Review: Break Point (Netflix) - Love is a losing game

The Netflix series Break Point, produced in collaboration with the ATP and WTA, shines a light on life on the professional tennis tour. And it’s not necessarily an enviable life…

Professional tennis is, famously, a career for losers. At the Australian Open – focus of the first drop of the Netflix series Break Point – there are 128 men in the singles draw and all except one will lose, half of them doing so after just one match. 

The same goes for the women; just as many losers there. 

And it’s not like each player has an equal one-in-128 chance of winning the Australian Open. Rather, a handful of elite players always monopolise the winning while the vast majority exclusively lose, albeit at different speeds. For nearly all tennis pros, the realistic odds of winning one of the Grand Slam tournaments are, if not quite zero, then as near to zero as makes no difference. 

So virtually all tennis pros start, continue and finish their careers as emphatic, unequivocal losers. Losing is what it’s all about.

And yet, perversely, the kind of people who go into tennis careers are precisely those who most hate losing. To get to even the lowest rungs of the professional ladder, you have to hate losing more than anything in the world.

Over and again, their story is the same. They fall in love with tennis as infants and show thrilling promise. Homemade videos show super-talented tots swinging precociously perfect forehands. They go to bed cuddling their rackets. They meet their tennis heroes at charity events. They have a scary tiger parent or a brilliant, caring coach. They win constantly: against their peers, their older siblings, then against the best of their peers, then the best of their older siblings’ peers. They win locally, then nationally, then internationally. They expect to win and they’re expected to win.

Then they turn pro and it’s lose lose lose all the way to retirement. Very often against those same childhood heroes, who still haven’t retired.

To the extent that these players penetrate the consciousness of the casual sports-watching public at all, it is as mere extras in a drama played out by the superstar actors. They form an ever-revolving cast of cannon-fodder to be summarily dispatched by Rafa or Roger or Novak on the path to yet another tournament final showdown. 

Break Point focuses on a selection of these unfortunate men and women, giving the also-rans their day in the sun. And indeed it seems that the lives of Taylor Fritz, Felix Auger Aliassime, Casper Ruud, Maria Sakkari, Paula Badosa and Frances Taifore are virtually interchangeable. All tennis players, right the way down to club amateurs, are familiar with the game's unique ability to make you feel you are at war with yourself. But more surprising is the horror these amazing athletes have of embarrassment on the court. 

(Another singularly cruel feature of tennis is that the scoring system means players who are only slightly worse than their opponents can be thrashed by humiliating 6-0, 6-0 score lines. And conversely, especially over the five sets of grand slam matches, the elite players who always win can fall quite far behind an underdog before their inevitable and for the loser, heartbreaking comeback victory.) 

And so they all tour the world together in a constant state of stress, increasingly scarred and haunted by all the losing and embarrassment they inflict on one another. 

For the first episode, however, the Netflix producers have cannily picked one serial loser who has actually made himself famous – or rather, infamous – beyond tennis aficionados: Nick Kyrgios, official villain of the men’s circuit. Here we’re presented with a sweet,  gentle off-court Nick, loyal to his ever-present friend/factotum and apparently devoted to his new girlfriend (which makes for slightly uncomfortable viewing given the assault charge hanging over him at the time). 

We see his haphazard, coach-less training sessions and his outrageous natural talent. We also see his on court meltdowns, temper tantrums and horrible, relentless bullying of umpires. And what we really want to know is: why does he do it? Why does he self-sabotage and behave so appallingly when things go even very slightly  against him? In Break Point we never find out. There doesn’t seem to be any particular childhood trauma that could explain it. (An argument is made that Kyrgios is by nature a team player and not cut out for solo sports, which is why he enjoys basketball and  playing doubles with his mate Thanasi Kokkinakis. But this argument is immediately undercut when he throws an epic wobbly in the Australian Open doubles semi-final, as poor Kokkinakis looks on helplessly). In the end, the only conclusion to be made is that Kyrgios is very immature. 

In stark contrast is the episode on Ons Jabeur, who is an absolute sweetheart as well as a wonderful player. I hadn’t appreciated before how disadvantaged players are from small countries (Jabeur is Tunisian), with the relatively tiny fanbases making it much harder to get lucrative sponsorship deals. Anyway, after Break Point there will be a lot more Jabeur fans.

The other notable episode is the one that gives us a glimpse of a tennis romance. A more amenable and well-mannered (and untidy - you should see the state of their hotel room!) couple than Matteo Berretini  and Ajla Tomljanović it is hard to imagine, but the show reveals how tough it is for two young people to conduct anything resembling a normal relationship in the bizarre world of international tour tennis. The problem at the Australian Open is that they lose (of course), but they do it out of sync: Ajla departs in the early rounds and has to jet off for a minor tournament on the other side of the world, while Matteo makes it all the way to a lonely semi-final, before his inevitable loss to one of the elite (Nadal this time). 

It shouldn't be surprising that tennis pros fall in love with each other - in fact, perhaps it’s surprising there aren’t more circuit couples. Not only do they spend all their time in the same strange little bubble together, but other tennis players are the only people who can possibly understand what it is to live this extraordinary, unenviable life and have to deal with all that losing. But then love, as Amy Winehouse so memorably put it, is a losing game.

The first five episodes of Break Point, focusing on the Australian Open, Indian Wells Masters, Madrid Open, and French Open was released on 13 January 2023 and is available to watch on Netflix now. The second part, featuring Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, WTA Finals, and ATP Finals will be released in June 2023.