Growing up in Britain, there were moments -- fleeting, to be fair -- when James Gay-Rees actually felt a degree of competence on the tennis court.
“The serve’s going in, everything is working and sometimes you would find a bit of form and think, `I can kind of play this game,’” the award-winning producer recently said from London.
He regularly watched the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage and even found his way to Queens Club a few times. Still, it wasn’t until last year -- when he spent most of it chronicling professional tennis for the upcoming Netflix series “Break Point” that he truly began to appreciate the degree of difficulty the job required.
“To basically unpack what it means to go from my crappy level to being an elite tennis player -- the journey those players go on and the commitment it requires to stay there was, frankly, a revelation,” Gay-Rees said recently. “The optics around Wimbledon are that it’s nice, cultured, polite -- but obviously tennis is a much tougher sport than that.
“It’s not an easy option to be a professional tennis player. And so to shine a light on that truth and to explain why that’s the case was really the big opportunity.”
The first five episodes of “Break Point” become available Jan. 13 on Netflix. The series features players from both the Hologic WTA Tour and ATP Tour with an emphasis on the Grand Slams. Paula Badosa, Ons Jabeur, Ajla Tomljanovic, Aryna Sabalenka and Maria Sakkari will play prominent roles on the women’s side.
ATP players include Taylor Fritz, Matteo Berrettini, Felix Auger-Aliassime, Casper Ruud, Frances Tiafoe, Stefanos Tsitsipas, Thanasi Kokkinakis and Nick Kyrgios. The remaining five episodes drop June 23, ahead of Wimbledon.
Showrunner Kari Lia, who grew up in California and considered herself a casual tennis fan, was surprised how much of tennis is played between the ears.
“Once you get to the Top 100 or the Top 50 players, you’re talking about incredible athletes -- the best of the best, right?” she said. “And the difference between who wins and who loses is so often about what’s going on in their minds. I found that fascinating.
“And when you watch the show, we really explore that -- what’s going on mentally. I found it really inspiring as well because there’s this determination to get over that and keep on going. Everyone can be inspired by these people that really harness the power of their brains to push to be the best.”
What he quickly realized, Gay-Rees observed, is the loneliness of losing -- the fact that there are 128 players in a Grand Slam draw and only one person can win.
“You have to process loss every week in most instances,” he said. “The way you have to manage that is really interesting. Just the solitude of the sport. Unless you’re a Top 20 player, you’re not going to have a big entourage when you travel. You’re in the hotel room by yourself -- and then you’re out on the court again. The singularity of that -- there’s nobody in your corner, no caddy. You’ve got to work it out for yourself.
“And to do that week in and week out, sometimes a couple of times a week, must be incredibly challenging just to stay in that place. I think it’s much more demanding than I think people realize, and that’s been a fascinating part of the show.”
The important parameters for the series were set down in conversations between the two tours and Box To Box Films at last year’s US Open. WTA president Micky Lawler was excited by the prospect of the characters and the character of tennis being shared with a global audience, particularly uninitiated viewers.
As a teenager, Lawler was a huge fan of Martina Navratilova, Chris Evert, Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors. Her only source of inside information, she recalled, was a “trashy” Dutch magazine called "Prive" (private).
“But when I started in tennis in 1986 [with the ATP], I was living those stories,” Lawler said. “And I thought, ‘Gosh, there is so much that people would love to experience and know to make more sense of what happens on the court and how lives change when big victories are won.
“As James and Kari have told you, they have newfound respect for what a professional tennis player’s life is like. And I think that respect is going to be evident in the work that they do. They don’t have to mess with the story -- the story is really good.”
While episodes of “Hard Knocks,” the HBO series focused on NFL training camps, must be approved by the NFL, the WTA and ATP have no such contractual control. Lawler, citing Badosa’s poignant discussion of the sports’ mental health challenges, said she has no qualms that Gay-Rees and co-executive producer Paul Martin will handle the difficult issues in good taste.
“For Paula to be so honest about that -- because everybody has anxiety, and some days you have more and some days you have less -- and it has to come out somewhere,” Lawler said. “And so she was very honest and really vulnerable.”
Said Lia: “We fell in love with them all. Ajla Tomljanovic is someone who was a real surprise to us, how honest and open she was about winning and losing, the grit and determination. Ons Jabeur, who was someone who was really inspiring about where she came from and what she represents. We didn’t expect her to have the year she did, but she was a real inspiration.”
Before the 2022 season began, the Box To Box team sat down with the WTA, ATP and representatives of the Grand Slams to determine who their main characters would be. With the retirements of Serena Williams and Roger Federer, there was a focus on youth and compelling backstories.
“A lot of people were offered up and discussed, in terms of where they were in their careers, going up or coming down,” Gay-Rees said. “And so we just came up with a wish list and approaches were made. And some of those people came through, other choices came from left field. You can only be in the show if you want to be in the show, you can’t force anybody to be in it.
“So people kind of step up because they want to be in it, for different reasons. And you need a good blend, a really good mix of characters, male and female. So it just sort of transpires that different narratives emerge. And it’s up to us to tell the best version of those narratives.”
Gay-Rees’ personal tennis narrative may sound familiar to weekend warriors of a certain age. At 55, his knees are “knackered” and his playing days are behind him. His focus is on the young stars of his upcoming series -- and shooting for the 2023 version of the series begins in January.
“Genuinely, on both sides of the line they’re really extraordinary people,” he said. “And it’s just a privilege to tell their stories to wider audience -- because they are the future.”
