Culture notes from sick leave: Break Point
I’ve been on sick leave this month, for a collection of things that, in the long run, probably won’t be serious but, in the short term and combined with the extraordinary stress and strain of the past few years, require a lot of rest. (Hence limited writing here.)
In my last newsletter, I shared an article about rest, and again here’s the part that struck me hard:
In looking for info on how to feel better, I eventually came across a soothing and helpful article published by the Royal College of Occupational Therapists in the UK, which included this curious bit: “Continue to limit everyday ‘thinking’ activities, such as emails, planning shopping, making decisions, as these all use energy. Try to do them only for set times with regular rest in between.” It was the first time I had ever considered that resting for my health was not the same as, say, chilling on a Saturday. Discovering this was a genuine light-bulb moment; once I realized that reading articles, texting, and doing the crossword puzzle wasn’t serving me, I switched over to some truly mindless consumption—Real Housewives of New York—and gave my body the time and space it needed to heal.
I haven’t managed all of that, but I have taken to heart the need for more mindless—or at least less taxing—cultural consumption. I’m watching a lot of very untaxing television, and leaving the more complicated plots and emotionally challenging material for another time. Still, my mind finds it hard to shut off, so for the next little while, some quick sick leave culture dispatches.
Break Point is a Netflix documentary series about tennis, from the same team that produces Drive to Survive. Drive to Survive appears to have singlehandedly drawn a lot of Americans into Formula 1, myself included. It did this in a few ways. First, it distilled the very basics of a sport many Americans were completely unfamiliar with and made it all seem compelling rather than esoteric. It used the sport’s unique features (the dual competitions between drivers and constructors, which then makes team principals stars of a kind) to drive the storylines. And it also made an unexpectedly smart choice in foregrounding Daniel Ricciardo. His Australian charms are a much more recognizable way of inhabiting athletic stardom to Americans than the Europeans who dominate the sport, which was especially important given that Mercedes (and critically Lewis Hamilton) didn’t participate in the first season. Ricciardo’s career has subsequently been bumpy—and this past season was very possible his last in F1—so the sport’s stakes became even clearer as they affect the show’s breakout star.
I don’t quite know how to evaluate whether Break Point has the potential to do for tennis what Drive to Survive did for F1, because I’ve been watching tennis my whole life. From the “basics of the sport” perspective, it feels like some essential things never get explained, including the title. The only way to win a tennis match is to win break points or tiebreaker mini-breaks, but you wouldn’t know that from watching this. Nor is the relationship between Grand Slams and Masters tournaments and other smaller tournaments ever discussed, even though that would possibly explain both why it matters that Nick Kyrgios plays infrequently and also why it’s possible.
Still Break Point does a lot well, especially from the mid-point of this 5-episode first part of the season on. They’ve chosen a good group of players to follow, especially the younger men who, unlike the lost generation ahead of them, are likely to actually win Grand Slam tournaments in significant number. (And that there is a lost generation of men in their late 20s and early 30s who never broke the dominance of Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic is also never truly explained, nor is the fact that such dominance has never been seen before and will likely never be seen again. It’s weird to watch a show that’s trying to draw people into a sport without telling them that the men’s game is about to break open completely.) They scored a major coup in getting Nick Kyrgios to take part. And they do an incredible job of showing just how much Rafa Nadal looms over this sport with a foreboding presence even while the producers had no access to him at all. And getting Toni Nadal (Rafa’s uncle and former but longtime coach) onboard is an astonishing success.
It struggles, though, to explore in enough detail the problem of tennis. This is a sport where players travel around the world the majority of the year with only their teams—and in the case of the women, they are traveling around with groups of nearly entirely men they are either related to or they pay or both. It’s an isolating sport, both on-court—the men receive no coaching during matches, the women do but not in Grand Slams—and in its logistics. It’s an emotionally brutal sport, where any match could turn into hours of gladiatorial combat (for the men, that could be 5 or 6 straight hours) without any help. Even the greatest players have found themselves crying mid-match from the tension. Matches have gotten longer and longer and more and more grueling. Even the greatest players, Rafa included, have found themselves crying mid-match from the tension. And, in line with the rest I need to be taking, a confession: I don’t watch as much tennis as I used to and as I would like to because I can’t take the stress. I inherited from my mother a pretty intense style of tennis watching—she too couldn’t bear it if her beloved Pete Sampras got into trouble—and five hours of this stuff is just a whole lot.
Little of this come through in Break Point. It’s necessary to distill these matches, but they still need to convey just how much time is elapsing in any given match, and how much opportunity for destructive rumination is built into the gameplay itself. Not all of the players they follow are good at articulating why and how a match turns, or what’s going through their mind as a winnable match slips through their grasp. They get closest when they focus on the women’s game. Here the players are more open and more articulate about what it’s like. Distilling a 2.5 hour match is easier than a 5 hour one, and they also seem to give these matches more time. When Maria Sakkari loses a winnable match, we get a sense of that agony because the match simply gets more time on screen. It possibly would be better if they focused exclusively on the women’s game.
There are five more episodes coming in June. (On another note: I really dislike this new trend from Netflix of breaking up seasons into halves.) There’s something good enough here, I think. And if you have watched Break Point with little or no knowledge of tennis, I’d love to know what you thought of it!