The Ball Is in Your Court: Snapshots of Political Discourses in Contemporary Films about Tennis

Despite the traditional values that tennis has generally been associated with, the portrayal of this sport in different cultural manifestations, such as cinema, gives evidence of its latent potentiality to dismantle conventional social assumptions. In particular, contemporary films about tennis give evidence that, in the evolution of the game, tennis not only has reflected political changes in society but has also contributed to promoting them. With a focus on both the aesthetic and political dimension of tennis, this article aims at analysing contemporary biopics of tennis legends, such as Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton’s Battle of the Sexes (2017), Janus Metz Pedersen’s Borg vs McEnroe (2017) and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s King Richard (2021) in order to evince how tennis has contributed to reassessing and problematising social prejudices in relation to the discourses of gender, social status and race. As tennis has been widening its scope to reach and embrace people from all sorts of backgrounds, it has also become a platform to defend the rights of diverse communities. In addition to the analysis of these three films, contemporary examples will also be provided to prove the pervasiveness of these discourses concerning different aspects of tennis in current times.