There’s a moment in the new movie Challengers, in which Zendaya plays a legendary tennis player named Tashi Donaldson, where she is asked to describe what the game means to her.
These were the days when his character was the next big thing, in a game that created events with the ease and gentleness of a nuclear reaction.
“You know what it is,” she tells Josh O’Connor (The Crown) and Mike Feist (West Side Story). They’re his co-stars, or maybe co-moons: two junior prospects vying for his attention and to be in his orbit.
“It’s a relationship.”
it is This moment is going to be a topic of discussion among tennis players of every level, 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 fuzzy balls and disputed lines. -Call. Challengers, Tashi, and the film’s director Luca Guadagnino have a lot to say about that spiritual dilemma. He has a lot to say about the aggression-filled flow state that two players enter when they’re in the middle of a high-octane match, rhythmically smacking the ball back and forth across the net .
The Challengers may not actually be a tennis movie – but it has a lot to say about the quintessence of the sport.
Some things you’ll often hear when this topic comes up among people who play or coach tennis for a living, or have dedicated their lives to it in some other way:
This is boxing, or any other form of hand-to-hand combat, only you are not allowed to touch the opponent, although you would do so if you could. You will tear out their throat.
It is a form of self-expression.
It’s ballet with a racket.
This is warfare, psychological and otherwise.
It is socially acceptable, masochistic torture, the search for moments of perfection that never come for most people or are so rare and so euphoric as to inspire despair.
“A relationship” isn’t something that gets 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 is often about toxic relationships. It’s in the people and within the game. And it’s this dynamic that attracted screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes to tackle the project in the first place.
“TeaThere’s such a deep intimacy that builds on the court, because for all the hours it takes to play a match, you’re completely focused on this other person,” says Kuritzkes, who played some as a child but Became obsessed with it. Game after watching one of the most dramatic matches of the modern era, the 2018 US Open women’s final between Serena Williams and Naomi Osaka.
“You have to know them deeply enough to be able to cheat them, because that’s how you win points in tennis: you cheat someone. This requires their deep knowledge.”
Zendaya and Josh O’Connor form the two corners of a tennis love triangle (Nico Tavernis/Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)
In an interview last weekend, Kuritzkes described his particular fascination with watching matches where a player is completely comfortable treating the opening game, or even the first set, as an information-gathering exercise Have it, even if it means losing out for a while. Think of Novak Djokovic in basically any five-set match against a first-time opponent: He’s surprisingly awkward with the opponent and himself, even at 6-6 in amateur wrestling. Can spoil his way. But he’s not struggling, he’s computing, and then he wins seven points in the tiebreak and then two more sets to reveal his analysis disastrously.
If he loses the first one, it is very likely to prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
“It’s his own kind of mind game he’s playing, isn’t it?” Kuritzkes says about 24-time Grand Slam champion Djokovic. “He’s telling the guy, ‘I’m not afraid to lose a set just to learn something about how you play.’ It’s a mutual relationship, and it’s very intimate and very energetic.”
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Tennis fans are airing their usual complaints on The Challengers, about how the combination of actors and their body doubles are poor replications of the greatest players on Earth.
(Memo to those tennis snobs: You are too, and everyone else who isn’t an elite player. Get over it.)
It happens every time a tennis movie, seminal or otherwise, comes out, whether it’s Wimbledon, the 2004 Kirsten Dunst vehicle Battle of the Sexes, about Billie Jean King’s showdown with Bobby Riggs from 2017. Ho, or Oscar winner King Richard, about the Williams sisters’ production from 2021.
In this case, it’s also very much Brad Gilbert – the American tennis legend who coached Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and Coco Gauff to Grand Slam titles and asked the actors in Challengers to treat the racket and ball like a baseball bat and a piñata. . – Can do.
it Is It’s strange to see practice scenes where Feist and Zendaya practice drills that involve feeding each other slow balls from the middle of the court, something elite players almost never do. This is an unexpected error, but that’s OK. And Zendaya certainly dedicated herself to capturing the unique footwork patterns and physical movements of the top players:
Zendaya training for ‘Challengers’ with stunt double Kara Hall Wangler. pic.twitter.com/pWc7r40zt3
– Zendaya Updates (@Zendaya_Updated) 23 April 2024
As she said about the film during a press conference over the weekend, “I can’t define what kind of movie it was; It was funny, very funny, but I wouldn’t say it was a comedy, but it had drama in it, but I wouldn’t say it was just a drama, and it had tennis in it, but it wasn’t like a sports movie. ,
As the rivalry between O’Connor and Faust’s characters grows and the love triangle involving Zendaya develops, it’s hard not to wonder why these characters are tennis players. Could they just as easily have been rival musicians, or mathematicians, or writers?
Possibly.
And yet the journey the film follows, from the moment Kuritzkes began envisioning it, to a marketing campaign that features Zendaya posing in tennis-style clothing and tennis balls at tennis tournaments in Indian Wells and Monte Carlo has never shied away from this confusing game, its oddities and its contradictions.
Zendaya’s Challengers campaign draws on the symbolism of the game (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Back to that 2018 US Open final. Williams was attempting to win a record 24th Grand Slam singles title, which she would never achieve. Osaka, who burst onto the scene that year, had her way with Williams and won in straight sets 6-2, 6-4 – but the only thing anyone will remember is when the chair Williams blew a gasket when the umpire penalized her because her coach and former boyfriend, Patrick Mouratoglou, was coaching her from the stands, which was not allowed then but is now.
The Kuritzkes did not pay attention to tennis for years, or indeed even think about it. He played in and around Los Angeles, a hotbed of young tennis talent, during his childhood. Everyone felt like they were better than him, because, well, they were. There is no shame in this.
Then she found herself, almost by accident, watching that US Open final and saw Williams frustrated because, she said, the chair umpire had inappropriately accused her of cheating.
The Kuritzkes were stunned by the interpersonal logistics and consequences of that moment.
You’re all alone on your side of the court, and there’s one other person in a giant tennis stadium who cares about what happens to you as much as you do, but you can’t talk to them.
Osaka and Williams after the controversial 2018 final (Tim Clayton/Corbis via Getty Images)
What if there’s something really important you need to talk to them about? What if it has nothing to do with tennis? What if it’s something that was going on with both of you, or the person on the other side of the net, or both?
How is that conversation of yours?
Kuritzkes started working on those ideas. He also started watching a lot of tennis.
Another match he remembers well is the 2019 Wimbledon final between Djokovic and Roger Federer. Djokovic won in a fifth-set tiebreak after the final set score was tied at 12–12. As Federer missed two match points at 8–7 and the match became the tennis equivalent of a penalty kick in football, the camera flashed to Federer’s wife Mirka. His own tennis career was cut short by an injury; She then helped her husband become one of the great players in history — not unlike Zendaya’s character’s arc in Challengers.
“She was pulling her hair and I couldn’t understand why,” he says.
“Because in my mind, I was like, ‘Okay, he’s got 20 Slams, you guys have all the money in the world. What’s so stressful about it right now? Is it supposed to be another day at the office?'”
The following year at the Australian Open, Kirtsaks was again seeing off the Swiss great.
Federer was playing journeyman American Tennis Sandgren in the quarterfinals. While the aging, beleaguered Federer was squandering seven match points en route to a tough five-set victory, Kuritzkes witnessed a fight of survival proportions.
Sandgren went into the match wearing great shorts and a sleeveless shirt emblazoned with the logo, allowing him to make some quick money at the last minute, while Federer was perfect as ever despite fuming against his lights out. Were visible.
Two players on opposite sides of the game – or, at least, that’s how he imagined they were seeing it.
“It felt like both of these guys, in their own ways, were playing for their lives,” says Kuritzkes. “And the reason was that Federer knew, ‘If I can’t beat it Man, my career is over’, and Sandgren knew, ‘If I can’t beat him now, when he’s injured, my career is over.’ And it felt like there was so much at stake for both of them personally in this match, about their lives, about 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, suffering a knee injury after losing his final competitive set 6–0 in singles to Hubert Hurkacz on Center Court at Wimbledon in 2021. Due to which he died.
Sandgren has made little notable noise since that day, including anti-vaccination declarations or sympathy for the protesters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
A tennis tie, or something like it, is written in major and minor.
(Top photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures)
