Game, Set, Action: How tennis documentaries found the spotlight – and lost some teeth

Forgive yourself if you can’t keep track of all the tennis films out there at the moment.

Break Point, the Netflix behind-the-scenes series, may have been canceled earlier this year, but anyone who thought that might be a death-knell for tennis media was mistaken. Each month seemingly, and sometimes each week, yet another filmed player documentary drops on a streaming service that you may or may not subscribe to. The success of Challengers, the Zendaya-led tennis movie that is not really a tennis movie at all, has put stock back into the sport’s cultural currency, and the real-life stars of the sport are in on it too.

The latest and biggest entry into the tennis media canon is Federer: Twelve Final Days, which offers an inside look at the last sliver of the Swiss great’s wondrous career.

Many tears are shed, as Federer, his family, and the contemporary greats of tennis reflect on what it means to retire from a sport whose pinnacle you have largely defined for more than half your life. Directed by Asif Kapadia and Joe Sabia, it opens a window into the emotional toll that retirement took on Federer and his loved ones, especially wife Mirka, as he bowed out at the Laver Cup in September 2022 alongside his friends and rivals, hoisted into the air on the shoulders of those who spent nearly two decades trying, and mostly failing, to beat him.

Federer is a leader in the sport, but he is anything but a pioneer in this media environment.

Tennis players, as international celebrities who appeal to both men and women, have been gobbling up film deals in recent years.

Netflix has a camera crew following Carlos Alcaraz these days and will be releasing a film about his rise in the coming years. Novak Djokovic has been developing a documentary — including purported conversations with the team behind Michael Jordan’s The Last Dance — for years.

Naomi Osaka, the four-time Grand Slam champion who is mounting her comeback following maternity leave, first released a TV series about her journey in 2021. Ons Jabeur dropped a documentary in January — and if you want to know what it’s like for an athlete to be forced to re-watch one of the most painful moments of her career, check out Jabeur seeing herself lose a second consecutive Wimbledon final last year.

She doesn’t make it all the way through. “He wants to catch that part of me not wanting to watch it,” Jabeur said earlier this year of the film’s director. “It was, like, ‘OK, good job. You got the scene. Let’s move on’.” 

In 2022, John McEnroe released a quasi-documentary (his agent, Gary Swain, was an executive producer); Boris Becker participated in one last year. Iga Swiatek and her main sponsor, sportswear firm On, recently released a 10-minute film about her. Uninterrupted, a media strand that U.S. basketball star LeBron James and his agent Maverick Carter lead, will soon release Top Class Tennis, a series about the junior circuit, and next month Serena Williams and U.S. broadcaster ESPN will release an eight-part show about her life, titled In the Arena: Serena Williams.

Of course, Serena already participated in the production of King Richard, 2021’s Oscar-winning Will Smith movie about how her father made her and her sister, Venus, the two best tennis players in the world on the playground courts in Compton, California.

If there is a throughline to all this, it is the gauzy, invariably flattering presentation of nearly all the subjects, many of whom (or their agents) receive producing credits.

Becker is the exception: Alex Gibney, the Oscar-nominated director of 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room, paid the German for the time he spent sitting for interviews but was otherwise free to explore his marital infidelity and the financial malfeasance that landed him in a British prison. In an interview last year, Becker said he wanted it that way so the film had “maximum credibility”.

“Tennis is definitely having a moment where it’s transcending a lot into popular culture,” said Stuart Duguid, Osaka’s agent and business partner who has launched a production company with the Japanese-Haitian star, who lives in the U.S.

Thanks to changes in technology, the ongoing transition from supernovas to rising stars in tennis, a shift in who holds the power in media, and the aftermath of Break Point’s ultimate failure, that moment of transcendence also applies to the form, as the tennis “documentary” becomes an increasingly autobiographical pursuit, whose truth is in the hands of its stars.

All of this has come long after Dominic Thiem started posting videos about himself on YouTube in 2018.

Those videos of Thiem, sitting in front of a beige drape, telling the camera he wants people to understand all the work that goes into being a pro player seem like quaint slices of ancient history, from a time long before a year in which Zendaya started popping up at tournaments across the world in heels spiked with tennis balls; Nick Kyrgios brought Rainn Wilson and Gordon Ramsay to a video podcast; and Daria Kasatkina joined forces with partner and Olympic figure skater Natalia Zabiiako to rebrand her documentation of the day-to-day realities of life on the WTA Tour on YouTube with What The Vlog.

Theories abound on why this has come about, but changes in technology are probably the biggest driver, according to people involved with the projects.

Some 15 or 20 years ago, if top players wanted to tell their story in the middle of their careers, they would hire a ghostwriter and produce an autobiography, or an “authorized biography”. Today, in an era when everyone has a video camera in their pocket or bag and a new generation has grown up only knowing posting videos of their lives on social media, making an autobiographical film has never been easier, or more mundane, or easier to sell.   

Duguid’s view is that the struggles, and ultimate cancellation, of Break Point may have created a vacuum in the market.

The producers of the wildly popular Drive To Survive show following Formula 1 motor racing were also making Break Point. Plenty of executives expected it to dominate the market and become the definitive non-fiction tennis film.

That didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, but mainly because most of the top players opted not to participate. They didn’t want cameras following them everywhere when they had little creative control or financial incentive.

Swiatek, the women’s world No 1, cooperated for one episode during the first of its two seasons but didn’t like how little input she had, she said earlier this year. Swiatek also said her appearance “caused some hate towards me and my team”, so she took matters into her own hands with the On film. With her team having creative control alongside her lead sponsor, the now five-time Grand Slam champion could take control of her message.

“I like projects that show an athlete as a human being, not like a machine,” Swiatek said via email this week. “There’s sometimes this narrative that we’re special, we can do more, but that’s not true. We’re just humans, like everybody else.”

Swiatek said she and her team have fielded plenty of proposals to make a longer autobiographical film. She’s not interested in the hassle, which she fears would get in the way of her training, and she thinks it’s kind of a silly idea.

“There’s maybe a story to tell, but this story is still being written and has a lot of chapters ahead,” wrote Swiatek, who is also a fan of The Last Dance, and likes Full Swing and Quarterback, Netflix shows about pro golfers and the NFL’s field generals. “I feel you can make documentaries about legends like Rafa or Roger, not about a 23-year-old person.”

Her short film, though was something else — partly a long commercial and partly a window into what makes her tick, done on her timetable and within her schedule: “My management team had a big impact on the concept, on all the logistics and organization which helped because they know me well. They could plan everything to make it smooth for everyone. The On team listened to me, to my ideas, my perspective.”

That opportunity has put projects like these at the centre of the changing context of tennis media, and it comes from a broader shift in the power relations between the players and those of us who cover the sport.

As in the documentary space, it’s Osaka who has been a leader.

When she announced she would boycott French Open media sessions in 2021, she said that “people have no regard for athletes’ mental health and this rings true whenever I see a press conference.” She was also saying, if not in words, that whatever those conferences offered, it wasn’t worth the damage they were doing to her at the time and she could convey what she wanted to convey to the outside world in other ways.

Those cameras in people’s pockets and the platforms that they post their footage on? They’re also microphones — megaphones, for the biggest stars — and those stars have realized that a direct, often monetisable, route to their fans on the devices that they carry every day is a very effective media strategy.

Whether it’s Alcaraz or Taylor Swift, Swiatek or Bad Bunny, Federer or Lionel Messi, star-led social media has reconfigured power relations. Even Becker, who wanted maximum credibility for his film, uses his X account like a stenograph for messages from the stars of today. This was both the life and the death of Break Point: the promise was in the access to the sport’s biggest stars; the biggest stars were able to reject the access. The series floundered.

Kasatkina is an exception, using her outlet to reflect on the absurdity of the best tennis players in the world waiting around to practice because their tournament hasn’t sorted out transport, and some tournaments — particularly the U.S. Open — have realised that using platforms such as TikTok on those platforms’ terms, remixing and remaking tennis in the process, is a route into bringing more people into the sport’s lives and dramas.

Some companies have sought ways to unite different poles of the media environment.

On is bringing together Federer, an investor in the company, and Zendaya, who is already doing On commercials, for an upcoming campaign.

Federer’s film, according to his longtime agent and business partner Tony Godsick, is built on one of those simpler and older media formulas that have withstood the great shift in relevance.

“There is an appetite these days for content for iconic athletes,” he said. No argument there, apart from about the “these days” part.

Godsick said the Federer documentary happened almost by accident.

Federer had received inquiries about making a biographical film many times and didn’t have much interest in doing so, preferring to keep his private life with his wife and their four children off-camera. But as he came to terms with his career-ending knee injury and prepared to announce his retirement in 2022, Godsick asked if they could capture the preparations for that moment, and his final match, on film, just in case.

Federer is carried off by fellow players in 2022 (Peter van den Berg / USA Today Sports)

 “The idea was to shoot it and put it in the freezer for 10, 15 years, so if he decided to do a life-doc at some point, we’d have the footage,” Godsick said. 

First they hired Sabia, a contemporary media savant who developed the ’73 Questions’ series that Vogue magazine — and Federer, with his appearance in 2019 — made one of their calling cards. “To be a fly on the wall was incredibly enlightening,” Sabia said before the London premiere, speaking of being paid to witness one of the great sports figures of the past 100 years calling it quits and film what he was asked to film.

Sabia knew he had not been hired to make a movie, but midway through the process he told Godsick he was getting some incredible footage and felt there might be something more there. Godsick told him to think about putting together a three-minute piece they could release on Instagram.

Federer remained resistant, but Godsick convinced him he owed his fans something, and once they started compiling the material, he relented, letting Godsick set up some meetings with studios.

There was no shortage of interest. 

Amazon saw some of the material and suggested bringing in Kapadia, a narrative British filmmaker with an archivist’s eye and a fondness for the stories of outliers and outsiders, best known for highly regarded movies about British singer Amy Winehouse and Argentine footballer Diego Maradona, to put it all together.

Now, less than two years after Federer said goodbye to competitive tennis, the world has a window into the emotional toll that took on him and his family, especially his wife. For Federer, it is also a window — demarcated on his terms and framed by the edges of a screen. What you see is what you get, even if it is not everything that happened.

“This had to be a moment, so we were determined to celebrate it because that’s what it’s supposed to be,” Federer said at the premiere. “That’s what I love about this film and any retirement, and I hope we’ll see more of a snapshot into the retirement of athletes.”

Godsick said he and Federer didn’t have the formal final-approval rights, but traditionalists would argue that their financial participation in the project and their input make it something other than a documentary in a journalistic sense. That is likely a side issue, given the seemingly insatiable market at the moment for tennis player content, even if most people probably will not consume all of it. 

The lighting around Federer is perfect throughout Twelve Days. Fans rave about him as though he is a kind of tennis messiah, and to them, that’s exactly what he is. The tension between the shiny veneer of stardom and the people that it varnishes, a hallmark of Kapadia’s other work, is buffed away. On this smooth and shiny surface, the tears over the prospect of Federer’s departure — from fans; from Rafael Nadal; and from Federer — just flow and flow and flow.

Additional reporting by The Athletic’s Charlie Eccleshare in London.

(Top photos: Quality Sport Images, Getty Images; design: Dan Goldfarb)