Deep Tennis with Steve Tignor

(Deep Tennis is a new No Mas column from Tennis Magazine writer and editor Steve Tignor. Steve will be answering our incredibly deep questions about all things tennis. If you want to ask Steve a Deep Tennis question, send it to me at [email protected] and I will decide if it is deep enough for his attention. Keep in mind, I will only be forwarding questions to him that are seriously effin deep.)

Steve, last week on Oscar Sunday we did a retrospective on all of the great boxing movies that have won Academy Awards. That got us to thinking about sports movies in general, which eventually brought us around to the paucity of good tennis movies. In your opinion, what is the all-time best tennis movie, and why in general do tennis movies suck so bad?”

The two best movies with tennis as a major motif, I think, are Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” from the 1950s, and last year’s “The Squid and the Whale.” (Caveat: I’ haven’t yet seen Donal Logue’s low-budget buddy comedy “Tennis, Anyone,” but something tells me it will never be described as “Hitchcockian.”)

“Strangers on a Train” gets the old amateur-era tennis player just right. The lead character is an aristocratic type—the cardigan-wearing, wood-racquet-sporting, not-a-hair-out-of-place kind of guy who is now universally mocked, but who was once someone Americans envied and aspired to be. And that’s the theme of the movie, as a creepy recluse tries to destroy the tennis player’s life. There are long, credible tennis scenes on a court that’s supposed to be the stadium at Forest Hills.

“The Squid and the Whale” is a flawed but cool indie movie from 2005, set in Brooklyn in the 1980s. This one captures the brief period when tennis was hip among bohemian intellectual types. The local teaching pro, Billy Baldwin, is the best thing in the movie—after an author/professor lectures him on the beauty of the one-handed backhand, Baldwin gives him a lesson in the reality of tennis: Underneath the aesthetics, it’s really a brutish game of force. They play the most hilariously clunky—i.e., real—tennis ever put on screen. (Then Baldwin has sex with the guy’s wife later in the movie.) You can tell someone involved with the writing knew the sport—when the female lead character comes to watch her son, she doesn’t say she wants to see him “play,” she says she wants to see him “hit.” The lingo is just right.

But there’s still something wrong with the tennis in this movie, and it points to why there are so few decent movies featuring the sport. The setting for “Squid” is New York, 1986-87. You wouldn’t know that from the tennis scenes—Baldwin dresses in headbands and tight Fila that had gone out of style five years earlier; the professor references Borg when he talks about the beauty of the game, even though Borg had retired four years earlier; and one of the kids in the movie uses a marker to write the word “Vitas” on his arm. In 1986, Vitas Gerulaitis was a has-been; 1987 was the beginning of Agassi and his denim shorts. (“The Royal Tenenbaums” commits the same sin, putting the star player in a 70s-era headband.)

In other words, tennis in the popular imagination is stuck in two places: the preppy, cardiganed 50s, and the Borg-headband-longhair 70s. There hasn’t been a way to make tennis relevant or cool onscreen since, because it hasn’t had a defining style in 30 years. (It’s hard to blame the “Squid” producers for going with Borg Fila instead of Agassi denim.) The latest tennis movie, “Wimbledon,” is typical—it has nothing to do with the sport. It’s “Rocky” and romance in white shorts, with no attempt to get the lingo, the culture, or even the modern style of play right.

Golf had a “Caddyshack” in the 70s, then a “Tin Cup” in the 90s, because the sport has been able to go from country-club to blue collar. From a pop-culture standpoint, tennis remains lost in two pasts, one despised, the other clichéd.
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Steve Tignor is the executive editor of Tennis Magazine and the writer of a regular column on the Tennis website called The Wrap that also appears on ESPN.com. He was a four-time All-American tennis player at Swarthmore, a feat he somehow managed to accomplish despite keeping up a very demanding daily schedule of drinking a lot of Schlitz and discussing the nuances of Exile on Main Street with Large. He's also an accomplished music writer, and still a badass tennis player, as well as (we hear) being a monster on the squash court, all of which should serve us well come the first Inter-Blog Olympics.