In addition to solidifying Zendaya as a movie star, the new Luca Guadagnino film Challengers presents a couple of ideas about the seemingly polite and preppy game of tennis: One, it’s a sport that belongs on the silver screen as regularly as football, baseball, or boxing. Two, it’s quite possibly the most erotic activity outside of sex.

Early on in Challengers, tennis prodigy Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) explains to her fellow players and future romantic conquests, Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor), that “tennis is a relationship.” As the film goes on, the sport becomes a vehicle for psychosexual warfare. The movie time-jumps across a tense love triangle between the three athletes, who take diverging career paths but remain trapped in a perpetual three-way match throughout their adulthood.

While there’s no actual intercourse, there are lots of passionate make-outs, male nudity, and simmering glances. Most of the film’s sexual tension is released on the court, where Art and Patrick meet a decade-plus later to have a climactic showdown at the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) Challenger Tour, the second tier of professional male tournaments. There’s much more than just ranking points at stake.

It’s safe to say that the gameplay in Challengers is mostly sexy because of Guadagnino’s directorial sensibilities, Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s cinematography, and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsing score. The Italian filmmaker is known for sensually (and queerly) capturing the beauty and horror of the human body, to the point where they sometimes overlap. However, there’s an argument that the formalities, aesthetics, and personalities of professional tennis make it an innately hot sport designed for hot people. In an interview with Variety, Challengers’ screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes argued that tennis is naturally an “erotic sport.” He compares the game — which has origins in Victorian-era Britain — to a “Victorian romance,” adding that there’s a “deep intimacy and a lot of repression.”

Culture writer Kyndall Cunningham and senior culture correspondent Alex Abads-Santos, former players and fans of the sport, unpack what makes tennis so right (and occasionally wrong) for such a naughty film, ranking these qualities from least to most sexy.

The lingo

Stroke. Balls. Depth. Grip. Grunt. Love. These are all tennis terms and, depending on your maturity level (or lack thereof), they could easily be manipulated into double entendres. The men’s professional tour has actually done this!

Famously, in 2001, the organization was promoting the next generation of exciting new players, which included future GOAT Roger Federer and grand slam winners like Marat Safin. To drum up excitement at the time, the ATP tour released a campaign with the tagline “New balls please.” The line is a reference to an actual part of a tennis match; two new cans of balls are opened after the first seven games because of wear and tear. But the slogan also functions as a smirky way of signaling a changing of the guard in the men’s game because of the........

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