logos plastered on it to earn him a few quick last-minute bucks, while Federer looked his usual perfect self despite his rage over the dying of his light .
Two players on opposite ends of the sport – or, at least, that’s how he imagined they saw it.
“It felt like these two guys, in their own way, were playing for their lives,” Kuritzkes said. “And the reason was that Federer knew: ‘If I can’t beat This “Man, my career is over,” and Sandgren knew, “If I can’t beat him now, while he’s injured, my career is over.” And so it felt like both of them had so much at stake in this match personally, regarding their lives, regarding the trajectory of their lives, that they were both in this existential moment.
Sometimes existential moments really are moments. Federer lost in the next round, never played in Australia again and barely played after that tournament, before succumbing to a knee injury in 2021 after losing his last competitive singles set 6-0, on court central Wimbledon, against Hubert Hurkacz.
Sandgren has made little notable noise since that day that hasn’t involved anti-vaccination statements or empathy for the protesters who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
A tennis relationship, or something like that, big and small.
(Top photo: photos by Metro Goldwyn Mayer)