Break Point faults
Park MacDougald
Men’s tennis has a problem. For 20 years, the sport has been dominated by the three best, and most popular, players of all time. One barely needs to list their names: Roger, Rafa, and Novak are as ubiquitous as smartphones and have been around for longer. Their statistics beggar belief: 63 of the past 77 Grand Slams at the time of my writing and a combined 892 weeks, or around 17 years, ranked No. 1 in the world. The fourth-best player of the last two decades, Andy Murray, managed three Slams and 41 weeks in the top spot. And Andy Murray was good.
But the “Big Three” won’t be around forever. Roger Federer retired last September at age 41; Rafael Nadal (36) looks slower and more injury prone with every tournament; and Novak Djokovic, though still the best player in the world, is only 16 months from turning 37, the age past which only one man has ever won a Slam — once, in 1972. Will fans still care as much about tennis once their heroes are gone? Will they shell out for the endorsed rackets and sneakers, posters, T-shirts, hats, and bobbleheads? Will they pay upward of $1,000 for lower-level seats to a major semifinal when they are likely to see not Rafa and Novak but Karen Khachanov and Jiri Lehecka?
The Association of Tennis Professionals has spent a great deal of time and energy attempting to market its “Next Gen,” but thus far, these young would-be stars have mostly failed to shine. 2022 U.S. Open champion Carlos Alcaraz (19) is a genuinely electric talent, and the 2021 champion, Daniil Medvedev (26), has matured into a likable antihero. Beyond that, it’s pretty much a wasteland. For the casual fan, the question hanging over nearly every tournament now is the one I get from my relatives every July during Wimbledon: “Wait, who are these guys on TV?”
This is the question at the heart of Break Point, a new Netflix documentary series produced in collaboration with the men’s and women’s professional tours. The first five episodes (more will be released in June) follow a collection of good-but-not-yet-great players — Nick Kyrgios, Taylor Fritz, Matteo Berrettini, Casper Ruud, and Felix Auger-Aliassime on the men’s side and Maria Sakkari, Paula Badosa, Ons Jabeur, and Ajla Tomljanovic on the women’s — as they compete on the first leg of the 2022 tennis season, including in the Australian and French Opens. We see the stars and their coaches, families, and boyfriends and girlfriends as they flit between hotel rooms and practice courts, struggling to push on in a lonely sport in which the dominant experience is repeated and often emotionally devastating failure.
Break Point is a Netflix product through and through. It’s slickly put together, with beautiful aerial footage of Paris in June and Melbourne in a January thunderstorm. And the show’s producers have been granted an enviable degree of access to a sport in which the stars are often private and generally mistrustful of the media. Sometimes, the results are more or less null — Ruud, for instance, is so drearily respectful of his opponents that you almost wish someone would slap him just to see if he’s capable of anger. Usually, they’re simply banal — awkward couples’ arguments, folding laundry, killing time on stationary bikes. But a few times, some genuine emotion breaks through, as when we witness a dejected Tomljanovic berating herself in a side tunnel after a bad loss to Badosa. “It’s like heavyweight against lightweight,” she tells her coach. “What’s the point of being out there if I don’t believe I can win? Like, it’s easy. I just retire.” It’s a good moment precisely because you feel she’s forgotten the camera is there. What tennis player, of any level, hasn’t felt that same self-loathing, that desire to forever quit the game that brings you so much pain?
Where Break Point stumbles, however, is on the question of who it is for. The show is produced by the team behind the popular Formula 1: Drive to Survive docuseries, and while executive producer James Gay-Rees claims to “love” tennis, you wouldn’t know it from his show, which feels less like a tennis series and more like a generic sports series that just so happens to be about tennis. To take one irritating example (and an ironic one, given the show’s title), the match play sequences provide the score only in games (2-1, 5-5, etc.) without ever explaining the concept of a service break or why being down 5-4 on serve is completely different than trailing 5-4 down a break. (In the former scenario, you are effectively tied; in the latter, your opponent is serving for the set.)
This is not particularly esoteric stuff — any casual fan would know it, and it takes perhaps 90 seconds to explain to the uninitiated. The decision to ignore it is simply confusing. For those who know what they are looking at, it is baffling to watch Break Point glide over gut-wrenching points and massive momentum swings without comment, as if the tennis itself were a distraction from the more fascinating business of what the players ate for lunch. And for those who know very little about tennis, Break Point makes next to no effort to convey its drama and beauty, which raises the question of why they would want to spend five hours watching not-quite-star athletes talk about such an apparently boring sport.
It is always a difficult business trying to film (or write) something about a niche sport like tennis. Do you try to please the nerds and die-hards, or do you try to appeal to a wider audience of people with no particular interest in your subject? The best sports movies and shows do both, giving the fans something to dig into while demonstrating to the nonfans what makes the sport so appealing to its devotees. Break Point goes for the latter and ends up accomplishing neither. But, as in tennis, there’s always next season.
Park MacDougald is the deputy literary editor of Tablet magazine and a former Life and Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.