Challengers: Zendaya and her tennis boys teach us a lesson about the sport

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…