Tomljanović’s Love of the Game
How Kevin Costner may have helped end Serena Williams’ tennis career
Day 12 of Left Open, Club Leftist Tennis’ daily leftist coverage of the 2022 US Open.
By Elena Saavedra Buckley
The Australians of New York City—a population that has boomed since the early 2000s thanks to the war on terror—have already experienced spiritual whiplash this September. There have been multiple lows. We can’t forget that their queen also died yesterday; after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese learned that “Sydney Harbour Bridge was down,” radio stations across the country paused their broadcasts of The Kid LAROI’s debut album to announce the news. Additionally, they found out that the Nolita location of Two Hands cafe, in the heart of Manhattan’s “Little Australia,” will not be carrying the chain’s newly released salmon quinoa bowl. Through these struggles, however, they were buoyed by their triumph from last week: their countryman Ajla Tomljanović defeated Serena Williams at Arthur Ashe, knocking the six-time Open winner out of the running. Since this is very likely Serena’s last tournament before retirement, the Aussie essentially ended the GOAT’s career in the process.
The press widely praised Tomljanović for her decorous composure during the three-set match, coverage her embattled ex Nick Kyrgios has basically never experienced. In front of 24,000 elites who paid fat stacks for tickets (which should be abolished!), mostly to watch Serena, Tomljanović barely wobbled. She moved efficiently. She was a system of strong, straight lines. She had the uncanny combination of pistoned speed and grace displayed by Boston Dynamics robots when they’re, um, “dancing.” And Serena was no weak tea opponent. She was feisty at the net, surefooted on the baseline, and brilliant with runs of aces. I would say more about Serena, who is the Atlas of the sport and of much else, but this post is not about Serena, because it is instead about the following passage from a New York Times article, describing what Tomljanović’s dad told his daughter in advance of the match: “He mentioned one of his favorite movies, ‘For Love of the Game,’ in which a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, played by Kevin Costner, reflects on his life and career in the midst of a perfect game. ‘But she didn’t know the movie, so I had to explain it to her,’ he said. ‘I told her, “You have to be Kevin Costner today.”’”
Costner beat Serena. I couldn’t resist… I paid Oppressor Bezos $3 to rent the movie for a limited number of hours. For the Love of the Game (1999) is a flashback-heavy flick directed by Sam Raimi, following 40-year-old pitcher named Billy Chapel (Costner) as he bumbles around the pitcher’s mound at Yankee Stadium and remembers scenes mostly from his just-failed relationship with a fashion journalist named Jane, played by Kelly Preston (RIP!). It feels like an AI-generated ‘90s movie. It is laden with Coplandian orchestral tracks—those hopeful, American woodwinds. By the end, Billy cinches the perfect game and gets Jane back. The main irony is that the drama comes from this being Billy’s last game before retirement; he’s the Serena, and the Yankees are Tomljanović. The applicable part for Tomljanović, however, is Billy’s ritual of entering a kind of zone before trying to strike out his opponents. “Clear the mechanism,” he mumbles to himself, after which the crowd and subway sounds hush and the surrounding commotion blurs around him like a boss’s Zoom background. He then chucks the ball to his catcher, who is a lunkish, kid-brother sidekick figure named Gus played by John C. Reilly.
What else, though, can we glean from this Tomljanović the Elder rec? Pickleballers might argue that tennis is the unlikely site for revolution, given the isolation of solo sports, but For the Love of the Game is a great reminder that alienation can happen anywhere, especially within teams. The individualism here is predictably off the charts. The movie’s Detroit Tigers should be happy about the MLB Players Association—they would not do well unionizing on their own. For one thing, Billy is never pictured talking to anyone in the dugout but the coach (an uppity J.K. Simmons) and Gus, who seems too lobotomized to form full sentences. He has a direct line to the owner of the team (a helmet-haired Brian Cox) and is in cahoots with him about trades and salaries. There are no scenes of the team bonding in locker rooms, on the road, even in huddles. In the final few innings, when Billy’s arm starts to hurt, he’s only able to ward Yankees off first base thanks to his teammates' agility, but we barely learn anything about the guys. The movie’s conservatism enshrines Billy’s many contextless solitudes—on the mound, in his hotel penthouse suites, in his snowy mountain estate, in a helicopter airlifting him out of said estate when he cuts his arm on a saw. It’s “giving NIMBY.” And, for what it’s worth, Jane doesn’t seem to interact with other people in New York, where she lives, other than her teenage daughter. She’s too busy writing articles for Elle about aromatherapy called “SCENTS AND SENSIBILITY.” (No shade, sounds cool.) The movie ends with Billy and Jane making up (and out) in an airport, which makes sense. Globalization is groovy here.
But don’t take me too seriously here, comrades. Baseball can be very cool, even if Costner’s listless Billy is decidedly not, and I obviously went into this with an agenda, as well as very little time to write this. More to the point, tennis is cool. It may not be a team sport, but this very quality pushes us to create strong movements around it, mostly by blogging. And if Tomljanović admirably ushered a titan into retirement because of a bad Costner performance she’s never actually going to watch, I respect it.
Elena Saavedra Buckley is a writer and editor who grew up across the street from Albuquerque’s best public tennis courts.