From the 70s-camp “Players” to the 80s-teenploitation “Spring Fever” to last year’s Dunst-cap “Wimbledon,” tennis and movies have never mixed. (Not that I’ve seen any of those flicks—just taking an educated guess. Let me know if I’m wrong.) It’s a legacy that makes the “The Squid and the Whale,” which I saw in New York last week, a pleasant surprise.
The movie, which was written and directed by Noah Baumbach (“Kicking and Screaming”) isn’t about tennis per se. It’s an upper-class New York story, another account of enchanted alienation in the city like those sketched out over the years by Salinger, Paul Simon, Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” movies like “Tadpole” and “The Royal Tenenbaums,” the Strokes, and others. It’s an appealing little fantasy world, but it has also produced one real life tennis great, Manhattan prep-school grad John McEnroe (Frank Deford once spent a long profile trying to tie Johnny Mac to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield).
While tennis doesn’t dominate “The Squid and the Whale,” it’s a major part of the characters’ lives. So can you guess when the movie is set? You got it, the early 1980s, the sport’s perennial high-water moment, the last time it resonated in Americans’ lives. The family at the center of “Squid” plays doubles with a motley assortment of racquets, from Borg’s Donnay wood, to Connors’ T-2000 to a Wilson Kramer. Billy Baldwin steals every scene he’s in as a lunk-headed Brooklyn teaching pro who sports long, greasy hair and Fila pinstripes.
Tennis is the metaphor here. Baldwin wants the family’s youngest son to hit a manly two-handed backhand, like Connors; on the sidelines, the boy’s father, a pretentious writer played by Jeff Daniels, speaks up for the artistry of the one-hander. The argument quickly heats up as Daniels challenges Baldwin to a set and loses, a fight that’s played out in more serious form later.
A few weeks after Daniels and his wife separate, he comes back to say hello. This is what he says to mask the fact that his existence is basically useless: “I’m playing the best tennis of my life.” It sounds ridiculous, but as someone who started playing the game in the much-eulogized golden era of the early 80s, I can remember people actually saying things like that about tennis. Now, as we all know, it’s golf that gives “meaning” to middle-aged men’s lives.
In today’s tennis world, it was another week of busy obscurity. There were tournaments in Stockholm, Vienna, Bangkok, and men’s and women’s events in Moscow. These tournaments were not completely uninteresting.
James Blake showed that he can win outside of the New York-New Haven corridor by taking his first European title, in Stockholm; along the way he avenged his Davis Cup loss of this fall to Olivier Rochus. This is good news. I had thought that Blake, a guy with tremendous star potential in the U.S., might fade away for the rest of the year after his quarterfinal run at Flushing Meadows.
On the other side of the planet, in Bangkok, 16-year-old Nicole Vaidisova completed a remarkable triple, winning her third straight title. By doing so, the Czech 6-footer became the sixth woman in WTA history to win five titles before her 17th birthday. Of the others—Austin, Jaeger, Seles, Capriati, Hingis—only one, Jaeger, failed to reach No. 1. In the final, Vaidisova avenged her most embarrassing defeat of the year, to Nadia Petrova at the U.S. Open. After losing that match, she drilled a ball into the stands as hard as she could and was booed off the court. Did that show a self-destructive tendency, or the fire of a champion? From watching Vaidisova over the last year or so, I would say it was six of one, half-dozen of the other. She plays with passion and has surprisingly smooth strokes for such a rangy girl, but Vaidisova lacks the frightening focus of that other 6-foot teen phenom, Maria Sharapova.
Finally, this coming week brings us an event worth watching (or at least following, for those who don’t have the Tennis Channel), the ATP’s Madrid Masters. Some big names are missing—Federer, Hewitt, Agassi, Safin. But some big names are in the draw—Nadal, Roddick, Coria—and a Masters event always has meaning for the players. Most people involved in tennis, myself included, moan that the season is too long; but when it comes down to it, it’s nice to have an important tournament to watch, no matter what time of year it is.