Sports movies are too "filmi"? Think again

My Economic Times column, which I couldn’t resist turning into a small tennis tribute after last week’s Australian Open final (which I think was Rafa Nadal’s greatest win ever, given the circumstances and his age/mileage). Have written much longer tennis pieces than this elsewhere, of course…
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We know about the many clichés of the mainstream sports film: the underdog’s journey told through a hyper-dramatic lens, with the piling up of obstacles, the fall from grace, the comeback, the last shot at redemption. And then the improbably down-to-the-wire finale involving the penalty goal that must be taken, or the six runs needed off the last ball, or the rare wrestling manoeuvre executed with a mere second left.

The movie’s overall tone might of course vary: here, from pre-liberalisation Hindi cinema, is a fresh-faced Aamir Khan hitting a six to seal a win (while helicopters and gun-toting villains and a nodding Dev Anand decorate the skies above the stadium) in the cheesy Awwal Number; and here is a portlier Aamir nearly three decades later in the more gritty Dangal, locked in a room while his daughter-protégé pulls off that complicated five-pointer. But the basic principle holds. Watching an inspirational film in this genre means suspending disbelief at some point, accepting that the climax isn’t meant to be realistic but cathartic and rousing in a way that good melodrama can be.

But if we are discussing the absence of “realism” in a fictional movie, one might ask: how much of the Federer-Nadal-Djokovic super-era in men’s tennis has been plausible?

Speaking as an obsessive Rafa Nadal fan (but also as a grudging admirer of Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic – AND an appreciator of a dozen superb players who have achieved much less than these three, Andy Murray, David Ferrer and Stan Wawrinka among them): one consequence of following tennis in the past decade and a half is that my ideas about the dramatic tropes of sports movies have shifted.

Consider that when Pete Sampras won his record-extending 14th Slam just before retiring, many people thought the record might not be broken for a few decades. (Incidentally, Pistol Pete won his first major in 1990, which was the year of Awwal Number. His last came in 2002, the year that the other Aamir cricket film, Lagaan, got an Oscar nomination. Thanks partly to surface homogenisation and increased media interest, tennis was about to change as much as the aesthetics of Hindi cinema did over that period.) The feeling then was that when Sampras’s record was broken, maybe someone would hobble to 15 or 16 Slams, in the same underwhelming way that Kapil Dev got to 432 Test wickets.

If a time-traveller had shown up on a primitive tennis forum in September 2002 and told us that in under 20 years THREE separate players would have each not just raced past Sampras but added six more Slams to the tally – continuing to look fit and hungry in their mid-thirties – this oracle would be laughed out of the chat-room, and possibly reported for being a dangerous lunatic. And that would have been the absolutely correct response.

Which is another way of saying that the stories and the twists involved in the tennis “trivalry” of the past 16 years could make up a dozen or more sports films – most of which would be dissed for being over the top (assuming they were greenlit in the first place). There isn’t enough space here to list the many ebbs and flows, but there have been personality conflicts and redemptive wins, kingdoms lost and regained, astonishing returns from injuries, and scarcely believable five-set epics (in the past year, both Nadal and Djokovic won major finals after being two sets down against much younger, fresher opponents). There have been many bizarre coincidences and symmetries too: last week Nadal won the second-longest Slam final of the Open Era exactly 10 years to the day after he had lost the longest Slam final on the very same court.

In the social-media age, there has been unprecedented fan madness and continuous shifts in our perceptions of these champions: in the early years, Nadal was the underdog trying to dethrone the universally loved Federer; in later years that mantle fell on Djokovic, whose fans, more than any other fan base, enjoy nurturing their victimhood. There was the “Novax” rumble that saw Djokovic kept out of the Australian Open because of his non-vaccinated status, and the absurdity of his father likening him to the slave leader Spartacus in an interview. You couldn’t make some of this up.

And yet, for all the craziness of the matches and the career ups and downs, watching Nadal after the final last week – with his characteristic level-headedness and the refusal to participate in the foolish “GOAT debate” that too many tennis fans and journalists are obsessed with – was to be reminded that there is a lower-key film playing parallelly to the hyper-dramatic one. For all the adrenaline and the fist-pumping, Nadal off the court is a bit like the working-class protagonist of a Ken Loach film, pragmatic, cautiously hoping for the best. It’s as if Sylvester Stallone staggered out of the ring, bruised and sweaty and grimacing, and morphed into Amol Palekar, smiling shyly and speaking tentative sentences. Who would be silly enough to script something like that?