Tennis is an elegant and simple sport. Players stand on opposite sides of a rectangle, divided by a net that can’t be crossed. The gameplay is full of invisible geometry: Viewers might trace parabolas, angles, and lines depending on how the players move and where they hit the ball. It’s an ideal representation of conflict, a perfect stage for pitting one competitor against another, so it’s no wonder that the game comes to stand in for all sorts of different things off the court. Google tennis metaphor and you’ll learn how marriage is like the call and response of a rally; how business is like trying to find the best angle on your opponent; how in life it’s sometimes important to “come to the net.”
Naturally, the protagonists of Luca Guadagnino’s film Challengers, whose entire existence revolves around tennis, also make sense of themselves through the rules of the game. To hear them speak to one another is to experience their monomania: Everything they really mean is hidden beneath layers of tennis puns and analogies, and the lines between life and the game become as imperceptible as those on a well-used clay court. If this is a movie about love or desire or anything else, it’s only by way of tennis.
The film’s story unfolds during the final of the fictional Phil’s Tire Town Challenger tennis tournament, held in New Rochelle, New York. Via flashbacks interspersed throughout the match, we learn about the rivalry between the prim champion Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and scruffy down-on-his-luck Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor)—as well as their relationships with Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), a once-promising player whose career fell apart due to injury. Although Art and Tashi are now married, the film slowly reveals the evolution of these relationships. We see how they all met at a sponsor party during the U.S. Open Junior tournament, where Tashi promised her phone number to the winner of a match between the two boys, who at the time were best friends, declaring her desire to watch some “good fucking tennis.” We see how Patrick and Tashi were a short-lived couple and had an affair long after they broke up, and how Art’s irrepressible flirtation with Tashi led to a career-defining romantic and coaching partnership between the two of them. As we realize how much of their lives are tied up in the Phil’s Tire Town final, every glance, serve, and motion becomes fraught with meaning.
The narrative progresses in a way that’s not unlike John McPhee’s 1969 book, Levels of the Game, which recounts a single match played between two American players, Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, in the semifinals of the 1968 U.S. Open. Between McPhee’s descriptions of various points played during the match, he travels back to key moments in each competitor’s life, narrating the personal and social conditions that shaped their respective playing styles and dispositions on the court—and how the two rivals see each other.
For McPhee, “a person’s tennis game begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and characteristics of play.” Graebner sees Ashe’s short strokes and risk taking as an extension of his “loose” lifestyle, equating his confidence on the court with the rising social position of Black Americans. To Ashe, Graebner’s cautious and predictable play style is indicative of his traditional values and conservative, family-oriented life: He calls it “Republican tennis.” Although in some ways it was just another meeting between two longtime rivals, the match comes to stand in for competing cultural currents in America, the civil-rights struggles of the ’50s and ’60s looming in the background.
A few years later, another match took on post-1960s gender politics in a famously theatrical showdown. The “Battle of Sexes” match in 1973, between Billie Jean King and then-retired Bobby Riggs, has since been mythologized as a turning point for women’s sports. If the social allegory of the Ashe-Graeber match was subtextual, the one in this spectacle—which ended in a decisive victory for King over the cartoonishly chauvinistic Riggs—was glaringly explicit. At a time when women’s liberation was becoming a force that threw all sorts of conventions into question, and plenty of people were for or against the gains of the movement, seeing the debate represented by a game of tennis surely had a comforting appeal. For those with more regressive beliefs, rooting for Bobby was certainly easier than really articulating a justification for maintaining massive pay disparities between men and women, both within and outside of professional tennis.
In Challengers, the topic of tennis plays a similar orienting role for three players whose “only skill in life is hitting a ball with a racket,” according to Tashi. Talking with Patrick and Art after she meets them, Tashi describes tennis as a “relationship.” On the court, she understands her opponent—and the crowd understands them both, watching them almost fall in love as they battle back and forth. For Tashi who has nothing but tennis to talk about, the tennis metaphor works because seeing things as a game based on one-on-one competition, long-standing rivalries, and extended strategic play makes intuitive sense. Although pretty much everything else in her life might be complicated, tennis is not.
But this assured confidence doesn’t follow the players off the court. Within their love triangle, tension arises with the dawning recognition that in a one-on-one sport, there’s always another person who doesn’t have a place on the court. Save for the night they meet, when Tashi induces Art and Patrick to kiss each other for her entertainment, the three of them rarely engage with one another at the same time: Someone is always watching from the stands, whether literally or metaphorically. Tashi’s solution to Patrick and Art’s competing interest—giving her number to the winner of their match—doesn’t stop the loser from wanting to continue play, of course. Life isn’t that simple.
Nor are the boundaries between sport and play so neatly defined. During Patrick and Tashi’s brief romance, a post-coital conversation seamlessly transitions into a discussion about Patrick’s poor performance as a pro, and eventually becomes a referendum on why their relationship doesn’t work. Confused, and trying to make sense of it all as their banter swiftly changes definitions, Patrick asks: “Are we still talking about tennis?” “We’re always talking about tennis,” Tashi replies. Frustrated, Patrick tersely retorts: “Can we not?”
What would it be for them to not talk about tennis? As the linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.” In other words, we’re always talking about things in terms of other things—even if it’s not always as obvious as it is in Challengers. Metaphors are more than just a poetic device; they’re fundamental to the way language is structured. Complex ideas almost always elude easy explanation, so we reach for metaphors, either consciously or not. When tennis represents these various concepts—love, gender, race—they become easier to discuss due to the sport’s inherent legibility. No matter what issue is at stake, or how grand it may be, it can always be reduced to an individual’s performance on the court.
And as a sport, tennis is versatile enough to be a playful and rich metaphor in Challengers. While Patrick is still dating Tashi, and Art is transparently trying to steal his best friend’s girl, Patrick playfully accuses Art of playing “percentage tennis”—a patient strategy of hitting low-risk shots and waiting for your opponent to mess up. It’s something unique to the game, as it wouldn’t really make sense in the context of other individual sports like boxing, track, or bowling. As we learn, it’s also not a good strategy for love—because although Art does make his move once Patrick inevitably screws up, his unflagging commitment isn’t enough to make Tashi genuinely love him.
On the night before the Phil’s Tire Town final, Art asks for Tashi’s permission to retire once the season is over. Art knows that this would be the end of their professional relationship—he would no longer be able to play dutiful pupil to Tashi. But it might also be the end of whatever spark animated their love in the first place, as you can’t play “good fucking tennis” in retirement. Tashi says she will leave Art if he doesn’t beat Patrick in the final. Tired of playing, but unable to escape the game, Art curls up in his wife’s lap and cries.
The next day, as the final nears its conclusion, tensions run high. Art has just discovered the truth about Patrick and Tashi’s affair, and the match goes into a tiebreaker to decide the final set. After an intense rally, Art jumps for a smash and falls over the net, landing in Patrick’s arms. As she watches her two lovers embrace, Tashi stands up and screams “Come on!” with a passion not seen since early in her career. It doesn’t matter who wins. Lost in a moment of catharsis, they’re finally not talking about tennis anymore.
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