The opponent’s ball lands short and the woman in black steps into the court to attack it as she has countless times before. But this time her ferocious forehand finds the net. The game, set and match are over. A collective sigh goes up from the vast crowd, followed by a reluctant but resounding cheer. Tears will follow and thousands of articles will be written. The woman is Serena Williams, the match at the 2022 US Open her last as a professional tennis player. Even those with zero interest in the sport know her name and recognise her greatness.
But who was the other woman on the court that day? Only devout tennis nerds will know the answer and few besides them will recognise the name Ajla Tomljanović, even if the Australian is a three-time Grand Slam quarter-finalist and hardly a newcomer.
This is the problem facing tennis today: a handful of household names who have hogged the limelight for two decades are slowly bowing out, to be replaced by newer ones unfamiliar to most of us. Last year we kissed goodbye not only to one Williams (older sister Venus forges on at the age of 42) but also to Roger Federer, perhaps the most beloved player of all. Meanwhile, Rafael Nadal is now asked so often about calling it quits that he quipped last week: “Every time I come to a press conference it seems that I have to retire.” Novak Djokovic may soon be the last active representative of this fab four, who between them have won a preposterous 86 Grand Slam tournaments and counting.
To put it simply: how on earth do you follow that?
The custodians of tennis’s future are hoping that at least part of the answer lies in the new Netflix series Break Point. Released today, on the eve of the first Grand Slam tournament of the year, the Australian Open, which begins on Monday, it follows a clutch of male and female competitors over the course of last year, its aim to excite interest in some of those who are not all-time greats. Not yet, anyway.
Tomljanović is among those featured, paired with her then boyfriend, Italy’s Matteo Berrettini, who reached the Wimbledon final in 2021. Others include fast-rising American Taylor Fritz, gifted young Canadian Félix Auger-Aliassime, hard-hitting Spaniard Paula Badosa and Tunisia’s Ons Jabeur, the first Arab player to reach a Grand Slam final. What it captures, above all, is the relentless grind of professional tennis, a sport that demands players play as many as six matches a week and rewards them with an improbably short off-season. The effects on body and mind can be punishing.
Break Point is the work of Box to Box Films, the same stable that produced Formula 1: Drive to Survive, a roaring success that has helped win a new audience for F1 racing by focusing on the sport’s personalities and inner tensions rather than its technical minutiae. Now four seasons deep, the show is credited with having boosted F1 TV viewership nearly 50 per cent worldwide since it began. In the US, where F1 was previously a niche sport, rights holder ESPN has gone from paying $5mn annually to between $75mn and $90mn.
Tennis would dearly love a similar boost. In the US, its TV viewing figures slumped in a period when American players won fewer big titles. It is more than 20 years since the heydays of Sampras and Agassi, let alone Connors and McEnroe. An American man has not won a Grand Slam since Andy Roddick in 2003. Last year saw some signs of recovery: Serena Williams’s career-ending defeat was the most-watched US Open match in seven years.
“Americans tend to stand behind their teams, their athletes,” says Micky Lawler, president of the Women’s Tennis Association. “So when you have American athletes leading the charge, the sport does very well. With Serena retiring, she leaves a big void.”
No one knows whether lightning will strike a second time with Break Point but there is at least now a rod to catch it if it does. “F1 was this new, shiny, sexy proposition that a lot of people got behind because of Drive to Survive,” says Lawler. “So I think Break Point will help us a lot in the US.”
Tennis snobs are already sneering at the prospect — they of course followed all the events covered in the series last year — but the cognoscenti are not the target audience. The aim is to appeal to the casual fan and potential convert. Executive producer James Gay-Rees, whose CV also includes Asif Kapadia’s acclaimed sports documentaries Senna and Diego Maradona, explains the rationale.
“Most people will never get close to driving an F1 car — it’s fucking terrifying — but most of us have played tennis on some level at some point,” he says. “Sometimes you have just a little purple patch for 10 minutes when it all clicks. And you know how frustrating it can be as well.” By focusing on some of the top players in the game, the idea was “to make a series which shows you exactly how hard it is to do what they do”.
The series does this with an approach that owes as much to reality TV as documentary. In each episode, a narrative is constructed around one or two players at a particular tournament. We see them train, train some more and train harder, but there are also cosy interludes at home with families and partners.
The mood often veers closer to the desolate chill of Ingmar Bergman than the fist-pumping triumphalism of Rocky. We see the hope in players’ eyes as they ready themselves for a match. Then we watch it fade on court — our new knowledge of their backgrounds adding pathos — before they disconsolately pack up their belongings and head to the next event.
“We prepared them for that,” says series showrunner Kari Lia. “We said, ‘We are going to be with you when you win, and we’re going to be with you when you lose. And you are going to lose more than you win.’”
She describes one scene capturing Tomljanović after a particularly gruesome defeat. “She’s there crying in the hallway. It’s really raw. And it was important for us to include in the film, because losing is a part of playing tennis. As Taylor [Fritz] says in episode three, at every tournament you have 128 players and there are 127 losers by the end of it.”
Tennis last year was not short of dramatic episodes: the will-they-won’t-they nail-biter of unvaccinated Djokovic’s deportation from Australia, then the exclusion of Russian and Belarusian players from Wimbledon. And later those emotional goodbyes, Federer and Nadal clasping hands as they sobbed through the former’s farewell ceremony at September’s Laver Cup.
Yet in Break Point the very biggest names feature only peripherally. Federer was injured for most of the 2022 season and Williams and Nadal clearly had no need for the extra publicity. Nor did Djokovic, who has anyway for some time been followed by his own cameras for a long-promised but delayed documentary.
Also absent is the new world number one, 19-year-old Spanish phenomenon Carlos Alcaraz, who claimed his first Grand Slam title at last year’s US Open. (On the women’s side, Poland’s currently indomitable Iga Świątek, already a three-time Grand Slam champ at 21, is due to appear later in the series.) That some of the top players do not appear in Break Point reflects the fragmented nature of the sport. The bigger the asset, the more closely guarded they will be by their management teams.
This may change over time. Current F1 world champion Max Verstappen refused to take part in the past three seasons of Drive to Survive because of what he called “faking rivalries” but will feature in the upcoming fifth season. The Dutchman was not the only one to voice concerns. F1 fans decried a less desirable “Drive to Survive effect” that they say influenced race directors to steer Grands Prix towards more sensational outcomes. Tennis observers will be scrutinising tournaments and players for any similar grandstanding. (A Box to Box series entitled Full Swing, following professional golfers, has also just been announced for February.)
What we get for now in Break Point is a series of mini-dramas, such as one involving Auger-Aliassime at last year’s French Open. In the fourth round he faced Rafael Nadal, 14-time winner of the tournament, on the red clay of Paris — arguably the toughest challenge in all of tennis. But what adds further intrigue on screen is the presence of Auger-Aliassime’s coach, who happens to be Toni Nadal, Rafa’s uncle and former coach.
The camera captures some deliciously awkward moments. Rafa coming off court after his previous match to see Toni, quickly switching to Mallorquí and asking: “Are you even allowed to be on this side?” Later we see the no-nonsense Toni looking uncharacteristically bashful when Auger-Aliassime broaches the subject of his next opponent. But asked by press whom he will be supporting, Toni is his usual straightforward self: he wants Rafa to win. “I’d be surprised if that relationship survives,” says one commentator.
Remarkably, it did, and Auger-Aliassime now shrugs off the incident. When we speak via video call, I ask whether, given all the pressures that he already faces as a tennis player, he thought twice before agreeing to let the cameras in.
“I was thinking about it, for sure. I was like, I’m still young, is it too much for me? Am I going to be able to just focus on my tennis? Is it going to take me out of my habits? But I always kept in mind the bigger picture, which is, OK, it’s annoying that they’re filming. But this is actually something that can be good for tennis, for the future, for new fans.”
As well as such moments of tennis-related drama, however, more troubling events have bedevilled the men’s game in recent years. In 2020, Olga Sharypova, ex-girlfriend of former world number two Alexander Zverev, made allegations of domestic violence against the German star. He has repeatedly denied the claims. A promised investigation by the men’s players governing the body, the ATP, is yet to materialise, but Zverev is not featured in Break Point. When the Netflix series was mentioned during a press conference last January, he appeared surprised, suggesting that he had not been invited to participate.
But another player who has made the cut is Nick Kyrgios. Known as the flashy Australian bad boy of tennis, Kyrgios, now 27, has a large fan following and an equally large army of detractors. Some are justifiably outraged by his verbal abuse of officials and crowds; others, on Twitter, are nakedly racist. The first episode of Break Point focuses almost entirely on him, his early defeat in the singles competition at the Australian Open and eventual triumph in the doubles with childhood friend Thanasi Kokkinakis. What goes unmentioned is that since then Kyrgios has been accused of assault by an ex-girlfriend, Chiara Passari. His lawyers have said that he is “committed to addressing any and all allegations once clear” and he is due in court next month.
Gay-Rees assures me that this is addressed in a later episode in the series (only the first five of 10 have been made available so far), that players “didn’t have any editorial control” and that “there were no no-go areas”. For the moment, however, Kyrgios seems to be enjoying the experience. Never one to shrink from playing the troll, he last week tweeted: “Haha so after all this, all the media, journalism saying how bad I am for the sport, disrespecting the game & just a pure villain, I am going to be the number 1 episode on Netflix . . . to grow our fan base, basically trying to put tennis on the map again.”
One aspect of the game that has been gaining more attention in recent years is the mental health of players. Kyrgios has been candid in the past about having experienced self-harm and suicidal thoughts. In Break Point, the subject of mental health arises most starkly in an episode featuring Paula Badosa, 25, who rose to world number two last April and has also spoken openly about suffering periods of anxiety and depression. The series catches up with her at the 2022 Madrid Open where she suffers an early defeat. Usually this is where tennis coverage ends — to the winner belong the spoils and the cameras.
Not here: instead we see a stricken Badosa and her coaching team attempting to pick up the pieces. She tells her team that she can quickly slip from feeling fine on court to “Get me out of here. I want to die.” Given the ruthlessly competitive nature of the sport, did she have doubts about showing such vulnerability to her rivals?
“Of course you have those thoughts,” she tells me via video call from Brisbane. “I don’t know if this is going to be OK, to show that part of myself. But, on the other hand, I just want to be honest and to normalise a little bit all these situations to help other athletes.”
Those unfamiliar with the game might expect such troubles to affect only the players unable to find success at the highest level. Not so. Naomi Osaka won four Grand Slam titles in four years before opening up about having “suffered long bouts of depression” over that same period. However, her attempt to pull out of mandatory media assignments at the 2021 French Open was met with a furious backlash from the powers that be. The tennis world was not ready to give any leeway to players citing mental-health concerns.
Badosa expresses her sympathy with Osaka and her wariness over dealing with certain sections of the press. “The kinds of questions that they ask you sometimes are not the correct ones — and how they do it. It’s part of the job, but maybe they should learn to empathise more with you when you’re having a tough moment, passing through anxiety or depression. Don’t be so hard on athletes, because we’re not robots.”
For Break Point it is early days, and for many of the players it features time is still on their side. It is unlikely any of them will match the records of the outgoing legends of the game but Badosa for one is sanguine.
“What we saw, I think it’s very difficult to repeat that,” she says. “It’s a generation that I grew up with, they were my inspiration. So of course it’s going to be very sad when it’s finished, but tennis is always evolving . . . I can see change. Everyone is getting stronger, faster, more aggressive. Now you can see women serving at 200km per hour when before it was only Serena.”
For a suitable analogy we could do worse than look to tennis’s unusual and ingenious scoring system. However well or badly the first set has gone, once it is over, the scoreboard resets to love all — a clean slate. So it might be when the old guard is gone.
“We move on quite quickly, actually,” observes Auger-Aliassime. “In life sometimes you think things can’t be replaced or they’ll be there for ever. But everything moves on and you learn that the sport is the biggest thing — you’re never going to be as big as the sport. And so you need to be grateful and enjoy the moment.”
The first five episodes of ‘Break Point’ are on Netflix from January 13
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