If you aren’t watching tennis right now, you need to be.
Over the past few years, there has been a major surge in tennis popularity. Over the pandemic, it was one of the few sports that could be played socially distanced, making it one of the only things available to watch. At about the same time, the resurgence of ‘preppy’ fashion has made playing tennis as stylish as ever. Tennis isn’t just for the country club elite anymore and has become more inclusive.
On the outside, tennis can sometimes seem like a drag. With matches lasting between two and five hours, a complicated scoring system, and individual points that look remarkably similar, it’s understandably a hard sell.
However, a new face of tennis has emerged, with it being quite different than the stereotypical upper crust players of yore, with Americans like Frances Tiafoe paving the way for a more diverse sport. With the semi-recent retirements of legends Serena Williams and Roger Federer, the looming end of Rafael Nadal’s career, and the skyrocketing success of young talents like Carlos Alcaraz, means the battle for the top places is more varied than ever.
Netflix saw an opportunity to capitalise on this beautiful intersection of availability and trendiness and came out with Break Point in 2022. Break Point is essentially Drive to Survive for the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tour. The show follows a handful of tennis’ top stars through a season on the tour. I was already mad about the sport before the show, but once I learned that the players on the men’s and women’s tours date each other, I was hooked.
Tennis, like any individual sport, attracts players with intense personalities who love and sometimes crave attention from crowds. Tantrums are not uncommon, and even before Netflix created a reality show about the sport, it was easy to create drama on the court. Watching grown men smash their racquets against the ground until they resemble tumbleweeds is always a treat. Plus, tennis is essentially a year-round sport, so you don’t ever have to endure a months-long off-season.
In the age of social media, young tennis stars are somewhat like internet celebrities. Italian hotshot Jannik Sinner is the face of Gucci, Greece’s Stefanos Tsitsipas and his Spanish girlfriend, Paula Badosa (who plays on the women’s tour), have a shared Instagram account with nearly 100,000 followers , and 21-year-old American Ben Shelton has become the subject of CapCut edits everywhere. It has never been more fun to be a fan of tennis.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a beginner’s group lesson that I’m late to.
“Frances Tiafoe” by mirsasha is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.