Two years ago, Luca Guadagnino decided to ask the brave question, “What if tennis players could be cool? And also polyamorous?”
And thus, the film “Challengers” was born.
For one beautiful summer, people really resonated with two otherwise wildly unpopular things: non-monogamy and tennis. Tennis was the new sport for hot and chic people who have seen at least one A24 film.
Personally, I’m too monogamous to have any formative opinion on polyamory. To quote one of the great proverbs of our time: that’s not my circus and not my monkeys. On the other hand, I can attest to tennis fever. Searches for “adult tennis classes” were up 245 percent. Blood Orange’s “Uncle ACE,” the supplemental sound to the pivotal hotel scene, is one of his top 10 most streamed songs despite the album coming out in 2013. But let’s be real with ourselves: not many of us have thought about this movie since then. As time has passed, we’ve all gotten over our bouts of “Challengers” fever, and with it, we have also let tennis fade back into its quasi-obscurity, a relatively uncommon phenomenon for sports — but why?
To answer this question, you have to zoom out your thinking and ask: why do we like sports to begin with? Many, many years ago, it was cool to watch a guy fight a lion in a giant arena. It was cool to watch a guy throw a disc really, really far. And while these ideas still exist in the zeitgeist as we understand it, there is also the sentiment that the economy of our attention has shifted radically since. For a lot of people, it’s not enough for someone to be good at something anymore. We have to be able to personally attribute ourselves to the success of these athletes. Why cheer valiantly as your favorite gladiator beheads an animal they probably should have gone their entire lifetime without seeing when you can make a fancam or change your profile picture on Instagram to be a particularly flattering carving of Agathos the Destroyer?
In a more modern context, consider Olympic champion figure skater Alysa Liu. Undoubtedly, she is incredible in her skill as a figure skater, but people are more beguiled by her celebrity presence. People want to root for someone, not just a summation of statistics that make them the most Optimal Sports Player.
And you might be asking: what does that mean for tennis? To which I say: Have you ever been to a tennis game?
This semester, I’ve had a lot more time to invest in things that I enjoy, one of them being tennis. As a result, I’ve gone to two of this university’s tennis games to watch the men’s tennis team — the Comets — for the sole reason of theirs being the only side of the courts with seating. But this is far from a bad thing. I think that tennis is an incredibly compelling sport to watch, one that requires intense focus and admirable feats of endurance. The small morsels of emotion from any respective player after a winning or losing point are intoxicating to watch.
While I would watch these games, I would look out at the tennis player in front of me that represented UTD, and thus, in a small way, represented me, this student body, a living, breathing, racket-holding scion of this school. And yet, I felt a distance that felt foreign to the commonplace understanding of sports but was precedent in the world of watching tennis.
I wasn’t alone in feeling that way. The friends I brought to these games referred to watching these matches as going to “the boy zoo”, considering these games amount to essentially watching a bunch of guys play tennis behind a chain-link fence, unaware and unfeeling of the presence of any audience. Though men’s hockey has earned the title of “the boy aquarium”, the implications feel less harsh. When you go to an aquarium, you can go to those shallow pools and touch a stingray. If you’re at the aquarium and, ironically enough, hate fish, you can tap on the glass. All you do at the zoo is watch from a safe distance.
Though this was probably the last way the Comets would want to be referred to, I felt that there was some (unfortunate) merit in the nickname. What’s the difference between a fan and a passive watcher? Was this distance my fault or the sport’s?
For a while, I thought these questions would remain unanswered.
However, and I don’t know if you guys knew this (as this was news to me), but student athletes are, in fact, people that you can talk to. My foray into doing brave gestures such as being nice to people in the name of basic human decency is how I ended up at the Braum’s on Campbell with one of the tennis players for UTD’s men’s tennis team: psychology senior Benjamin Dubois, whom I only knew up until recently as “Ben from my writing workshop.”
In my conversation with Dubois, I’d found one central thread regarding the folly of tennis: a permeating sense of loneliness that the audience was only a proximal casualty of.
“The only people I’m allowed to talk to are my teammates,” Dubois said, “There have been occasions where I know people on the other team. For example, there was a girl on the other team who was playing [against] our women’s team. I knew her from Quebec when I was young. And then I can’t [talk to her] without my coach watching, because he would be really mad.”
This checked out. From what I had seen, the conversations within our team were mostly minimal and polite. And, in line with Dubois, any conversation between opposing teams was virtually non-existent. Suddenly, under the cheap fluorescence and the loudest iteration of “Yellow” by Coldplay as presented by the Braum’s overhead speakers, I understood what had made “Challengers” such a compelling tennis film: the interpersonality. I understood what this match meant to all parties involved. There was an incentive to root for someone, a desired outcome beyond the idea of one player being better at the sport than the other.
Of course, I’m not asking anyone on either of our tennis teams to start living a pained iteration of the polyamorous lifestyle and forgo their uniforms for all-Uniqlo-branded tennis garb because that is, firstly, incredibly preposterous and secondly, not necessary. Tennis can be a really fun sport despite all of these things, so long as you have that sense of interpersonal exchange, not just for the audience, but for the players as well. I learned this as I listened to Dubois reflect fondly on matches at schools where people did rally at tennis games.
“There’s sort of a division [between the player and the audience]. No one goes crazy. I mean, it does happen when you play the big teams,” Dubois said, “We play SMU sometimes, [the audience gets] pretty crazy, pretty fun. A lot of people don’t go to home matches also because it’s, you know, it’s tennis.”
I was intrigued by Dubois’s frankness in terms of the casual understanding of the sport. Of course, we must acknowledge that tennis has cemented itself as an athletic symbol of the bourgeois, though work is underway to make the sport more accessible. But even then, it’s hard to market tennis when so much of the air around it is saturated with the staunch politeness of wealth and an insularity wherein those who like to watch tennis also play it. Thinking back to the two mid-afternoons I spent watching two people lob a ball back and forth, I understood that there was a fascinating element of quick-thinking regarding what type of hit one should do, and thus, that tennis is a “mental sport.”
But that understanding isn’t there for the average person. It’s just two people hitting a ball back and forth. It’s this disparity that, in my mind, holds tennis back from stepping into the spotlight of the zeitgeist and further homogenizing into culture the way hockey and F-1 are beginning to. You don’t have to be a football player to enjoy watching football. You don’t have to be a baseball player to enjoy watching baseball. The same simply isn’t true of tennis.
Above all else, though, the institution of tennis has to acknowledge that it is a sense of community that is astringent to any casual enjoyment of sports. People watch sports because they want to watch people interact, but also because people want to ascribe to a cultural moniker. The individualism inherent in the sport — tennis as a team sport stops at the collegiate level — is what leads to a lack of general interest and, in turn, leads to a lack of revenue for tennis players when compared to other sports. We watch football because, in some respects, it’s the American thing to do. Dubois, who is Canadian, had a similar understanding.
“In Quebec, if you’re not a hockey player and you’re in school, you’re not gonna make friends, you know? So, you need to play hockey,” Dubois said. “Here in the U.S [specifically Texas], you have the Dallas Stars, and [the thinking is] that’s my team. [For tennis], this guy’s from my hometown. I’m gonna root for him. That’s all you have.”
But what can you, a UTD student, do? Do these changes have to come from the top? Sure, the CEO of Big Tennis might one day decide that the white uniforms and polite, yet stiff-handed, clapping of it all is doing the sport no favors. But until then, while you could spend your time lobbying outside of the ATP and WTA headquarters, you could also just show up to our university’s tennis games and boo whenever the opposing teams loses, make posters, or even fancams of whichever player you decide you like most (So long as you have their expressed consent. Don’t record people without them knowing. That’s weird.)! Look up the opposing team, find their various social medias, and make incredibly pointed comments about their personal life!
You can even bring your friends, which guarantees you a good time —- especially if you’re unfamiliar with the mechanisms of the sport. Change is only ever the product of expressed interest. Investing your time in a tennis team is not only a fun way to expand your horizons, but it can also bring about necessary changes within the institutions of an incredible but overly traditional sport.
