There’s a moment in Challengers, the new movie starring Zendaya as a once-great tennis phenom named Tashi Donaldson, where she is asked to describe what the sport is to her.
This happens back in the days when her character is the next big thing, in a sport that produces phenoms with the spontaneity and gentleness of a nuclear reaction.
“You know what it is,” she says to Josh O’Connor (The Crown) and Mike Faist (West Side Story). They are her co-stars, or perhaps co-moons: two junior prospects vying for her attention and held in her orbit.
“It’s a relationship.”
This is the moment destined to get the chatter flowing 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 contested line-calls. Challengers, Tashi and the film’s director Luca Guadagnino have plenty to say about that metaphysical quandary. They have plenty to say about the aggression-filled flow state two players enter when they are in the middle of a high-octane match, rhythmically pounding and pattering a ball back and forth across a net.
Challengers may not really be a tennis movie — but it has plenty to say about the quintessence of the sport.
Some things you often hear when the topic arises among people who play or coach tennis for a living, or have dedicated their lives to it in some other way:
It’s boxing, or some other form of hand-to-hand combat, only you are not allowed to touch the opponent, though you would if you could. You’d rip their throats out.
It’s a form of self-expression.
It’s ballet with a racket.
It’s warfare, psychological and otherwise.
It’s socially acceptable, masochistic torture, a search for moments of perfection that for most never come or are so rare and so euphoric to inspire desperation.
“A relationship” is not something that has gotten a lot of airtime in this discussion, but that doesn’t make it any less potent or provocative, especially in the context of this tennis love triangle that is all about the often-toxic interactions between people and within the sport. And that dynamic is what drew screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes to tackle this project in the first place.
“There’s such a deep intimacy that gets created on the court, because for however many hours it takes to play a match, you’re so totally focussed on this other person,” says Kuritzkes, who played some as a child but became obsessed with the sport after watching the 2018 U.S. 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 that you can trick them, because that’s how you win points in tennis: you trick somebody. That requires a deep knowledge of them.”
Zendaya and Josh O’Connor form two corners of a tennis love triangle (Niko Tavernise / Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)
In an interview last weekend, Kuritzkes described his special fascination with watching matches where one player is completely comfortable treating the initial games, or even the first set as an exercise in information gathering, even if it means losing for a while. Think Novak Djokovic in basically any five-set match against a first-time opponent: he might muddle his way to 6-6, in a surprisingly ungainly, even amateurish wrestle with the opponent and himself. But he’s not struggling, he’s computing, and then he wins seven points in a tiebreak and then two more sets to devastatingly unveil his analysis.
If he loses the first, he is very likely to prove that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
“It is his own kind of mind game that he’s doing, right?” Kuritzkes says of 24-time Grand Slam champion Djokovic. “He’s letting that guy know, ‘I’m not afraid to lose a set just to find something out about how you play’. That’s an interpersonal relationship, and it’s very intimate and very charged.”
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Tennis snobs are going fire their usual complaints at Challengers, about how the combination of the actors and their body doubles are poor facsimiles of the greatest players on the earth.
(Memo to those tennis snobs: so are you, and everyone else who is not an elite player. Get over it.)
This happens every time a tennis movie, quasi or otherwise, comes out, whether it’s Wimbledon, a Kirsten Dunst vehicle from 2004, Battle of The Sexes, about Billie Jean King’s showdown with Bobby Riggs from 2017, or the Oscar-winner King Richard, about the making of the Williams sisters from 2021.
In this case, there’s only so much even Brad Gilbert — the legend of American tennis who has coached Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick and Coco Gauff to Grand Slam titles and got the actors in Challengers to treat racket and ball as they might baseball bat and pinata — could do.
It is odd to see practice scenes where Faist and Zendaya do 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 fine. And Zendaya certainly dedicated herself to getting to grips with the unique footwork patterns and body movements of top players:
Zendaya training for ‘Challengers’ with stunt double Kara Hall Wangler. pic.twitter.com/pWc7r40zt3
— Zendaya Updates (@Zendaya_Updated) April 23, 2024
As she said of the film during a press conference over the weekend, “I couldn’t define what kind of movie it was like; it was funny, so funny, but I wouldn’t say it was a comedy, but there was drama, but I wouldn’t say it was just a drama, and it had tennis, but it wasn’t like a sports movie.”
As the rivalry between O’Connor’s and Faist’s characters plays out and the love triangle involving Zendaya’s evolves, it’s hard not to wonder why these characters are tennis players at all. Could they just as easily have been rival musicians, or mathematicians, or writers?
Possibly.
And yet the journey that the film follows, from the moment Kuritzkes began to conceive it to a marketing campaign that has involved Zendaya showing up at tennis tournaments in Indian Wells and Monte Carlo wearing tennis-style dresses and shoes with heels tipped by tennis balls, has never strayed far from this beguiling game, its idiosyncrasies and its contradictions.
Zendaya’s Challengers campaign leans into the iconography of the sport (Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
Back to that 2018 U.S. Open final. Williams was trying to win the record-tying 24th Grand Slam singles title she would never capture. Osaka, who had burst onto the scene that year, was having her way with Williams and won in straight sets, 6-2, 6-4 — but the only thing anyone will remember is Williams blowing a gasket when the chair 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.
Kuritzkes spent years not paying attention to, or even really thinking about, tennis. He had played as a child in and around Los Angeles, a hotbed for young tennis talent. Everyone seemed like they were better than he was, because, well, they were. No shame in that.
Then he found himself watching that U.S. Open final almost by accident and seeing Williams’ meltdown because, she said, the chair umpire had unjustifiably accused her of cheating.
Kuritzkes was dumbfounded by the interpersonal logistics and consequences of the moment.
You’re all alone on your side of the court, and there’s this one other person in a massive tennis stadium who cares as much about what happens to you 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 is 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 the two of you, or the person on the other side of the net, or both?
How do you have that conversation?
Kuritzkes started toying with those ideas. He also started watching a lot of tennis.
Another match he vividly remembers is the 2019 Wimbledon final between Djokovic and Roger Federer. Djokovic won in a fifth-set tiebreak, back when that only happened when the final-set score reached 12-12. As Federer squandered two match points at 8-7, and the match ticked on into the tennis equivalent of penalty kicks in soccer, the camera kept flashing to Federer’s wife, Mirka. Her own tennis career was cut short because of an injury; she then helped her husband become one the great players in history — not unlike the arc of Zendaya’s character in Challengers.
“She was, like, pulling her hair out and I couldn’t figure out why,” he says.
“Because in my mind, I was like, ‘Well, he’s got 20 Slams, you guys have all the money in the world. What’s so stressful right now about this? This should just be another day at the office?’”
At the Australian Open the next year, Kirtzkes was watching the Swiss great again.
Federer was playing journeyman American Tennys Sandgren in the quarterfinals. While an ageing, banged-up Federer was fending off seven match points on his way to an arduous five-set win, Kuritzkes saw a battle of existential proportions.
Sandgren played the match in goofy shorts and a sleeveless shirt with logos slapped on it to earn him some quick bucks at the last minute, while Federer looked his usual perfect self despite raging against the dying of his light.
Two players at the opposite ends of the sport — or, at least, that’s how he imagined they were seeing it.
“It felt like both of these guys, in their own way, were playing for their lives,” Kuritzkes says. “And the reason for that was that Federer knew, ‘If I can’t beat this guy, my career is over’, and Sandgren knew, ‘If I can’t beat him now, when he’s injured, my career is over’. And so it felt like both of them had so much at stake in this match personally, about their lives, about the trajectory of their lives, that they were both at this existential moment.”
Sometimes existential moments really are moments. Federer lost in the next round, never played again in Australia, and barely played after that tournament, before succumbing to a knee injury in 2021 after losing his final competitive set in singles 6-0, on Centre Court at Wimbledon, to Hubert Hurkacz.
Sandgren has made little notable noise since that day that doesn’t involve anti-vaccination declarations, or empathy for protestors who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
A tennis relationship, or something like it, writ large and small.
(Top photo: Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)
